ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how some Victorians were concerned about area of environmental degradation, underground, and investigates the impact of guano's arrival in Britain. It explores the interest in guano of agricultural chemists and considers their influence, particularly on Victorian high farming and its craze for guano and new chemically manufactured fertilisers. The chapter examines how this chemical technology was perceived to create divides—interrupting natural cycles between people and land, and within agricultural communities—and how this influenced other Victorian thinkers. It addresses how scientists, farmers and other influential Victorians addressed this growing divide through wide-ranging debates about the problems of sewage and sanitation in overcrowded cities. The chapter reveals an aspect of the Victorian conflict between science and nature, and, while the feared impact of intensive farming on rural landscapes was not realised during Victoria's reign, the seeds had been sown for their degradation by chemical technologies in the twentieth century and beyond.
