Tipping Point for Planet Earth by Anthony D. Barnosky

Author:Anthony D. Barnosky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466852013
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7

TOXINS

Tony in Fes, Morocco, March 1996

I couldn’t quite figure out which of my senses was being most assailed. I was in the Fes el Bali medina, one of the oldest marketplaces in the world. The noon prayer call had just echoed through the ancient alleyways, the eerie, disembodied tones of the muezzins (‘Allahu Akbar … Ashadu ana la Ilaha ila Allah’) overprinting, for a few minutes anyway, the rest of the cacophony. Bearded shopkeepers dressed in loose linen were imploring me to buy their goods, shouting out against the background chatter of thousands of simultaneous conversations. The clip-clop of a mule, packsaddle piled high with some sort of delivery, reverberated off the ancient stone buildings that walled the narrow passageways.

Jockeying shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the crowd on the cobblestone street, I was trying to keep my wits about me in this foreign land, but was distracted by the rows of fresh sheep’s heads lined up at the butcher’s stall on my right, arranged beneath a display of neatly-spaced animal bladders hanging from a rope that stretched above. The next stall over caught my eye, with stunning brass and copper candelabras, vases and jewellery, some expensive and some cheap. After a bit of haggling, I walked on with a couple of rings for our daughters. Leather jackets, belts, gorgeous handbags, piled one on top of another helter-skelter; Liz would love these, I thought. Across the way I caught the scent of the spice shops, bowls of orange and brown powders, and aromas of turmeric, cinnamon, cumin and cloves. Somewhere close by, a lamb tajine was simmering and coffee was brewing, making my mouth water. That quickly gave way to the perfume stall, where the spring air, now beginning to feel hot on my back as the sun reached deeper down into the ancient urban canyons, became an olfactory stew of floral and musky smells.

And then it was suddenly not so pleasant. As I climbed a stone staircase that was well worn from over a thousand years of use, the pleasant smells of down below gave way to something else – the stench of rotting meat. When I reached the rooftop and gazed down, I saw why. Actually, what I saw, as I wrote in my journal that day, was my version of hell.

It was a leather tannery, operating pretty much as it had for centuries past. Picture looking down on a city block, but instead of houses, visualise open cisterns tightly packed together, some looking like bathtubs carved into rock, others circular and larger, about two body-lengths in diameter. In each vat were stinking brews of pigeon guano, chromium and sulphuric acid, among other toxic ingredients. Animal hides, preserved in salt, lay around the edges. Those wonderful belts and handbags I saw earlier started out right here, and the putrid meat smell, now with a good dose of rotten egg and chemical undertones thrown in as I got closer, was the byproduct of treating the hides.

For a while

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