ON EDGE 6: A Fascination with Fatbergs
by Kate Sketchley Outside of working as a Mediator at Science Gallery London, I’m an actor and theatre-maker, and I’m currently developing Undermined: The Fatberg Musical, written by Tilly Lunken, composed by Michael Clulow, and produced by 45North. We started creating the show after visiting the Museum of London’s Fatberg! Exhibition. We were fascinated by the fatberg, and we think it can tell us a lot about our modern urban existence; our habits, our needs, and our anxieties.
During my time working on On Edge season, I found myself reflecting on the different ways that anxiety manifests itself, and the range of responses that people exhibit when they experience anxiety. But it’s also worth reflecting on how anxiety manifests in a society at large, not just on an individual level. We do not function in our own little vacuums, but are constantly impacting other people’s lives. The coronavirus pandemic has drawn that into sharp focus, as we are urged to alter our behaviour with others in mind. Others who are in danger of being infected, others who are doing work which cannot stop or which is vital to our survival. Tiny everyday choices impact these others. For the most part, we’ve been able to accept and adjust.
Yet we cannot switch off our individual anxieties, and we see the outcome in moments like the toilet roll panic at the beginning of lockdown. Each individual or household suddenly started thinking ahead, worrying that they wouldn’t have access to crucial items, and so they bought what they could, to assuage that fear. Toilet paper is tied to one of our most basic physical needs, and it is as necessary as the toilet it’s flushed down. The urge to stock up is understandable, especially as people’s toilet paper use would no longer be split between home and the office.
But while low stocks of toilet paper were a foreseeable consequence of panic buying, it also led to an increase in use of kitchen roll and wet wipes when toilet paper wasn’t available. Both of these contribute significantly to fatberg formation, and now that the lockdown has been in place for over 2 months, knock-on effects are becoming visible, specifically an increase in fatbergs. Thames Water has seen a 20% increase in the number of sewer blockages (which translates to about 10 more blockages per day).
We’re experiencing this very basic, primal anxiety over our health and well-being, specifically how that is impacted by our daily choices. It’s a sudden confrontation with a threat, which isn’t fully known, and isn’t visible, but is real. On one level we do understand that viruses are a true danger and need to be avoided, but at the same time, for a lot of people, that danger isn’t manifesting in a tangible way in front of them. Their living situation remains the same, their working situation remains roughly the same, with a change in location. The streets are quieter, but the buildings still stand and food deliveries still come. There are many ways in which we aren’t seeing a visible manifestation of the scale of the threat we face.
This invisible threat is similar to that of climate change, albeit on a shorter time scale. And within the climate crisis, there are many different fronts where humans are impacting the world around them in ways they cannot see. Most relevant at the moment, habitat destruction has been linked to the increase of pandemic threats that humans are facing, as people disrupt ecosystems and are exposed to novel viruses which they likely would not have encountered otherwise.
For our work on Undermined: The Fatberg Musical, we’ve spent a lot of time exploring a very small slice of this human-environment relationship. We’ve been researching London’s sewage system, and speaking to the workers who keep it running every day, and across all our conversations with trunk sewers technicians and sewage treatment workers, we kept hearing a version of, “I just wish people thought about what happens after they flush”. We’ve been able to adopt an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ attitude towards many parts of our modern existence - sewage, rubbish, plastics - which mirrors how we think about the environment as a whole.
There’s an interesting parallel between this process and anxiety management. Both involve interrogating our accepted narratives about what is or isn’t true, and how much power we actually have to change it. While initially it can feel overwhelming to truly look at all these things in detail after spending so long ignoring them, by accepting the reality and learning the facts, we can start to make decisions about them and engage with them productively. It may feel icky to think about initially, but the upside is that these are concrete problems with concrete solutions. Whether it’s fatbergs, habitat destruction, or plastic pollution, there is always something we can do.
——— ——— ———
This is part six of an ongoing blog series, inspired by and reflecting back on the Science Gallery London exhibition ON EDGE: Living in an Age of Anxiety during the time of the Covid-19 Crisis.
Kate Sketchley is a Mediator at Science Gallery London, has a science background with a BSc in Psychology, and is an actor and theatremaker. She is co-creator of Undermined! The Fatberg Musical, a comedy-horror musical about waste, bacteria, and community.