CHAPTER 9
Know Shit:
A way Forward
I think the hardest thing to feel is that the shit is purposeless. This is at the heart of the emotion we call “despair.” Despair is an existential emotion. It occurs when our meaning system gets shattered and we have to construct a new one. But our culture does not value this process. We don’t see any value in the shit. We want to flush it away. It takes courage to allow our faith and meaning to be dismantled. Despair can be a powerful path to the sacred and to a kind of illumination that doesn’t come when we bypass the darkness.
— psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan,
in an interview with psychotherapist Barbara Platek
Although it was midday, the sky darkened as in an eclipse, and as the column of birds thickened, their droppings fell like snow. For three days and nights the vast flock passed overhead, at a steady speed of 95 kilometres per hour (60 mph), undiminished and with no pause. At the last the very air smelled of pigeons, and their droppings had whitened the earth . . . At Audubon’s reckoning, the flock that he experienced in the fall of 1813 consisted of an unimaginable 25 billion birds.
— Tim Flannery, on passenger pigeons
in John James Audubon’s work
Some might say there is too much shit in the world, in all the wrong places. And yet there are moments — watching a dung beetle at work, or being showered on by millions of rose-breasted birds — when one might see a strange beauty or certain poignancy in all this excrement.
Shit can be both awful and awe-inspiring, but it also has a purpose, and its beauty lies in its purpose. Psychotherapists Greenspan and Platek were not talking about the same shit that I have been talking about in this book, and perhaps I am pushing my luck to suggest that the path to enlightenment might be through understanding excrement. But there is a reason why the Egyptians deified the scarabs, other than their apparent propensity to deify everything from cats to onions. Scarabs (like onions and cats!) are special. Dung beetles speak to us of what we have lost, and what we must restore if we wish to live long and prosper. Based on an ecological and evolutionary transformation of our understanding of excrement from a “waste” to be “managed” to a necessity for life on Earth, we can restore shit to its rightful place in the biosphere, and in so doing discover both healing and meaning for ourselves.
Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying that we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. This has become a kind of mantra for many public health workers, political activists, and environmentalists. Yet every time we (our species) begin to tackle a big problem — 9/11, a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, loss of biodiversity, too much shit in the wrong places, obesity, starvation — we go back to exactly the same thinking that created the problem. Industrial technology created the problem of too much shit, and we think industrial technology will save us. New technology, important as it is, is only as good (in both senses of the word, morally and in terms of its effectiveness) as the context in which it is used and the challenges for which it is designed to respond. I would go so far as to say that developing the technology is easy; throw money at the engineers and they will invent something. Creating new technologies is not, primarily, the problem we have.
The science that underlies technology is what some academics in the natural and biomedical sciences call “hard science” and which is often the only kind of science considered “real” science. This results in natural and biomedical scientists making fools of themselves by preaching to the rest of the world about what should be done to respond to issues like excrement, when pretty much every intelligent person knows, based on good evidence, that such preaching is probably the least effective way to promote change. These “hard” scientists end up sounding silly because they clearly have no understanding at all of how and why people change. They imagine it is all due to ignorance, or cultural inertia, or that catch-all, “lack of political will.” They also, ironically, act as if we (people) did not evolve through random mutations and selections inside the systems we are trying to understand. They often act as if we — or at least they — are objective, outside observers. The effect of taking this exclusively hard science, pseudo-objective approach is that anything having to do with the humanities — understanding why people behave the way we do, our understanding of what comprises knowledge, history, anthropology, ethics — is undervalued. It is often referred to as “soft science.” Understanding how to use technology to create a sustainable society is considered “soft.” I prefer the term “really difficult science,” as proposed by geographer Barry Smit, for this work of co-creating a sustainable global narrative.
In part because of this lack of respect for the humanities, and in part because previous global narratives (Christianity, Islam, State Communism) have so often been catastrophically bad, the story many of us have told ourselves has focused on what we have seen to be the ideological “neutral” tale of technology and progress. We have deluded ourselves into believing that this is not a belief system, because it uses science to achieve its ends. But where this has led us, in the past century, is into a place where our stories have been constructed around single problems or built on narrow-minded academic disciplines. We have lived with the illusion that we can solve our problems one by one until they are all solved. If we look specifically at issues related to excrement, the international development literature is replete with tales of latrines being used to store food, or not used at all, because important social and ecological relationships have been ignored.
A story by one of my colleagues, Andres Sanchez, is typical.
In 1993 and 1994, Sanchez, an engineer-cum-anthropologist, visited the recently created Sierra Santa Marta, a Special Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. The reserve was home to more than 1,000 plant species, 400 bird species, and more than 1,000 other animal species, of which more than 150 species were listed as endangered. It was also the home of more than 60,000 Nahua and Zoque-Popoluca indigenous people. The reserve was also a major water source for an urban and petrochemical “corridor of Southern Veracruz.”
Sanchez began, he says, with a rather traditional western approach to development research, exploring human behavior in relation to diarrhea and what preventive measures might be feasible based on a deeper understanding of relationships between people and their feces. Diarrhea in the area had been increasing annually, and in 1994, the cholera epidemic that was exploding throughout Latin America raised the anxiety of local citizens and government.
Although he eventually set aside this specific research in favor of a broader investigation of pre-Hispanic social and cultural beliefs about health and nature, Sanchez followed his original interest in shit through a series of more informal interactions with people in the area.
A review of the situation by the Ministry of Health found that the water source (a protected spring catchment) and distribution were safe, but that water was being contaminated by feces in the homes. Eighty percent of households had no water for washing or cooking in the home, nor sanitary facilities; those that did turned the water, as Sanchez recounted, into “fecal tea.” People defecated in the open, women under the cover of darkness, and men in the privacy of their milpa (corn fields). Chickens, dogs, and pigs, roaming freely inside and outside homes, used feces as a main source of food in their scavenger diets, dashing after the fresh pickings left by children, who defecated in their home yards.
According to government officials, the problem was clearly one of lack of education and poor personal hygiene. Given this diagnosis, the government response appeared sensible. A school- and clinic-based community hygiene program was implemented, and the penning of animals was promoted. The doctor at the local health clinic gave a talk on sanitation and disease, and at the end of the talk provided a sack of cement and instructions to build a latrine. To attract women to the talk, the clinic gave a free kilogram of corn flour to all who attended. Since men were the ones who were culturally supposed to build things, and since many of them were uninterested in the need for a latrine, the cement was often left unused.
Pilar was a local woman who took a strong interest in the water, excrement, and health problems of the community. A Jesuit-trained community health worker deeply interested in communities’ traditional stories, her diagnosis of the situation differed somewhat from that of the Ministry officials.
The population of the community had quadrupled over twenty years, and one group of people had cashed in on the coffee boom of the previous four years. Because of deforestation in the hills, the twenty-year-old water system was plagued by decreasing output in dry months. Responding to the periodic dry periods, the people who had become relatively wealthy from selling coffee used their extra cash to build home water storage tanks and flush toilets; sometimes they left their taps running, muddying the nearby streets, to the delight of free-ranging pigs.
Wastewater from the wealthy homes drained into a river upstream from an artesian well. The poor people in the community (who made up about 60% of the population) had to line up at public taps for their water. This was a task done by women and girls and often took much of the day, as the lines were long. Some simply did not have the time to wait: single mothers, women from households having someone with a chronic illness, or elder couples heading households with children whose parents had left home for work elsewhere or had died. The women and girls in these households then often had to do double shifts, working in the milpa and at home.
Eventually, the long lineups at the public taps caused these women to go to the artesian well near the river (downstream from the rich people’s wastewater outlet). This well was often flooded, and contaminated, during heavy rainfalls. A water vendor who sold agua fresca (fresh water) outside the Sunday church service also drew his water from the contaminated well.
Because of the increases in population, the fields used for open-air defecation were moved farther away from the community. When men got sick with “the runs,” they went to the field to relieve themselves, and came home to be cared for by their wives. Women could not afford this luxury. Sanchez heard stories of diarrhea-stricken women being beaten by men who came home after a long day of working at the milpa to find that the food was not prepared; or because there was town gossip of the wife seen going to the bush during the day, “probably to meet a lover.” Women and girls, seeking privacy, often waited to defecate until nightfall; this also made them vulnerable to harassment and assault. On top of this, walking in the dark to the defecation fields, the women feared stepping on poisonous snakes that, at night, spread out on the roads trying to absorb the heat soaked up by the earth during the day.
The poorer households, often headed by single parents or grandparents, or with a chronically ill family member, did not have the labor or time to build latrines. Pilar visited the municipal president and his wife, the head of social programs in the municipality, to put pressure on the local government to manage water with social equity and to lobby him to support a youth program to help the poorer sector build latrines.
After Pilar presented her version of events, she received a one-hour sermon from the president on democracy and equality of opportunity. He was unwilling to support such a program because, he argued, it was not democratic. Everyone had been offered the same opportunities to get a free latrine slab. Why should one sector now be singled out for special help?
Pilar returned home, determined to devise a new strategy. She began to build coalitions and partnerships in the community. She went over the head of the municipal president, lobbying NGOs to insert sanitation into the biosphere reserve management plan, a plan that had been developed and implemented by the state government. She lobbied her personal contacts and friends among the teachers and organized a nutrition and hygiene fair open to all, where she recruited volunteers for latrine-building groups. She kept the story in the local news networks.
When she returned to visit the municipal president and his wife, she came with a multi-stakeholder petition in hand for support of the latrine-building project. She organized a community meeting, where she helped give voice to dissatisfaction from community members about water waste, scarcity, and inequity. As the result of Pilar’s persistence and insight, a community water supply and sanitation improvement program was inserted into the management plan for the biosphere reserve.
Pilar understood that dealing with excrement was not simply a matter of providing better toilets. It required addressing interconnections in an evolving context: a growing population, the new wealth of some that had led to the hoarding of safe water available to the community, snakes, community violence, poverty, inequality, and increased fecal contamination of the river — all complicated by the heavy inertia of culture and gender relations.
Sanchez explained to me that the story of this community in Mexico has been repeated in communities around the world. Excrement and water management are systemic issues, tightly related to inequalities of wealth, power, and gender relationships. Without addressing the social and ecological context, the wicked problem of excrement will remain intransigent.
We tend to think of such stories in relation to poor communities in “developing” countries. However, solutions to shit-related problems in industrialized countries are also, equally, embedded in stories, most based on carefully selected and biased evidence. What are some of these stories that have framed how we respond to excrement in our lives?
Several of the stories we live by are bounded, in good bourgeois fashion, by the assumption that our households are the center of the world. This is a kind of 1950s “family values” story, where all that matters is our clean house and our healthy children. This can be accomplished with a flush toilet, running water, and some enforced rules of etiquette. If we want to save water, we can use the motto I first encountered in my sister-in-law’s bathroom in California more than a decade ago: if it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.
If the theme of our story concerns the invasion of a neighbor’s story into ours — say the offensive smell of our neighbor’s commercial pig farm and the sight of his manure lagoons through our kitchen window — we can recommend certain feed additives and feeding regimes that change the smell of their shit and reduce the volume they produce. Or one of us can move somewhere else.
In the story we tell ourselves, we may we want to slow down the depletion of soils in Brazil, and reduce the shit-contamination of waters in Europe and North America. If we have a choice and can afford it, we can eat local, preferably organic, preferably from smaller mixed farms. We can eat less meat. Michael Pollan’s advice is good: “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” We can keep fewer pets.
So far these stories are mostly about what is good for us, and only a little about what might be good for the planet that is our home.
Not all of our stories are completely selfish. If we want meat at a low price in the grocery store, we might also enlarge that story by saying that low prices are generally good for everyone, especially poor people. We might say that technological progress and creating wealth are the answer. In fact, we may not think there is too much shit in the wrong places. We might think that, in order for everyone on the planet to have a chicken in every pot, or pork cubes in every wok, or a steak on every grill, the amount of shit we have is the right amount, maybe even not quite enough. Soil depletion in some parts of the world and water contamination in others is simply the cost of having sufficient protein to adequately feed the world. This is a problem, we might even say, of social justice: it is everyone’s right to have animal protein every day.
If the shit that comes out of these large farms is seen as a problem, well, we have a technological solution for that: bio-digesters that produce electricity. Simply put, bio-gas is one of the outputs of systems called anaerobic digesters, or bio-digesters. These take organic matter (like manure, or animal or vegetable wastes), put it through a process of treatments that involve acid production and anaerobic (oxygen-hating) bacteria, and produce bio-gas (primarily methane, a powerful greenhouse gas), and a slurry. The gas is burned directly as a source of heat, or, more often, at least in larger commercial systems, to produce electricity. The slurry has been used as fertilizer, often after being composted or treated in another way. In some cases the water is separated and used for non-drinking purposes, like washing out barns. I’ll have more to say about bio-digesters later.
If our story involves wanting to free people in large cities from the labors required to grow their own food, and to spend their time creating art and music, cars and computers, then we may find common cause with the economies-of-scale “feed the world” folks.
If the story we are interested in is about a diverse, resilient, sustainable, healthy world, a world that can anticipate and adapt to multiple possible futures, then we are back in the kind of narrative that interests me. In this story, everything — equity, enough food for everyone, how that food is produced and by whom and how it is distributed, the fate of excrement, art, ecological resilience, meaningful work — are all, simultaneously, important. In this world, ecological and social diversity are important, providing buffers against surprising changes in a world full of uncertainty: they provide resilience.1
But we also want to take advantage of some of the economies of scale, without going to the fantastic extremes preached by agricultural industrialists. Some of these economies, after all, free us to have more time to dance, write poetry, make art, and sing. We want a world where the tensions and arguments between local and global, past and future, change and memory, diversity and commonality, are real, ongoing, never-ending, and deeply rooted in our sense of home on Earth. To have this kind of a world, we must know shit.
In the previous chapter, I proposed the basics of a new way of thinking about, and responding to, the wicked problem of excrement and everything else. I suggested that a robust, post-normal science, rooted in a complex understanding of the world, will guide us in making our way to a healthy world. I have also suggested that there is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of excrement — that the solutions will be dependent on local ecology and culture, and justified by the narratives in which they are embedded.
Before we circle back to take a second look at some of the technologies available to us in moving toward this utopian vision, we should have a closer look at how one can elicit such stories. Since the mess we are in is largely the result of being held in thrall to a global techno-progress narrative, I am particularly interested in seeking an insurrection of marginalized, more complicated stories, such as the one shared by Andres Sanchez from Mexico.
Fortunately, a lot of people have been working on this knotty problem over the past few decades, and, in a kind of convergent evolution, most of the solutions these people are proposing have similar characteristics. The ecohealth approach, as I shall refer to it, has many names, comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, and has been “invented” by scholars and practitioners working on problems of public health, environmental management, conservation biology, economic and social change, and ecological resilience.
What you are getting here is the version that emerged from work in which I have personally been involved. Having set out a path by which we can walk from the wicked slough of excrement, I shall re-visit some of the many clever technologies that have been devised to help us with the details.
There is no paradigm for doing this; when the questions we ask are fundamentally, wickedly complex, as the questions I am asking about shit and sustainability are, then there is by definition no paradigm. Paradigms are important for sciences that are tightly constrained (physics, chemistry, communications, psychology). For the kinds of questions we want to address, we want to accommodate many different ways of knowing and types of knowledge and perspectives by microbiologists, energy engineers, economists, sanitary engineers, agronomists, public health workers, doctors, veterinarians, social scientists, social activists, old women, children, young men, Muslims, atheists, Catholics, anxious people in the streets, indigenous people, panarchy modelers, dancers, painters, poets, novelists, and political leaders. The expertise we need to solve the wicked problem of shit is collective. None of us has the answer.
In doing this collective work, we have to make up the rules together as we go along and keep testing them against the world we are investigating and transforming. It is the opposite of experts lecturing people; sermonizing by self-righteous industrialists and environmentalists reflects the same kind of thinking that created the mess we are in.
Is this possible?
For most of the past twenty years, I have worked as part of an international community of ecohealth scholars and practitioners. We are trying to figure out how to make the world a more equitable, healthy, happy place for people and all the other animals with whom we constantly co-create this amazing planet. Those, then, are the lenses through which I see the world. I see everything else — how many chickens or how much milk or how much shit we produce, how many cars, how many operas or novels or paintings — through those rose-colored lenses.
A decade ago, I worked closely with my late colleague James Kay, a systems design engineer, who was interested in sustainable management of the environment. He and his students created what came to be known as the “diamond diagram.” The basic message of their work was that we need to bring together our best understanding of complex natural phenomena with our collective dreams and wishes to arrive at scenarios that accommodate both. Only then can we know what needs to be done, create programs to do those things, and figure out how to monitor whether things are moving in the direction we want.
At about the same time as Kay and his students and colleagues were doing their work, I was engaged with friends and colleagues in Kenya, Italy, Nepal, Peru, Colombia, Canada, and the U.S. to create a process for doing the kinds of things that Kay suggested needed doing. Today, there are ecohealth networks and communities of practice in Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These communities include practitioners and scholars of all types, from economists, ecologists, engineers, doctors, veterinarians, and communications specialists to farmers and community organizers. Globally, the International Association for Ecology and Health has brought many of these people together. Our meetings are confusing, eclectic, exciting, frustrating, and inspiring.
The accommodation of different perspectives is rarely easy, especially for a scientist such as myself who is used to being “right.” One particular instance brought this home to me. In October 2010, I participated in a workshop delving into ecosystem services for poverty alleviation, in particular the relationship between biodiversity and indigenous health in the Amazon and the Yungas, the eastern slopes of the Andes. The workshop included physicians, anthropologists, epidemiologists, veterinarians, teachers, ecologists, and naturalists. We had indigenous leaders, Argentinians, Canadians, Brazilians, Brits, Peruvians, Colombians. Over a week, we argued, drew pictures, showed maps, yelled at each other, cried, laughed, got drunk, made lists and organizational diagrams, came back to the table, checked with our social networks on Skype, and drew up a research plan. What we were forging was an uneasy sense of common vision — One Health, global solidarity, mutual respect, finding interwoven narrative threads. In the midst of this, one of the indigenous leaders said that the traditional way of dealing with enemies, with people with whom they disagreed radically over important issues, was to kill them. She felt like killing us. The fact that our discussions elicited this response, and that she did not kill us, was reassuring for me. It meant that we were dealing with important issues, that the perspectives we brought to the table were, in fact, substantially different, and that there was hope that we could, if not resolve our differences, at least not kill each other because of them.
One formulation of the ecosystem approach to health, the one I have been mostly closely associated with, is called an Adaptive Methodology for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health, or AMESH. In simplified form, it boils down to a series of identifiable “steps,” although the steps are usually not as orderly as my presentation of it suggests, and sometimes we end up walking in circles, revisiting the same steps a few times, or jumping to the end before returning to earlier steps and then moving on.
Although AMESH emerged from projects and research in several countries, my experience in Nepal was particularly instructive. I went to Nepal in 1991 to investigate a human disease (called hydatid disease, or cystic echinococcosis) related to dog shit.2 Echinococcus tapeworms reproduce sexually in the intestines of canids (dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes) the world over. The gravid tapeworm is excreted, but can only complete its cycle if it is eaten by another species. In that other species, which is usually some form of ruminant (sheep, cow, water buffalo, moose), the tapeworm forms cysts, which are like slow-growing tumors full of tiny “proto”-tapeworms. When the second animal dies, and a canid eats the cyst, the tapeworms can mature and have sex in the canid intestine, and the life cycle is completed. In many parts of the world, this life cycle evolved to take advantage of the fact that people domesticated both sheep and dogs, and generally took pretty good care of both of them. People get this tapeworm cyst — again as a slowly growing tumor full of baby tapeworms — by accidentally eating dog poop. The habit of keeping sheep and sleeping with your sheep dog to keep warm perpetuated the parasite cycle over many millennia. North American versions of this life cycle involve moose and dogs, or wolves and caribou, or foxes and voles, as well as sheep and dogs.
In Nepal, the cysts were arriving in goats and sheep from the high plains of Tibet, and water buffalo from the hot plains in the south of Nepal and the north of India. When I entered the picture, invited by Nepalese colleagues to help them investigate this parasite and how to control it, the goats and buffalo were slaughtered at open sites along the riverbanks of the Bishnumati River in Kathmandu.
Initially, I saw this as a pretty straightforward problem: people were exposed to dog poop. How could we stop that? As I worked with my Nepalese colleagues throughout the 1990s, we realized that the problem involved, at a minimum, providing meat for the tourist industry, a mainstay of the economy; importing animals to maintain the supply; slaughtering those animals in the open air along the riverbank; letting organic garbage pile up in the street (saving disposal money, but also providing an extra source of nourishment for the street dogs); tolerating and even encouraging free-running packs of dogs (which provided community policing functions at night); and allowing much-loved pet dogs to defecate in the house.
After several years of trying, unsuccessfully, to “solve” the problem of people getting hydatid disease through basic research and public lecturing, we decided to change our thinking and our strategies. Going well beyond the simple problem of dog excrement to tackle the more wicked challenge of “everything at once” we worked together with butchers, slaughtering workers, street sweepers, garbage collectors, local politicians, shopkeepers, social activists, and researchers (veterinarians, parasitologists, anthropologists). Not long afterward, the community completely restructured itself, changed leadership in the Butchers’ Association, created closed-in slaughter facilities, moved holding pens for buffaloes to fields outside the city, started composting the offal and feces of slaughtered animals, stabilized the riverbanks with parks and grasses, built public toilets, and looked at how to create better garbage collection (which may, in the long run, require daycare and schooling for the children of the young mothers who sweep up the garbage). The problems of environmental contamination with excrement and the parasite infection were addressed by not seeing them as isolated issues. The shit was deeply embedded in what Douglas Adams would have called “life, the universe, and everything.”
It also seemed to me that this community-level reorganization in Nepal probably would not have happened if the Berlin Wall had not come down, because the activism that led to all these changes was part of the global movement for democratization in the 1990s. Complexity theorist John Casti has called this the “social mood,” and argues for its critical importance in how events in the world unfold.
All of these activities and events fit in with a holonocratic, panarchic view of the world, where behavior at one scale (personal, household, community, watershed, region) influences, and is influenced by, behavior at scales larger and smaller. What has impressed me as well is that the communities we worked with continue to take on new projects, and have adapted and responded to new challenges in the midst of a decade of political unrest and civil war. A good deal of the excitement and energy came from recognizing that there was such a diversity of things that could be done. Everybody had (has) a role to play. This resilience of the local community is hopeful, since it means local resilience can survive larger scale collapse — that is, the collapse of national government in this case — and serve as a source of renewal and inspiration for people who are trying to renew the larger system.
When big industrial, globalized livestock-rearing systems (like centralized economies and political systems of all sorts) collapse, renewal will be possible if smaller-scale, integrated, inventive, diverse animal and shit-management systems are already in place.
This story about Kathmandu is not perfect, nor is it an isolated event. It represents a new way of thinking about shit, life, and everything, and, like all new thinking, is inventive, exciting, subject to local power politics, and vulnerable to being overwhelmed by larger-scale events (climate change, pandemics, population explosions, migration to cities). Nevertheless, if we apply AMESH-style thinking at any scale of endeavor, keeping panarchy and holonocracy as our mental orientation, we can begin to resolve the global and local shit problems.
In every situation where I have worked using these orientations, people get excited when they see that lots of different kinds of knowledge are valued, and that the solutions will be collective, rather than being imposed by some outside expert.
Technology, as I have said, is important. Nevertheless I hesitated to include a lot of technological responses to the wicked problem of shit for two reasons. Firstly, having spent several decades as a scholarly researcher, I am well aware that most applied research is driven by funding. If money is made available, viable technological solutions to specific problems will soon appear. Secondly, a new global awareness of excrement, primarily as a public health problem, has elicited the money that will drive that research.
For instance, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet” Challenge in 2011 resulted, within a year, in prototype toilets that produced fertilizer, electricity, and clean water. As I would have predicted, however, based on several decades of evidence from “soft” science, it is not clear how, or when, such technologies will be adopted. It is not simply a matter of “transferring” technologies, as some naïve development “experts” used to think. It is a matter of working with people where they live to co-create a narrative within which those technologies make sense. That is difficult science. Having said that, I would be remiss if I did not at least discuss some of the basic technologies that are currently available. Some of them are quite simple and have been around a long time. Others are very new.
Probably the most widely accepted use of both human and animal manure is as fertilizer, which would also seem to be the closest to mimicking natural ecological cycles. Indeed, it is when excrement is not treated as a powerful fertilizer that we run into such major problems as nitrate pollution of drinking water and toxic algae blooms in the oceans. I have already explored this aspect of manure at length, but it is worth underlining here that fertilizer is not only the past of shit. Excrement is likely to continue to play an important role as fertilizer in the future, along with its use as a source of energy, which I shall return to later. Both of these uses are driven by increases in fossil fuel prices, as well as by popular demand for organically produced food.
Although not as highly valued as it was in the nineteenth century, guano has been regaining some of its former “luster.” According to some news reports, Quechua workers gathering guano in the islands off the Peruvian coast have been earning three times what they could earn back in their highland homeland. The guano is shipped back to mainland Peru to support organic farming. In a move that could herald a new frontier in species protection, the Peruvian government stationed armed guards at each of the more than twenty islands to keep away anyone who threatened the guano-producing Peruvian boobies and Guanay cormorants. Harvesting rotates among the islands, so as to minimize human intrusions. The government is also controlling commercial fishing in the area of the islands, in order to conserve the fish-eating guano-producer populations of birds.
The revival of the manure-as-valuable resource will accelerate as we begin to treat livestock agriculture seriously (recognizing it as the ecological manipulation that it is) and as we take the long, inexorable slide down the far side of “peak oil” and away from petroleum-based chemical fertilizers as the price of oil increases. There are signs that this trend is already occurring.
The oldest technology for managing feces is composting. Composting is a special case of what in nature would be called decomposition; in natural systems, organic matter is broken down and becomes humus. Although all organic matter decomposes through normal microbial action, managed composting is quite different than simply dumping manure or dead animals into a hole in the ground and waiting for them to rot.
As part of an ecosystem health course for veterinary students, we had them consider what to do with dead chickens in the face of an avian influenza epidemic; it would not be wise to load them up in trucks and take them to a landfill, dripping blood and viruses along the way. So what should a small- to medium-sized farmer do? We had the students toss some dead chickens onto a pile, cover them with straw, add some fuel, and set fire to them. We had them throw another few into a hole in the ground and cover them up with dirt. In another hole, they layered chickens, dirt, and straw, and left aeration tubes in place; this was the compost hole. Long-stemmed thermometers were inserted into the two holes. Burning the chickens took up a lot of wood and straw, and set up a terrific, exciting blaze that could be dangerous to anyone in the area; you wouldn’t want to try that during a drought, or in the mid-summer heat. After forty-eight hours, the composted chickens had heated up and were rapidly being reclaimed by soil insects and microbes. The buried chickens were pretty much as we had left them; the bacteria needed to accelerate the process need oxygen and more carbon than the carcasses provided.
Researchers have demonstrated that a well-constructed compost pile, with the appropriate mix of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen (to promote the appropriate bacteria), can reach temperatures of 54–66°C (130–150°F), which is enough to kill avian influenza viruses. After a couple of weeks, usable soil and perhaps a few feathers and bones are all that is left.
When my family composted one of our house cats (who was hit by a car), she was returned to our garden as excellent soil, and a few tiny bones, and was resurrected to us as flowers and vegetables. If manure is used instead of dead chickens, the same process occurs. It’s especially effective if the manure is mixed with bedding materials, to give a better balance of nitrogen from the shit and carbon from the wood or straw. The same process could be used to render cat and dog shit reusable, but public health officials are somewhat nervous that people not familiar with composting would simply bury the feces, and hence provide opportunities for a variety of parasites to leach into the surrounding soil and water. Composting can be done in the ground or, if larger volumes are available, in long windrows or piles on concrete slabs that are turned periodically to aerate them.
On a larger scale, the return of shit as a valuable product brings with it some serious challenges, especially in the context of globalization of animal feed supplies. Where the shit is produced is usually considered, but where the feed inputs to the animals and people that produce the shit comes from is usually ignored.
Industrialized countries have promoted the spreading of biosolids on farmlands. New technologies for treating excrement has made the transmission of pathogenic bacteria less likely. In Ontario, Canada, where I live, standard sewage treatment removes about 90% of the pathogenic bacteria.
The major problem with biosolids is not that they spread infectious disease but that they often carry heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, which do not die off or wither away even under the brightest, hottest sun. As the result of new technologies and regulations, in many cases the levels of these metals is much lower in biosolids produced by industrialized countries now than it was a few decades ago. But over a few decades, continuous applications on the same lands can lead to dangerous levels because of bioaccumulation. The implications of these higher levels of chemical elements is not yet clear.
If we mimic natural systems, then we would scatter smaller amounts of (preferably composted) feces over wider areas, the amount and placement being determined by climate, soil type, vegetation, slope, and the like. This would imply that we should back off the biggest-is-best model and think more in terms of farms sized to fit their surrounding ecosystems and social systems, with excrement-recycling systems tailored to fit the context.
Closing the cycles of energy and nutrients to create resilient ecosystems is more easily done locally than at industrial scales. Using bio-digesters and composting provide some interesting options. Integrating fish ponds into a mixed farm is another possibility. The addition of human or animal excreta to fish ponds (usually growing carp) has been recorded throughout Asia (particularly China), Egypt, and Europe for many centuries. More recently, agronomists have run experiments using animal manure to fertilize tilapia-growing ponds in Africa. This practice, by enriching the water with nutrients, promotes the growth of bacteria, algae, and zooplankton and results in good quality fish protein. It is thus a variation of the use of manure as fertilizer.
As a member of a class of scientists (epidemiologists) who have encouraged people to eat more fish (for heart health), and at the same time being concerned about both water contamination and the collapse of the global open-water fisheries, I am attracted to the notion of growing fish in shit-infested waters. Nitrates and phosphates from the manure are kept in the food chain, and fish help aerate the water, which discourages the growth of disease-causing bacteria. The use of animal feces to feed fish is one of those delightful eco-friendly farmer stories and scenarios much celebrated in the 1970s, until they were bulldozed by urban demands, misconceptions about our apparent “freedom” from ecological constraints, and diseases such as avian influenza that gave multi-species farming a bad name.
If there are concerns about the chickens carrying human pathogens such as Campylobacter or Salmonella, composting or otherwise treating excrement to kill off pathogens before it is fed to the fish, clearing away vegetation at the edges of the ponds to discourage the growth of snails (which can carry the parasites that cause schistosomiasis, a disease that damages internal organs in humans), and “flushing” the ponds with clear water a few weeks before harvesting the fish will help to result in a cleaner, healthier food. As with any option we have on the list of “what to do with this shit,” this one has to be carefully managed.
While manure’s most prominent role historically has been as fertilizer, this has been changing with increasing energy costs. The use of excrement for fuel is no longer restricted to the burning of cow pats in India and Nepal. Given that energy is probably the single greatest limiting factor for urban and industrial development, it is not surprising that developments in finding new energy-related uses for manure are perhaps the furthest along. Most of the technological innovations related to energy production from manure are related to the generation of bio-gas.
Bio-gas generation requires slightly more advanced technology than simple composting, but also offers a few more advantages, especially for up-scaling to larger farms or dense urban populations of people and dogs. In international development circles, the use of bio-digesters to produce bio-gas has a long history in places where there is both a shortage of fossil fuels and an excess of manure. The process of bio-digesting has been the subject of many books and development projects, as it seems to offer a rare win-win situation. Rose George, in her book The Big Necessity, devotes a considerable number of pages to the Chinese efforts in this regard. According to The People’s Daily, the Chinese claim to have 748 large- and medium-sized digesters that handle 20 million metric tons of human sewage annually and produce 200 million cubic meters of methane gas.
Although bio-gas production through anaerobic digestion in a bio-digester could be carried out at one of a number of temperatures, one needs to pick one temperature and stick with it so the bacteria that are doing the work feel “comfortable.” All bacteria have a range within which they best grow, multiply, and use resources. Listeria, for instance, prefer refrigerator temperatures to grow and multiply. Salmonella prefer temperatures that are closer to those of a mammalian body. To take advantage of different kinds of bacteria, and variations in ambient temperature, there are thermophilic (50°C–60°C), mesophilic (35°C–40°C), and psychrophilic (15°C–25°C) digesters. The communities of bacteria that survive naturally in thermophilic digesters multiply and work faster at higher temperatures; they can process at least small amounts of material in three to five days. However, the bacteria that thrive in these hotter digesters are also quite sensitive to temperature and pH fluctuations, and these digesters need to be more carefully managed than those that work at cooler temperatures.
The mesophilic digesters take longer than thermophilic ones (fifteen to twenty days), aren’t as efficient in killing pathogenic bacteria, and produce less gas. Because of the much slower bacterial action at lower temperatures, the psychrophylic take even longer and are less efficient at breaking down the organic matter. The choice of one over the other depends on ambient temperature (low tropics versus snowy mountains, for instance), what kind of material is to be processed (manure, dead animals, straw, vegetable waste), and how much (a farm’s worth, a whole village’s).
The cooler digesters may not achieve sufficient pathogen kill for the slurry output to be safely put on fields where foods are grown for human consumption. That means the cooler plants’ output may still need to be composted (which, unlike the bio-digesters, uses aerobic bacteria) to kill the pathogens. In any case, bio-digesters have been designed for just about every size and location in India and Nepal, and are widely used in those countries as a way to reduce dependence on burning wood or coal, and to prevent respiratory disease, which commonly occurs in women who cook over traditional smoky wood fires.
Engineers working for Hewlett-Packard have suggested that, with big enough input, electricity from bio-gas produced from cattle manure could be used to run computer centers. Similar systems have been described (and are in use) for an 1,800-head dairy farm in Maine and a 9,000-head swine farm in North Carolina. In North Carolina, the system, created with input from Google Inc., was used to claim carbon offsets. According to the farmer, the system reduces waste emissions, improves the health of the pigs, and creates a fertiziler he uses to grow wheat, corn, and beans. Some are now reporting that Google and Apple are competing to tap into the fecal energy produced by North Carolina’s large hog farms.
While bio-digesters in North America are usually related to livestock, this is not the case elsewhere in the world, where human crowding under unsanitary conditions is more common than livestock crowding. Dozens of community “biocenters,” large enough to accommodate a thousand people per day, have been built in crowded slums around Nairobi, Kenya. These centers contain hot showers and, sometimes, offices and other businesses above them. The centers, including the hot showers, are fueled by human excrement. The bathrooms were built over bio-digesters that decomposed human manure and urine to produce methane gas, which was supplied to kitchens in the surrounding areas. This solution not only provided fuel for cooking in these unserviced slums, but also eliminated the need for “flying toilets.” These plastic bags full of human excrement, thrown into the streets at night, were reminiscent of waste disposal habits in sixteenth-century London.
Post–civil war Rwanda has become a world leader in imaginative use of excrement. Researchers and development workers identified organic waste, including excrement, from prisons and secondary schools as an important health hazard to areas surrounding these institutions. At the same time, both prisons and schools were contributing to deforestation because of their demands for fuel-wood for cooking. One of my Rwandan colleagues wrote to me that “the Kigali Institute of Science, Technology, and Management (KIST) developed and installed large-scale bio-gas plants in prisons and secondary schools. Each prison was supplied with a linked series of underground bio-gas digesters, in which the waste decomposes to produce bio-gas. After this treatment, the bio-effluent is safe to be used as fertilizer for production of crops and fuelwood. KIST staff manage the construction of the bio-gas plants, and provide on-the-job training to both civilian technicians and prisoners. The first prison bio-gas plant started operation in 2001, and by 2011 plants were in operation in ten prisons. The largest has a series of twelve individual digesters.” According to this colleague, many homes are now installing similar digesters, but on a smaller scale.
The example from Nairobi is as close to a win-win situation as one might hope for; the use of prisoners’ waste to produce power for jails in places like Rwanda makes me just a little nervous. The human-waste bio-digesters in Rwanda produce about half the power needed in dozens of the country’s overcrowded jails. On the plus side, using this “natural gas” helps spare forests from being cleared for fuel in Rwanda’s already denuded countryside and keeps the manure out of the waterways used for drinking. It also provides excellent, odorless fertilizer for the prison gardens, which produce food for the inmates. On the downside, this constant need for the raw materials used to create the power would seem to require that the authorities keep the prisons full in order to keep them running, regardless of the crime situation. At this point, this does not seem to be an issue. And I suppose that the jails, if they are emptied, won’t need power sources. And one could do a lot worse than having an energy system for schools dependent on keeping the classrooms full.
Like the Rwandan jail bio-digesters, building large bio-digesters (such as those suggested by Hewlett-Packard and those implemented on large North Carolina hog farms) raises some serious dilemmas. On the one hand, it would be an excellent use of the vast amounts of manure produced by large livestock operations, helping to reduce the environmental impact of what is clearly a dirty business. On the other hand, once built, such plants would require these large inputs of manure or other organic matter. This choice, then, closes other options. Do we want to have our energy dependent on large pig farms? What are the other environmental and social impacts of those farms?
In any nested social-ecological system, “scaling up” almost always means a loss of adaptability and an increased vulnerability to large-scale failure, especially in the face of increased instability in political, economic, and climate systems. A breakdown in a small bio-digester is a manageable problem. A breakdown in a large one can have serious, cascading effects through the whole system. Perhaps a cooperative system involving multiple smaller farms and digesters linked together might offer the best of both worlds.
Globally, a decrease in human populations and a decrease (probably a drastic one) in intensive livestock rearing are in the best interests of the seventh generation into the future. Having made such a global statement, however, I would add that, even as North Americans and Europeans and wealthy people everywhere should decrease meat consumption and its attendant shit production, I think that very poor people throughout the tropics should have the option to eat more meat. Nutrition researchers have demonstrated that kids learn better in school if they have some animal protein in the diet. But that doesn’t require large-scale intensive livestock rearing.
Ecologically and socially (that is, in terms of our best understanding of complex, adaptive, self-organizing social-ecological systems within which all life is embedded), it makes much more sense to have a lot of smaller livestock operations well integrated into local farming activities to simultaneously facilitate more effective manure management, stronger rural communities, and more diverse landscapes.
The issue of the impacts of all technologies, not only bio-digesters, therefore raises the broader questions of economies of scale. The farms and industries required to achieve the kinds of cost savings that make such economies attractive take up large pieces of land, and promote populations of animals that are genetically similar. These enterprises are thus associated with the loss of biodiversity and adaptability in the social and natural landscapes where they are situated.
I am not so naïve to think that large-scale livestock operations will disappear overnight, or ever. Some large bio-digester plants make sense. But I propose that a variation in size would be more appropriate to meet the multiple goals of public health and ecological sustainability — some large plants and many medium or smaller ones. Globally, there is a lot of evidence that this variability in size is happening, and that the smaller, faster scales of innovation in the panarchy will continue to thrive.
Historically, not all urban centers have come up with the same solutions to fecal pollution. Over many centuries, for instance, the Yemenis developed elaborate systems to separate urine and excreta even in multi-story buildings. Urine passed from toilets along a channel to the outside wall of the building, where it evaporated in the hot dry climate, but feces were collected from toilets via vertical drop shafts. The feces were then sun-dried and burnt as fuel. This sanitation system required very little water, an advantage in the dry desert environment. The “modernization” of Yemen, which included the introduction of flush toilets, has been associated with water shortages and falling water tables in the capital city of Sana’a.
Sweden is one of the world leaders in energy produced from biological materials. Since 2005, the world’s first bio-gas–powered train, the Amanda, has been running the 120 kilometers between the cities of Linköping (Sweden’s fifth-largest city) and Västervik. In Västervik, the source of the bio-gas is the local sewage treatment plant. In Linköping, where buses and garbage trucks are fueled by bio-gas that is available at gas stations, the bio-gas is produced using the wastes from a local abattoir.
The use of cattle manure and other waste to produce power is more widespread in the world and less problematic, from a public health point of view, than the use of human excrement. In Nepal and India, where cow dung provides energy for more than a million people, it may be the “once and future” king of energy. If a cow defecates in the street, someone most certainly is watching, and will scoop up the patty and slap it onto a wall to dry. Once dried, it makes a reasonable fuel.
Cow dung has about the same heat-producing value as wood (but both have less than half of what kerosene provides). Llama dung has about the same value as that of cattle. Globally, 40 to 50% of the 150 (dry matter) metric tons of cow dung used annually for fuel is burned in India. While the traditionally flat patties are still common, the efficiency of energy conversion can apparently be raised from 10 to 60% by putting the dung through an anaerobic bio-digester. Since the killing of cows is forbidden by Hindus, the Indian subcontinent is likely to maintain a large cattle population for many generations to come. In this context, it would seem that finding new jobs for cows in India (such as eating garbage, producing fuel, and protecting forests) would be easier than changing the respectful Hindu attitudes toward the gentle, stubborn, smugly self-righteous beasts.
The global translocation of nutrients through animal feeds and human foods is a classic, wicked problem of complexity. The logic of nutrient cycles would suggest that one should send the shit, produced by the animals and people that eat the food, back to the countries from whence the foods came. But it also makes some sense, if we are actively managing the biosphere, to ship the shit to places where it might be useful for other reasons.
For instance, in the 1990s, Dutch entrepreneurs planned to export some 7 million metric tons of cow manure to India to be used as fuel. It seemed like an elegant solution to the “too much shit” problem the Netherlands were facing. Given the high levels of antibiotic use in Europe, however, the Indians feared that the dung might bring with it antibacterial-resistant bacteria. Bacteria share genetic material, including genes that code for resistance to antimicrobial drugs, without regard to any religious rules about appropriate breeding behavior. These genes can be transferred from normal gut bacteria that don’t usually cause problems to serious pathogens such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. Researchers have already determined that antibiotic-resistant bacteria have spread from the shit of people to mountain gorillas in Uganda, and can spread from human wastes to foraging gulls. The gulls can spread these bacteria, and their resistance genes, wherever they fly.
The program proposed by the Netherlands could thus solve a manure problem in the Netherlands and a fuel energy problem in India, but create problems for treating animal and human diseases by increasing antibiotic resistance. In the end, the project was dropped. Necessity being the mother of at least some inventiveness, in 2009 a report from Amsterdam announced that a new bio-gas plant had been opened near Leeuwarden that would use cow dung, grass, and food industry “waste” to generate sufficient heat for more than a thousand homes.
While global trade in livestock excrement and large-scale bio-digesters tend to grab headlines, often the best solutions are more nuanced and tailored to local conditions. If people in India can generate fuel from cow pies, feedlot owners can use cow shit to run computers, and Swedish engineers can help manage urban waste by using it to run buses, what do millions of North American city-dwellers have to offer? What about all those dog owners running after their pets with plastic disposal bags? Can we recruit them into the power grid?
Dogs and cats also produce huge amounts of organic urban waste, much of it going to landfills or leaching into waterways. A dog park in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides a kind of pilot project for what can be done. Dog owners in the park collect the poop in biodegradable bags, and deposit it in the “Park Spark” project. This project, the work of artist Matt Mazzotta, digests the poop and produces sufficient methane to run a street lamp. Norcal Waste, a garbage company based in San Francisco (a city that an estimated 120,000 dogs call home) has proposed that dog waste be collected and converted to biofuel. The estimated 9 million metric tons of shit produced by American dogs and cats (which are fed diets richer than those of most people in the world) may yet contribute to that country’s energy self-sufficiency, although I have yet to see it mentioned in the national energy plans.
While I was writing an early draft of this book, the workers for the city of Toronto who collect garbage were on strike. Dog owners lamented on the radio that they not only had to pick up the dog turds (which by law they must do), but now they had to take them home and do something with them other than put them into the trash. What hardship! Some have recounted harrowing and stinky tales of burying dog poop in the backyard. Why didn’t they mix it with grass cuttings and kitchen waste and compost it? The soil in their backyards would have been much improved, without stink, and public health and well-being would have been better served. Apartment and condominium owners (where dog owners do not have a yard) could band together and either compost or start a biofuel business, as proposed by Norcal in San Francisco. I can see the bumper sticker already: My car drives on dogshit!
On a slightly different tack, in the wake of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and as oil supplies dwindle, Yuanhui Zhang, an agricultural engineering professor at the University of Illinois, may one day be seen as a kind of cutting-edge hero. He has apparently been able to convert two liters of pig manure into a quarter of a liter of oil through a thermochemical process. Not much, but it is a start.
As the cost of oil has increased, we’ve seen increased interest in the use of manure as fertilizer and also as feed. Since the microbes in cattle rumens can take nitrogen sources and combine them with carbohydrates to manufacture protein-rich feeds, chicken manure can serve as an inexpensive substitute for grain and protein supplements in cattle feeds. This has been done in various parts of the world with, it appears, mixed success. While the shit serves as a good protein substitute, in one study in Israel, some of the chicken feces were found to have high estrogen levels, which interfered with normal development in young cattle. Any time anything is recycled, especially in intensive systems where problems can be magnified, a good quality control system is important.
One possible alternative to the direct use of manure as feed, if that is deemed too risky, is to raise flies on the manure, and then to dry and process their larvae, which are an astonishing 40% protein. This feed can then replace corn or soybeans in the diets of cattle, chickens, pigs, and fish — or ducks. Butchers in the neighborhoods of Kathmandu I described earlier, where people were suffering from hydatid disease, composted manure and offal in open rows. Others in the community then raised ducks; the ducks fed on the bugs that transformed the “waste” into food. This is relatively straightforward when done on a small to medium scale. The technology to achieve this on a large commercial scale will be mixture of the mundane (growing flies) and the high tech (creating harvesting chambers, post-harvest treatments of the flies, and the like).
Besides the usual options to use manure as fertilizer and energy, a variety of novel uses have been proposed, from jewelry to novelty gifts. At present, most of these uses are restricted to “niche” markets. Although I have my doubts about the commercial viability of the meat created from sewage sludge that I mentioned in an earlier chapter, some of these “novel” uses may, in particular contexts and in the interests of diversity, become important.
Earlier I mentioned the use of civet excretions and ambergris from sperm whales in perfume, but excretions out of, or from near, the anuses of animals have also served a variety of other purposes.
Many termites use feces (as well as soil and wood) in the construction of their mounds. As well, some birds (gannets, kittiwakes, South American oilbirds, the wonderfully strutting secretary birds) use their own and others use that of other animals to line their nests. Not surprisingly, then, people have experimented with similar uses of excrement. The Maasai, Dinka, and Nuer tribes of Africa use cattle dung as a type of mortar in the construction of their earth-brick houses, and in Belarus cow dung has been used to compact the thatch on cottage roofs. In India, dung is mixed with mud and used as flooring in rural areas. The gut bacteria and residual, undigested fibers present in the dung create a smooth, durable floor that produces less dust than mud alone. In Indonesia, a company called EcoFaeBrick produces bricks from cow dung that are said to be 20% lighter and 20% stronger than clay bricks, and provides increased income for farmers.
Fossil fuels are used for making a great many plastic-related compounds that have become essential in hospitals (disposable needles, intravenous bags), common in cafeterias and classrooms (plastic chairs), and desirable for backpackers and hikers who prefer to wear synthetic jackets made from fossil fuels rather than animal skins. Almost 5% of oil consumed in North America is used for making plastic. At least some of those plastics can be made from excrement. Micromidas, a California company, has developed a commercial process for creating plastic from wastewater and sewage sludge.
In another twist, in 2006, Japanese researcher Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan was presented with the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for extracting vanilla from cow dung. The one-hour heating and pressuring process costs less than half of what it costs to extract vanilla from vanilla beans. Most synthetic vanillin is made from petrochemicals; however, the lignin used to make vanillin is also present in the fecal matter of grass-eating animals (primarily ruminants), and given the amount of livestock feces in the world and the fact that we are past peak oil, this form of vanilla would seem to be an interesting option. But try not to think about it as you make your pudding.
As I mentioned earlier, elephants only digest about 40% of what they eat, and they put out 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of feces per day. The 60% of undigested, or partly digested, material can of course be reused, and is. Warthogs eat elephant dung, as will elephants themselves (if they are really hungry). However, elephant dung can be used to make paper, as can kangaroo dung, which is plentiful where elephant dung is not. Elephant dung paper, unlike similar products from other animals, has become something of a cause célèbre among those who consider themselves to be environmentally friendly. This may be because elephants are (rightly, in my view) not considered appropriate animals for the barbecue, or perhaps because our collective efforts to save the rainforests have inadvertently put many working elephants in Southeast Asia on the unemployment rolls.
On a visit to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in the dry, rolling hills south of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to check on a project for Veterinarians without Borders/Vétérinaires sans Frontières, I could not leave without exploring what happened to the elephant dung, which, as one might imagine in an elephant retreat center, was plentiful. A large, round, yellow sign on the wall declared (exactly as it appeared):
How we help the elephants?
One elephant is said to supply sufficient dung for 115 sheets of paper every day. The estimated 500,000 elephants in the world could thus provide enough poop, daily, for more than 50 million sheets of paper. As with any technology, “scaling up” and diverting elephant feces to produce paper on a large scale would remove that manure from the ecosystems where the elephants live, hence remove that as a source of food for other animals, including dung beetles, and probably result in a general deterioration of those ecosystems. Nevertheless, it is attractive as a cottage industry for people who live near elephant sanctuaries.
In 2002, National Geographic reported on pilot studies exploring the use of llama dung for filtering water. Researchers in Bolivia have discovered that llama dung contains microbes of the genus Desulfovibrio, which have the remarkable skill of neutralizing acidic water and aiding in the removal of dissolved metals, such as zinc, lead, copper, iron, and aluminum. The runoff from silver and tin mines is directed through ponds and lagoons filled with llama dung. Similar pilot studies have been done in the U.K., using cow and horse manure to filter runoff from old mines in Newcastle.
Despite all the research into uses for dung and the odd technological possibilities, I remain unconvinced that shit will become more than fuel and fertilizer. People in future centuries, however, may think me a silly old fool for having thought so un-creatively, with such low expectations of the innovativeness of my oh-so-clever species. Who knows: will we see shit-fueled computers made of bioplastic? Many things are possible, if only we put our minds to it. The biggest danger will be if we think we have found the solution, scale it up, and impose it on the world. If the study of complex social-ecological systems has taught us anything in the past few decades, it is that only through a mixture of public engagement, being aware of the many, diverse ramifications of any intervention in the world, and the creation of multiple, locally appropriate, adaptable resolutions will a sustainable and convivial human society be possible on this planet. Increasingly, “green” engineering companies, such as Enermodal in Canada, have recognized the mix of strategies, at several levels, that we need to address these complex issues.
Solutions for cities will combine variations of composting, energy generation, reuse of “gray” water (water that has been used for, say, having a shower) in toilets, reduced-water-flow toilets and showers, and conventional treatment plants. In agriculture, we are already seeing variations on the same theme.
The narratives we are co-constructing, in which we are all complicit, have many layers within them. The little girl I saw taking a dump in the communal refuse pile in Kathmandu lives in the same planetary family as the boy who dives into the outhouse in Mumbai so he can get a movie star’s autograph in the film Slumdog Millionaire. This is the same world where I can find orchids on the toilets in the men’s room of a Bangkok airport, and the same global village in which the people of Jakarta slums can watch their neighbor’s partly digested dinner going by in open sewers. This world includes, as well, the cavernous cloacal system into which the good burghers of New York flush their poop, drugs, and whatever else might be passing through their intestines.
While some dream of giant bio-digesters, others are making high-tech vanilla, or electricity-producing toilets, or are composting chicken shit or human excrement for the garden. The good thing about this mixed-up timeline is that we can be sure that somewhere in the world, collectively as a species, we have all the ideas and technologies we need to solve the problem of excrement. Our bright and eco-friendly future may be in the hands and minds of a small child in Kolkata or a young engineer in California or a farmer in Germany. The natural tapestry into which our bodies have been woven may be frayed, moth-eaten, and faded, but the strands are still there, and although we might not be able to discern the meaning, there are still enough members of the original weavers’ guild alive that we can re-create the vibrant colors of the original.
No matter how clever our technologies, they will only be effective and helpful if they are designed for, and used in, the appropriate social-ecological contexts. The big question is not “Can we design new technologies based on shit?” (Of course we can.) The question is “Can we reorganize ourselves so that whatever technologies we devise promote a thriving, sustainable globe that is hospitable to our species?”
Can we devise a twenty-first-century notion of holonocratic citizenship that acknowledges our membership in an amazing, co-dependent, co-evolving panarchy of millions of plant, animal, and bacterial species, even as it recognizes the richness and inventiveness of human culture? Can we admit, freely and openly, that what we eat and how we handle our shit are essential acts of citizenship, as important as how we vote? I believe that the answers to all of these is: yes.
Farmers who anticipate future prices and climate restructure the landscape to arrive there, and in so doing change the future. If the anticipated future is based on monocultures and stability — that the future will be an extension of the past — farmers will suffer catastrophically. The upside of this malleability of the future — the fact that we can anticipate a certain kind of future and in so doing change it by what we do today — is that, with an understanding of shit, uncertainty, and complexity, we have a pretty good chance of enabling some pretty fine options for future generations.
I find, increasingly, that I am part of exciting discussions that go across scales, from households and farms to local and regional leaders, to representatives of global organizations, creating communities of practice that link across government, private businesses (large and small), and the general public.
We walk our lives along a fine line between self and other, local and global, ecosystem conservation and ecosystem unfolding, tyranny and anarchy, hegemony and fragmentation. When I talk with my friends and colleagues in the local communities and communities of practice around the world, I really do feel as if I am part of an emerging holonocracy.
We can do this. No shit.
1 Note that I am not only talking about diversity of organisms (animals, people, plants). It is the diversity of connections and feedbacks that are important for resilience.
2 This work is described in more detail in my book on the ecological and evolution of diseases people share with other animals, The Chickens Fight Back (Vancouver: Greystone Press, 2007). For those who wish a deeper scholarly analysis of this, see The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty and Managing for Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Ecosystem Sustainability and Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).