The Humanure Handbook

Last month's seminar at the at the Long Now Foundation was by archeologist Brian Fagan, author of The Little Ice Age. He discussed how climate change has effected human civilization at different times in the past--spurring the rise of agriculture when the oak forests retreated in in the middle east, forcing the Norse out of North America and Greenland, or causing the collapse of the Moche and the Maya. One of the key problems in the coming years will be access to water, as the climate becomes more unpredictable and population pressures increase, especially on marginal land. Lately my somewhat haphazard reading on the web has been synchronizing in strange ways with the podcasts I listen to (try listening to Plato's Republic while reading The Botany of Desire and Oryx and Crake), and sure enough Joseph Jenkins, writer of The Humanure Handbook has the answer to eliminating 37-45% of our household water use. Stop crapping in drinking water. His suggestion, or rather, his admonition is that people stop flushing those valuable nutrients down the toilet, but compost them instead. His book, aside from repeating the same twenty or so nuggets of information ten times each, simplifies composting nicely, and gives a few simple rules for an efficient and sanitary collection and composting system, resulting in agriculturally safe humus. Some places, like Austin, Texas, already compost sludge, but waste a huge amount of water and money getting the sludge to the composting site. Think of how much water we could save and infrastructure we could forgo by processing poop on site, or picking it up with a weekly or biweekly poop truck? For the fecophobic Jenkins explains, and presents studies from real scientists (!), that urine and feces composted by thermophilic bacteria at temperatures exceeding 55˚ C for a couple of hours will kill any human pathogens. They either get burnt to a crisp, or out-competed, or eaten up by the earthworms and fungi that move in during the one year curing period once the compost has cooled down. And if you're healthy to begin with, there's not much chance of anything nasty getting in the pile. The toilets and compost don't smell either, since you cover each deposit with sawdust, rice hulls, peat, or leaf mold in the toilet, and straw, weeds, or leaves in the pile. If they do smell, then it's an indication that you're doing something wrong. The book is no great work of literature, but it's good for skimming, full of good information for anyone interested in dismantling one of the defining characteristics of western civilization, centralized plumbing.