gardening has this reputation as a gentle and chill hobby but you know what?? gardening is actually a constant and brutal conflict between the human need for control and the will of life to spread – a battle between life and death itself, even. in the garden I am the Overlord Supreme, Peerless Queen of the Dirt, Arbiter Above All, the ultimate and final judge over who gets to live and who must die. I drowned an entire anthill today for daring to exist in my realm, and the blood of hundreds has soiled my soul. my thumbs may be green but my hands are black and deadly.
This explains more about Samwise Gamgee than anything else I have ever read.
The Mayans had mastered water pressure and had fountains and toilets as early as 750 AD.
Aztecs had running water and sewage.
The Victorians In the mid-1800s were dying of cholera because they just dumped their raw shit in the river Thames. They wouldn’t shower for months at a time because they were afraid of the polluted water.
Incans had created aquaducts in the slopes of the vast Andes mountains to reach the emperor, cities and farmers who used agricultural terraces.
Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans were far more advanced than the savage Europeans.
They only conquered them because they were literally so fucking filthy that they accidentally wiped out most of the population with pathogens that the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans had never encountered before
Europe knew those thing too (aquaducts, fountains, toilets, public baths, etc). In the Roman times they mostly used them. But then came Christianity and its crazy idea that water spread the illnesses… and so Europe sank into filth. So blame religion for this too.