The Sensory Anthropocene

Bibliographic Data

ID3914190
AuthorsChristopher Otter (The Ohio State University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume17
Issue1
Pages1-22
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11543463
OpenAlexW4409013619
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited36

This article argues that our environmental crisis partly originates in the transformed Western sensorium. From the later eighteenth century, increased levels of disgust toward organic waste, and excrement in particular, were reflected in increased use of water as a sanitary medium. The water closet emerged as a key technology of sensibility, sustaining new perceptual norms by immediately removing excrement from the home, which in turn became a capsule sealed from the (dirty) environment. The article argues that the rise of the water closet foreclosed alternative pathways of waste management, particularly the earth closet or, in its twentieth-century form, ecological sanitation. Such waste technologies were marginalized in the Western world because they maintained proximity to excrement and organic effluvia. Today waterborne sanitary systems have become a global norm, but their expense and heavy water consumption means that they are often quite unsuitable for many parts of the developing world. However, the globalization of Western sensory norms can make ecological sanitation appear like the enforcement of backwardness. The article thus suggests that personal hygiene has an environmental and even geological history: our sensory norms contribute to environmentally problematic attitudes such as heavy water use and disgust for organic waste

Anthropocene · Cognitive psychology · Environmental ethics · Geography · Sensory system · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Psychology

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