CHAPTER 6

Hercules
and all that
Crapper

The ways that other animals have met the challenges of managing their feces are, in many instances, reflected in the ways that people have dealt with shit. After all is said and done, we are animals and share a great deal with all other animals — emotion, morality, devious behavior, genetics, problems with shit. We are also a very particular kind of animal, with our own cultural histories and hang-ups.

The way that human cultures have traditionally dealt with shit thus reflects a mixture of our biological inheritance and the cultural rituals we have created to reinforce or redirect various behaviors. We are conflicted: our instincts are to protect our young (and hence to remove feces), to mark territory (keep the feces close by), improve food supplies (use the feces for fertilizer to grow food), and prevent disease (keep the feces away from food).

Our language reflects our conflicted attitudes — not just with regard to what we call the stuff itself, but what we call the act of defecation, and the places where we defecate. As anyone who has traveled becomes aware, not only is talking about the act of wanting to take a dump itself problematic, but where one moves one’s bowels is also complicated. Does a person really rest in the restroom, hang water in the water closet, or wash in a latrine (which comes from the French lavare, to wash)? And if, as Lewin asserts, the term “covering one’s feet” in the King James version of the Bible refers to the act of defecation, is this because the desert tribes of the Middle East did not have access to water when they went number two? And if a dog lives in a doghouse, what lives in an outhouse? And going to the john? I thought this was something that sex-trade workers (as they are properly called today) did, but not the rest of us; apparently, however, we all do it regularly, at least if we do not suffer from irregularity. Or is “going to the john” simply a public relations ploy by the Jakes of the world, whose name was the medieval English term for a toilet, to clear their name and dump the ordure on Johns? What about a privy? Does this have any connection to what really goes on in the privacy of the Privy Council, that advisory gang to the government in a parliamentary system? Some birders talk about their birds “venting,” vent being the term sometimes used for the cloaca, that joint exit hall for feces and urine found in birds, reptiles, amphibians, and marsupials. Remember this the next time someone complains to you about their day and says they are “just venting.”

If we take a long view (more than the trivial few millennia that many in our culture concern themselves with), we might say that the ways in which human societies have managed their own — and their animals’ — dung can be understood not only as emerging from cultural habits and taboos. They also reflect evolutionary inheritances from other species and ecological patterns of nutrient recycling. The risk of talking about evolutionary precedents of human fecal-related behavior is that we might be tempted to create a false sense of uni-directional evolutionary development. But history is not always a story of progress, or even linear change.

Many of us have been well schooled in linear narratives of human progress, and the assumption might be that there is some kind of uplifting, progressive story to be told about how humans have dealt with excrement over the millennia. Alas, it is not so. The narrative of shit is one of fits and starts, water and earth, discovery and loss and rediscovery. What has changed is that there are so many more of us now, and more of our domestic animals, than ever before in history. The narrative is one of us trying this, that, and the other thing, and then trying the first thing again while the dung piles up around us.

Various human societies use a variety of strategies to deal with excrement. Some developed earlier in our history, some later, and we can learn from all of them. There never was, nor is there now, a “perfect” one-size-fits-all solution. In ecology and evolution, the diverse interplay of context with content, nature and nurture, genetics and social-ecological landscapes is everything.

One way in which humans have dealt with excrement is associated with nomadic peoples who, having left poop behind in the woods, later returned to those same areas to discover that their feces had fed the next crop of nuts and berries. The co-evolved lifestyles of people, horses, cattle, and sheep in semi-arid landscapes reflect this integration of culture and nature.

It was only with the beginnings of settled agriculture in the Neolithic era (about 10,000 BCE and continuing to the present) that humans have had to face the problem of having to remove excrement from us, rather than us from it.

As people settled and created farms rather than wandering through the bush, they began to create large accumulations of solid waste in small areas. This led, in various times and places, to the creation of special rooms inside houses, special pots, outdoor latrines, and areas in the woods that were designated for defecation. Unlike those species that have used toilet areas to meet and greet, we have tended to separate the places for feces from other living spaces.

In some cases, human waste was buried. The buriers included several First Nations groups in the Americas, as well as the Essenes, a mystical and ascetic Jewish group that lived in desert areas and in cities throughout what was called Roman Judea, from about the second century BCE to the first century CE. The Essenes also buried their libraries, which may or may not be significant in regard to the relative values they placed on scrolls and poop. The scrolls, which fed their minds, later came to be called the Dead Sea Scrolls. The poop may have fertilized the fig and olive trees that provided their sustenance. The parallel with burying feces is thus not a frivolous one, as the burial of the texts allowed the preservation of ideas and stories, and their renewal centuries later, in much the same way as the feces renewed the soil.

People, like many species, developed alternatives to midden heaps to meet mates. This being removed from the equation, the major remaining advantage to leaving animal and human manure in particular places was that the plants would grow better in those places. There is evidence that Neolithic settlements disposed of their excrement in and around their settlements, probably in dung heaps. Manure from livestock has long been recognized by farmers as a source of fertilizer and returned to the soil, and seems, until recently, to have posed less of a problem than human excrement. This distinction may reflect the observations of our ancestors that exposure to human feces was more dangerous to people, in terms of disease spread, than exposure to the feces of other animals. In simplistic evolutionary-selection terms, children who were exposed to human feces were more likely to die (from cholera and other fecal-borne diseases) before they could reproduce, than children not so exposed.

Never content just to gather in small groups, our forebears began to move into cities, where crowding and large-scale human feces production generated new challenges. When populations are small, a latrine hole for a family or a dung heap (like an animal midden) just outside a village or farm are effective ways of moving the excrement away from human habitation. What does one do in a city? Rooms in houses where one would just take a dump on the floor were fine if you had extra rooms in which to store the excrement, or long-suffering servants to clean it up, and as long as the dung holes were not directly connected to fans circulating air in the rooms below (hence giving us the expression “when the shit hits the fan”). Throwing poop and urine out the window — along with the shout “Agua!” or something similar to warn passersby — was an effective way to get it out of the house in parts of medieval Europe. Still, one would have to walk through it on the way to the opera. Very annoying.

While farmers have often used manure as fertilizer, the use of human manure in this way is less consistent. The Chinese, with one of the world’s most intensive and, until recently, most sustainable agricultural systems, have a history of collecting and marketing human excrement (called “night soil”) that goes back 3,000 to 4,000 years. Researchers estimated that, historically, 90% of all human excreta in China was being recycled in this way and that it provided about a third of all the fertilizer used in that country.

The Japanese too have a long and disciplined use of human excreta in agriculture that predates cities such as Edo (now Tokyo) but that flourished especially as the country urbanized. Farmers provided buckets beside the fields and asked travelers to use them when they defecated. In a web of transactions that mimicked natural cycles, the seventeenth-century city of Edo sent boatloads of vegetables and other farm produce to Osaka to be exchanged for the city’s human excrement. As the cities and markets grew (Edo had a million people by 1721) and as intensive paddy-farming increased, prices of fertilizers, including night soil, rose dramatically; by the mid-eighteenth century, the shit owners wanted silver — not just vegetables — for payment.

So who owned this shit? Apparently the people who owned the buildings were the proud proprietors of the excrement produced by the tenants. If some occupants within an apartment left, the owners increased rents for the remaining occupants, since they had less excrement to offset the basic capital costs of running an apartment block. The prices for human excrement were so high in eighteenth-century Japan that stealing human shit was an acknowledged crime, punishable by imprisonment. In a pattern not unfamiliar to contemporary farmers caught in a squeeze of high oil prices, the cost of shit became so high that poor farmers couldn’t afford it. Although the practice of using human excrement for fertilizer declined after the fall of the Tokugawa regime in the late nineteenth century, and during the industrialization of Japan in the twentieth century, one researcher has estimated that at least 50% of human waste in Japan is still treated and used as fertilizer.

The use of human and/or other animal feces for fertilizer has been and remains a worldwide phenomenon, a kind of convergent cultural evolution. Although this recycling has been more prominent in the Far East, the use of manure as fertilizer has been discovered and embraced in just about every settled society. In the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), excrement and organic waste were gathered and sold for fertilizing crops or tanning hides. In Peru, the Incas stored, dried, and pulverized excrement for use on maize crops. Ibn al-Awam, an Arab living in twelfth-century Spain, described composting techniques incorporating human excreta; the use of this compost as fertilizer for plants was said to cure illnesses in banana, apple, peach, citrus, and fig trees as well as in grape vines, palm and cedar trees, and wheat plants.

In the Middle Ages, as people moved to the cities, and cities produced excrement, Europeans commonly used excreta and gray water (water that has been used for washing) on gardens. The Cistercians, near Milan, used refuse, excreta, and wastewater on their land starting in about 1150. The people of Freiburg, Germany, irrigated their meadows with excrementally enriched wastewater from at least 1220. The irrigation and cultivation of these meadows improved growth in dry periods, was said to reduce the incidence of plant pests, and contributed to stabilizing the nutrient balance in the meadows. After reaching a peak in the nineteenth century, these irrigation practices declined and were mostly stopped by the 1960s.

By the nineteenth century, along with rapid industrialization and urbanization, the use of raw (untreated) sewage for fertilizer became widespread in Europe and the United States. New Yorkers made a profit selling their manure to surrounding counties as fertilizer (and then importing it back in the form of vegetables).

In the twentieth century, the rapid, uncontrolled growth of urban populations, which continues globally to this day, the development of chemical fertilizers, and an understanding that fecally contaminated water could be a disease threat to humans shifted the arguments to favor public health outcomes over recycling. Farmers and veterinarians might well tolerate the scent of manure, as it signals a useful product that can replenish the soil, stimulate crop growth, and improve profits; urban dwellers are more likely to associate the scent of shit with filth, disease, and the endless work of farming from which their parents escaped.

In summary, taking the long view, we can see that our conflicted cultural and personal attitudes toward shit have deep roots. In evolutionary terms, positive associations with the scent of excrement may be rooted in biological urges to define territory and communicate with others (as described in Chapter 4), as well as the observation that food plants grow better in areas that had been manured. When human populations were mostly nomadic and when settlements were small and sparse, the positive associations with excrement outweighed whatever risks were perceived. This positive view of excrement has persisted when connections between city and countryside have been explicit and open (as in the story of Edo), and in rural agricultural areas today. As we have increased our understanding of transmission of killer diseases such as cholera and childhood diarrhea in the last few centuries, however, and as the beneficial association of flush toilets and clean bathrooms with health has become clear, city dwellers have learned to take an unambiguously negative attitude toward shit. The shift from a positive view to a negative view is thus rooted in shifts from people living in the country to people living in cities, to a loss of connection between food producers and consumers, and to our increased scientific understanding of causes of disease. But the connections between our attitudes to shit and the subcultures we inhabit are even more complex.¹

The notion of perfume reflects this subcultural complexity. How one interprets a scent — whether one thinks of it as fine and lovely, or filthy and disgusting — is culturally conditioned. One allegory from the sixteenth century describes how the perfume of a courtesan was apparently thought objectionable by angels, but that of an “honest” dung-collector’s cart was considered just fine, and even virtuous. Which, if nothing else, says something about the cultural preferences of angels that inhabited Europe in those years. At that time, civet musk — the buttery scent from the perineal glands of civets — was an ingredient in heavy perfumes used to mask the odors of unwashed upper-class bodies. In the seventeenth century, William Shakespeare’s son-in-law John Hall was in good medical company when he used it to treat hysteria in a woman by rubbing it on her navel. It is not clear if the treatment was effective. Although synthetic alternatives were available by the 1940s, the pheromone derived from civet musk has been used as a stabilizer in perfumes until relatively recently.

In some sperm whales, the accumulation of unregurgitated indigestible materials mixes with feces and intestinal secretions to form a solid, fragrant substance called ambergris. Ambergris, highly prized by the perfume industry, may be expelled into the ocean, or may kill the animal by obstructing the intestine. Christopher Kemp, writing in New Scientist, asserts that the “rich, complex odor” of ambergris “has been compared to fine tobacco, the wood of old churches, the smell of the tide, sandalwood, fresh earth, and seaweed in the sun.” Musk and ambergris, both associated with excrement, but put to good use in “high culture,” may serve to help us think in new ways about manure (or perhaps to re-think what we mean by “high culture”).

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, bodily odors were still associated with “lower” classes, and cleanliness was next to godliness, so that the use of perfumes (still fortified by civet excretions) and powders displayed moral as well as economic superiority. This morally superior attitude persists throughout the industrialized world today, along with the general mythology that the poor people living in slums actually like to be without proper toilet facilities, or at least can tolerate this situation better than rich (white) folks with more sensitive dispositions. In every culture, from ancient Rome (where the main sewer of the city, the Cloaca Maxima, was cleaned by prisoners of war) to eighteenth-century England (where cesspool cleaners were required to work at night), those who manage feces on behalf of the rest of us are among the least regarded workers.

Today, urbanites in industrialized countries who move into the countryside admire the cows — and complain about their smells. In this, they reflect the urban-agricultural split I described earlier. Of course, there is a qualitative difference, and not just in terms of odor, between the happy scents of a few cows or pigs rolling in the straw and the flood of concentrated effluent that exudes from a modern industrial livestock facility. Humans seem able to pick up the scent of pig manure from a great distance. This has led to millions of dollars, including $1.7 million in President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package earmarked for Iowa, being poured into research to make pig shit smell nice.

Perhaps our aversion to pig manure in particular is related less to the manure itself than to an ambiguous relationship with the animals it comes from. Trichinella spiralis, which is associated with muscle aches and pains and occasionally death, is acquired by eating infected pork. Pigs pick up the parasite by eating rats or, sometimes, each other. Taenia solium, which is at one stage in its life cycle a tapeworm in human intestines, can cause epileptic-like seizures. In this case, humans acquire the intestinal infection from cysts in pork, and pigs get the cysts from eating human manure. People get the brain cysts (and the seizures) when they ingest the tapeworm larvae from their own feces on unwashed hands or contaminated foods.²

We cannot undo our evolutionary and cultural histories. The global population is now mostly urban, mostly amnesic about the ecological and economic benefits of manure, and increasingly aware of the disease problems associated with shit. Some will argue that the public health problems we face are not entirely new, and not particularly wicked, although they are more acute. These people, many of them my colleagues, and indeed myself not too many years ago, will argue that we have the tools to fix the problem, that they have been tried, and that they work. The flush toilet, considered by some to be the greatest public health invention ever, is one of those tools.

Water-flushed latrines, which emerged as the dominant manner of waste disposal in the twentieth century, have ancient roots. The fifth labor of Hercules required him to clean out, in a day, three decades of accumulated dung from about 3,000 cattle in the stables of the Greek King Augeas. The manure pile had not seemed to be a problem for the beasts themselves, but, according to the great twentieth-century scholar, novelist, poet, and re-teller of Greek myths Robert Graves, “it spread pestilence across the whole Peloponnese.”

This was probably the first recognition that manure runoff from intensive feedlots and other intensive animal-rearing operations could be a source of disease for others. Hercules accomplished his feat by breaking two holes in the walls around the cattle and then diverting the Alpheus and Peneus rivers through the cattle-yard, thus effectively flushing all the shit away.

Hercules had been promised a tenth of the cattle as his reward, but after Copreus (which means “dung man”), the herald, told Augeus how Hercules completed the task, the king refused to give him the cattle, arguing that the rivers, not Hercules, had achieved the desired cleaning. (I like it that the messenger in this story was called Dung Man, as it fits in neatly with my argument that the shit is telling us something.) Thus the magic of flushing, the idea of rivers as sewers, and dilution as the solution to pollution have long been entrenched in the consciousness of human civilization.

Flush toilets were available in many houses in the ancient cities in the Indus Valley between 2500 and 1500 BCE, among the Romans a thousand years later, and, at least by the eighteenth century, in northern parts of Europe. Much later than Hercules, and thinking on a scale less heroic, one might refer to Sir John Harington in the late sixteenth century, who wrote instructions for how to construct a “valve closet,” and Alexander Cummings, who patented a flushing device in 1775. The term “water closet” only entered the English vocabulary in the nineteenth century to distinguish it from the “earth closet,” a popular composting toilet developed by Reverend Henry Moule in 1860. It was basically a seat over a bucket, and pulling a handle dumped earth or ashes on the excrement. But the bucket had to be emptied somewhere, which created other problems. In a densely populated city, where would one empty it?

All of which is a circuitous path to assert that Thomas Crapper, the man who popularized the flush toilet in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, might have been a clever capitalist but hardly original in his thinking. In technology as in science, the claim to novel ideas is often made and is usually fraudulent. As an aside, the bidet, or “pony” in French, which was ridden to clean one’s butt, not to flush away excrement, never really caught on with the English. It is more akin to the notion of having a small bucket for scooping water from a water-filled concrete tank, as is found in some Asian countries. The water is used to wash one’s privates (with your left hand, please!).

While a flush toilet improved the hygiene in a home, what to do with the results of the flush has been a challenge from the start. In some societies, when it wasn’t thrown out the window, people emptied their waste into backyard cesspools. In sixteenth-century France a 1539 edict required people to build their own cesspools. One author, Dominique Laporte, has argued that European programs for shit management were based on a bourgeois social construct related to the primacy of individual property rights.

The Romans saw the disposal of excrement as a public, rather than a private, issue. One of the earliest sewage systems, Rome’s Cloaca Maxima, built by Tarquinius Priscus (616–578 BCE), was originally designed as a system of channels to drain rainwater. Only later did it develop into the city’s main sewer, transporting up to 45,000 kilograms of excrement a day, discharging it downstream from the city into the River Tiber.

The sewers of industrial Europe were originally designed to carry away wastewater and kitchen slop but not excreta — although city dwellers were known to raise their skirts and skirt the laws on that. When piped water was introduced (improving cleanliness in the home), the cesspools overflowed, creating stink and disease in the neighborhoods.

By the early nineteenth century, problems with backyard cesspools were sufficiently serious that city dwellers in Paris and London were officially allowed to connect their cesspools to the city sewers. It was seen as an advance over throwing shit out the window or letting it pool in backyards and leak into the streets. But city sewers were not designed for this volume of human feces. Who would have thought we could produce so much shit?

As any epidemiologist knows, what is good for an individual is not necessarily good for the population. Flush toilets and connecting to city sewers merely scaled up the issue of too much shit from household to city, and the problem needed to be solved again at that level. Emptying cesspools into the sewers and the sewers into the rivers was, on the one hand, a colossal waste of nutrients. More dramatically, it was also associated with cholera outbreaks. In the first half of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of people died in Paris and London from cholera.

By the mid-1850s, when the Thames River flowing through London became known as the Great Stink and its odors threatened to overwhelm legislators, England passed laws that helped transform the city’s sewer system. In 1849, reportedly more than 250,000 cubic meters of sludge were discharged from sewers into the Thames, and at least one company providing drinking water had its intake pipe only a few feet from a leaking cesspit in which a baby’s nappies had been washed. The baby was sick with, and later died of, cholera.

In 1854, Dr. John Snow (who also introduced Queen Victoria to anesthesia during childbirth) demonstrated, through investigating and mapping cases of cholera in Soho, London, that the disease was being spread by water contaminated with human feces. In a controversial move, Snow removed the handle from the Broad Street public water pump, which, according to his maps, was a major culprit. Snow has since been celebrated as the “Father of Epidemiology.” His astute and accurate observation and documentation of disease patterns, and his inference of the vehicles by which diseases were spreading, were remarkable because he had no knowledge of the actual disease agent itself. This was, after all, well before bacteria had been identified.

Some, less kind, might attribute greatness to the man as an epidemiologist because he recognized that the epidemic had peaked and would decline no matter what he did, a trick known and loved by other epidemiologists seeking public approval since that time. In fact, Snow himself is said to have recognized this as a possibility, which nevertheless did not change his general conclusion that the disease was being spread through fecally contaminated water.

Still other critics, the more cynical ones perhaps, point out that government officials scoffed at Snow’s explanations and replaced the pump handle after the epidemic subsided. They were offended at the wild theory that the disease was spread through fecal-oral transmission, and perhaps irked that an upstanding and wealthy water company was having its name besmirched in such an unprovoked manner. In any case, the idea that shit in drinking water might not be a good thing eventually took hold, as the evidence connecting contaminated water with the disease accumulated. Sanitation engineers and scientists joined forces with (or themselves became) politically active reformers. Finally, the “germ theory” of disease being put forward by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, which substantiated what the sanitary engineers were saying, replaced the old “miasma theory” that asserted that disease was generally caused by bad air.

The upside of this new germ theory and its champions was that it led to sewer systems, water systems, and flush toilets that much improved the health of urban populations in Europe. The downside was that the discovery of bacteria reinforced the idea that feces were only inherently dangerous and dirty. The truth is that human and animal feces, if not handled correctly, and if they are allowed to contaminate food and water, often are dangerous. This is particularly true of human feces, since they are the most likely to contain microbes that are adapted to living in people. These bacteria may include those associated with cholera, or typhoid fever (caused by a human-adapted Salmonella), or Clostridium difficile, the current bane of hospitals, which lives in at least a small percentage of apparently normal human intestines. Yet, if handled in such a way that the dangers are mitigated (for instance, through composting, or bio-gas production), feces of all sorts, including human feces, can be immensely beneficial. It is this latter truth which seems to have been lost in the campaigns to promote public health in the past century.

And so I circle again back to the wicked culture-nature entanglements with which excrement confronts us. On the one hand, our practical farming selves know that animal manure is an excellent fertilizer, enabling human settlements and people to thrive and sing and write great literature. Thus, almost every society has groups within it that manage excrement as a technical issue whether it be as fertilizer on farms in Europe or fuel in Indian villages.

On the other hand, there has been a general cultural tendency almost everywhere — probably related to urbanization and crowding, probably rooted in legitimate fears of disease — that there is something filthy, dirty, and embarrassing about taking a shit, or even talking about taking a shit, or “talking about not talking about it” (as 1960s guru-psychiatrist R.D. Laing would have said).

Even anthropologists and ethnographers in the European and North American traditions, who have been almost obsessive in describing the various eating and sexual behaviors of “other” cultures, have tended to shy away from considering what medical anthropologist L.L. Jervis calls “exuviae and exudations.” This is not so much shame (although showing one’s naked backside to others certainly can involve some of this), as it is, I think, embarrassment at being an animal. I recall, at the age of nineteen, being doubled over with diarrhea in Calcutta and having to drop my pants in a small alley off a main street in that bustling city. In some ways, as a callow Mennonite boy who had been taught that belief systems and spiritual well-being were all that mattered in the world, it was an epiphany. For all our lofty philosophies and religious visions, we still have to shit.

The most difficult temptation to resist when addressing issues that evoke conflicting emotions in us, is to make generalizations based on personal experience and anecdote. Some authors have argued that the link between evil and shit is universal, pointing to feces as an accessory to witchcraft for Indonesians, Patagonians, the Dyaks of Borneo, and the aborigines of Victoria. These authors have also invoked Gnena, a demon believed to live in feces by the Bambara (in Mali) and a Korean evil spirit that frequents toilet sheds. The Thai Filth Ghost went beyond frightening people while they were shitting to sometimes reach into their anus and pull down part of the rectal lining. While now the butt of jokes (according to my Thai friends), the Filth Ghost tale might, in earlier times, have accounted for hemorrhoids.

These stories reflect a mixture of genuine fear, nervousness about slightly embarrassing behavior, and sometimes humor. In this context, it is no surprise that belief systems, religious and otherwise, have had a strong influence on how we think about and manage feces. Acts of urination and defecation have often been linked to ritual impurities. In some cases, arguments framed as sacred prohibitions in traditional cultures have modern scientific justification. Whereas a Thai villager might not defecate in a moving stream because it offends Mother Water, a Canadian biologist would discourage this activity because it contaminates drinking water and can spread diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, or giardiasis.

Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalytic investigators over the past century have deemed it important to describe human behavior related to feces in terms of characterizing personal development and personality types. Hence, in popular culture, we now encounter the idea of “anal-retentive” personalities — those perfectionist, obsessive, neurotic, keeping-it-all-in people many of us know (and, to some extent, all are) — and “anal expulsive” personalities. One might also explore the relationship between fear and voiding behavior, and our somewhat nervous responses to stories of people being, literally, scared shitless. The first reported defecation in the face of terror is in the Annals of Sennacherib in 701 BCE. When the kings of Babylon and Elam fled in terror from battling the Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib, it was said that they “let their dung go in their chariots.” Better in a chariot, I suppose, that in the shark-infested waters off the Australian coast.

Reflecting on our psychologically ambiguous relationship to excrement is useful for therapy, perhaps. But for purposes of constructing the larger ecological and evolutionary narrative of our species and its place on this planet, these ways of framing the issues seem less relevant. We will make more progress if we look at how some cultures and religions have recognized the dangers inherent in feces even as they found ways to take advantage of its useful properties.

Islamic societies have characterized feces as being a source of najassah, or impurity, requiring a ritualized wash after exposure. Nevertheless, as I understand it, composting transforms feces from something impure to something useful. This, it seems to me, is a reasonable response, since the heat generated by proper composting kills most pathogens. In Indonesian Java, which is at least nominally Islamic, human excreta are added to fish ponds and hence transformed into useful food through dilution, flow, and consumption by species less fastidious than ourselves. Whatever the rationale, such practices promote both human and ecosystem health, so that they can be justified on both scientific and religious grounds, a situation devoutly to be wished for on many other issues.

Adding composted feces to the earth is a good thing, and is generally acknowledged to be so, provided that feces are properly composted, and not just buried. The crucial step of composting is reaching high enough temperatures to kill the pathogens and weed seeds. That we all defecate and thus can make a daily personal contribution to the renewal of the planet would seem to be something to be celebrated. In the last century, the ascendancy of fossil fuels — coinciding with the ascendancy of industrially manufactured fertilizers, the population explosion, and the flush toilet — has taken a source of celebration and made it into a problem to be solved.

How can we recover, if not a sense of celebration, at least a sense of meaning, in our shit-making? Where could our culture look for inspiration? I am reminded, once again, of the dung beetles. My favorite name, among all the dung beetles, is the genus of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus, an avaricious, lying, violent, clever man, who promoted navigation and commerce (an ancient counterpart, perhaps, to neo-liberals who promote global trade in order to enrich themselves), thought he was smarter than all the gods. After one trick too many, the gods punished him by having him roll a giant boulder up a hill. Just before he reached the top, the rock rolled back down and he had to start over again. Forever. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” an essay written in 1942, in the midst of World War II, Albert Camus saw in this myth life’s fundamental absurdity. Yet Camus imagined that Sisyphus could be happy in the midst of his meaningless toil, and concluded that the “struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

But the scarab gives us a more hopeful — I would say a more realistic — spin on this myth. The rolling of the giant dung-ball up the hill is not meaningless at all. It embodies the deepest meaning of life, a re-imagining, in biological terms, of what John Donne meant when he said that we should not ask for whom the bell tolled — it tolled for all of us. The scarab exemplifies for us the reinvention of life from its own waste, the expectation of a future re-awakening, the celebration of the dance of all living things, even through the most mundane of daily activities. Every day, in everything we do, we are renewing and reinventing life on this planet. In identifying with the dung beetle, Sisyphus — humanity itself — is redeemed.

1 And often very personal. When we had babies at home, I used to complain of the scent of infant feces while changing diapers, without much sympathy from my wife. She could not understand how I could tolerate, even enjoy, the odor of cow manure but not the smell of my own children’s poo. I suspect it is an evolutionary thing, my wanting to keep that child smell away from the house so the predators don’t come by, and liking that of cows because it means food. Being the great male provider, it is important to know where to find the cows. At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

2 As I have often told my food safety students who want to eagerly lecture the public about what to eat and what to avoid, our eating habits are not entirely formed around disease risks. Despite the risks, people eat whole mussels, oysters, and clams, including the entire digestive tract full of excrement; being filter feeders also makes these shellfish an excellent source of whatever viruses or bacteria are in the water they are taken from.