DECAY
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
—HENRY MILLER
AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I’ve been fascinated by decay, by how things fall apart, or how they don’t. As a young child I used my tiny fingers to explore rotting wood and the creatures who lived inside. I loved watching ants quickly find dropped food, and soon began leaving crumbs on purpose so I could watch the ants struggle to carry off bread and meat and fruit and vegetables (and potato chips and Cheetos and other junk too, for which I should now apologize). When I was a little older I would go to the same spot week after week to watch what happened to a fallen leaf or broken twig, or to horse, cow, or dog manure. I remember going year after year to see changes in piles of wood, junked swing sets, thrown-out appliances. And I remember trips to ghost towns in the mountains of Colorado, where I explored mines and houses and stores that a hundred years before were bustling with humans, but now were weathered, falling in, bustling instead with insects, lizards who sunned themselves on planks and skittered away when I approached, and leaves skipping away in the wind. I remember mine tailings, some scarred over and blanketed with plants trying to eke out an existence, some shaped into scabrous piles of rocks still incapable of supporting any life whatsoever, and some with open wounds still bleeding tainted, discolored, poisonous water into their surroundings. I remember wondering how long these wounds would last.
In my early teens I read an article—I think it was in Smithsonian magazine but I could easily be wrong—about what would happen to some of the iconic creations of civilization if humans disappeared tomorrow. The article focused on the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which would last a long time before it eroded; Hoover Dam, which thankfully wouldn’t last too long before it collapsed; and the Sears Tower in Chicago, which without supervision would, if I recall correctly, fall in on itself in a matter of decades.
The point is that I don’t remember many articles I read as an early teen, but I remember that one.
I also remember an assignment given by my eighth-grade science teacher. We were supposed to observe two processes—they could be whatever we wanted—differentiated by one substantial variable. A friend taped a bean to the back of a television for a month, then grew it and another bean side by side to see if the radiation harmed the TV bean (it didn’t seem to). Someone else—and this is unsurprising coming from a junior high student—soaked one pot of beans overnight and didn’t soak another, cooked both, ate them at different times, and tested for differences in his flatulence. For my own experiment I went to a market and bought a big fish, cut it in two, put half in a bucket of water and the other half on the floor, then watched the two decay. I didn’t tell my mom about the experiment, and I didn’t set it up far from where we lived, but rather, stupidly, in an outbuilding attached to the house. A couple of days into the experiment, my mom began to wonder if a mouse had died in the walls, and the day after that she started asking, “What is that smell?” I told her. She—and this speaks volumes about my childhood and why, for better or worse, I turned out the way I did—didn’t make me abandon the experiment, but rather move it to where she couldn’t smell it.
Although decay fascinated me, I have to admit moving the fish wasn’t fun. The fish in the bucket was easy: just carry the bucket, the contents of which had turned the color and consistency of two-thirds melted chocolate ice cream (but smelled altogether different), to another spot. The fish on the floor was more problematic. It had already become a pulsing, flowing mound of liquefied fish and maggots (who later became the fattest, slowest, tamest flies I’ve ever seen). I carried this mass on a coal scoop, stopping several times to dampen my gag reflex. That night I dreamt again and again of maggots.
Notwithstanding my fascination with decay, it was not a pleasant night.
The health of the land begins with shit, with dead bodies, with body parts that fall to the ground. It begins with death, decomposition, decay. It begins with eating, metabolizing, excreting. That’s how it has always been, since the beginning of life. You feed me, I feed the soil, the soil feeds everyone, the soil feeds me, I feed you, you feed the soil, and so on.
Here’s another way to look at it: I eat you, the soil eats me, everyone eats the soil, I eat the soil, you eat me, the soil eats you.
It’s all the same.
Our relationship—both personal and collective—with shit, and more broadly with our waste products, reveals much about our relationship with the land—with our habitat—and much about why and how this culture is killing the planet. In the case of shit, this culture has turned what was a gift from us to our habitat—a gift of fertile soil, given in response to the nourishment our habitat gives us—into something toxic, something harmful. Something shameful. And that is a terrible shame.
A few years ago I started shitting outside. I did this in part because I’m in love with the frogs where I live.
Each December and January I count the nights until the frogs start singing. If they’re a little late I start to worry that this might be the year the worldwide amphibian die-off comes home. And then a few nights later I begin to relax, as first one frog starts singing, then another, then over the next few nights more and more until they’re loud enough to make normal (human) conversation impossible.
There are two songs I hear: the soprano of tiny green Pacific tree frogs, and sometimes the bass güiro-like chuckle of northern red-legged frogs.
Frogs eat slugs, among many other creatures. I noticed that slugs love to eat dog shit, and I presumed (correctly, it ends up) that they would like mine just as much. I figured that feeding slugs would in turn feed frogs, so instead of flushing all these nutrients down the toilet I decided to let them enter the forest’s food stream.
I probably would have started shitting in the forest much sooner had my eighth-grade basketball coach not described (incorrectly, it ends up) the proper defensive position as that of “taking a dump in the woods.” Considering how wrong I later found he was on everything from athletics to philosophy to social skills, it didn’t surprise me much when I discovered he’d been wrong about this, too.
But for many years, whenever I thought about “taking a dump in the woods” (admittedly, not often), I pictured myself on the balls of my toes, knees only slightly bent, thighs and buttocks taut and quivering, ready for any quick movement (except, of course, the relevant one).
The first time I actually tried shitting in the woods, the real position was obvious, comfortable, and natural—far more so than not only the defensive position in basketball, but also sitting on a toilet.
Try it yourself sometime.
At this remove, I’m not sure which image strikes me as funnier: that of trying to shit from a standard basketball defensive posture (and hoping the shit doesn’t run down my leg) or that of basketball players trying to play defense while squatting, knees apart, thighs resting comfortably against their calves.
At least they would still be on the balls of their feet.
What is shit actually made of? Human shit is usually around three-quarters water. That portion increases, obviously, with diarrhea. Of the portion that isn’t water about a third is indigestible materials like cellulose—carbohydrates too complex to be broken down by humans: what we normally call “fiber.” Another third consists of dead bacteria, who until they die largely help our digestion and provide us with some nutrients we can’t make for ourselves. The remaining third is a mixture of fats, mucous, salts, protein, live bacteria, and dead cells from our own bodies.
Poop is usually brown because of a substance called bilirubin. When red blood cells in your body get worn out, your spleen breaks them down and extracts the iron. Some of that iron is reused in your body, and some combines with bilirubin to become a brown pigment which is secreted into your intestines and then excreted into the larger world.
The exact composition of shit depends on what you eat. If, for example, you eat more meat (which contains sulfide-rich proteins) your poop and farts will be smellier as those sulfides are released—hydrogen sulfide is the substance that makes rotten eggs and farts smell bad—unless you’re one of those men so high and mighty that your shit doesn’t stink, or one of those women so ladylike your farts smell like gardenias.
We’re called to this book, and to this discussion, by many driving questions. What is waste, really? Is there good waste, or ways to waste well? When and how did shit become waste? More to the point, when and how did waste become waste? How is “waste” dealt with in the natural world? How are cultural relationships with shit and waste mirrored in attitudes towards wasted people, castes, and classes? How did the dominant culture come to cause such massive wastage of materials, people, and lands, and what will happen to that waste when this culture is gone?
Answering these questions is not a mere matter of academic or intellectual curiosity. These questions go to the root of our relationships with our biological selves, with the future, with the land, with sex, with death, with the sacred, and with all other living creatures. If we want to live in a world that is not being laid to waste—where living creatures are not viewed as garbage or where lives are callously wasted—we have to find good answers to these questions, and soon.
The next question: what happens when the shit hits the land?
If it’s here, chances are good the dogs eat it. They follow me outside, heads lolling, faces grinning, tails wagging slowly. When I squat they sidle round behind me, and I have to put my hands on their shoulders to keep them from nuzzling in too close.
After I finish they move in to clean it up, just as they do with the tootsie rolls the cats leave behind.
I know this is supposed to bother me, but it doesn’t. I know that much of decomposition consists of consuming, digesting, and excreting, and I don’t much care who does it.
Of course I don’t let the dogs lick my face. But I didn’t let them do that before. I grew up in the country, and I know what dogs like to eat.
The word
shit comes from
skheid, meaning “to separate.” Its connotations are of separation from the body. The more polite word
excrement comes from a similar meaning in the Latin
excrementum, which is from
excernere, meaning “to sift out,” or “to separate out.” Originally it referred to any secretion of the body and wasn’t used strictly for shit until the mid-eighteenth century. The word
crap didn’t refer to shit until about 160 years ago. Prior to that, it and its ancestor words referred to chaff or siftings from grain or various kinds of leftovers and residue. The word
piss has always had its current meaning, but was originally acceptable to use in polite conversation the way we might say
urinate.
3 The word
feces originally meant dregs or sediment. The origins of these words are descriptive rather than emotional, and don’t reflect a particularly negative attitude toward shit.
Neither do the words for some of the places we shit. Toilet referred to a dressing room until a little more than a century ago. Latrine and lavatory are both from Latin lavare, which simply means “to wash.” (However, the word lavare is closely related to the word lotium, which means “urine.” This is because early Romans, who did not have soap, collected urine in which to wash their clothes.)
Words for garbage generally have similarly descriptive or neutral origins. Trash seems to find its root in Scandinavian words for fallen leaves and twigs or rags. Trash wasn’t used to mean household garbage until about a hundred years ago. Similarly, litter is what falls to the forest floor. The origin of garbage is also neutral; it originally meant the leftover parts of a slaughtered animal, the entrails. The word rubbish seems to be related to the word rubble meaning broken bits of stone. Junk used to mean old but reusable bits of rope, cloth, glass, and other materials. The origins of the word refuse may be the most interesting of the bunch. Although its current meaning has held for more than half a millennium, it can be traced back to the Latin refundere, which means to pour back, to give back, or to restore.
A modern and polite phrase for shit, human waste, has a somewhat different origin. The word waste has many definitions, nearly all with negative connotations. Waste as both a noun and a verb emerged about eight centuries ago from the Latin words vastus (“empty, desolate”) and vastare (“to lay waste”). That same root gave us the words devastation and devastate, meaning “to lay waste completely.”
Waste is used to refer to the physical products of waste: put that in the wastebasket. It is the process of weakening or decay: her body wasted away from cancer. It is the destruction or obliteration of person or place: The gangsters wasted the snitch in the alleyway; Man, he was so wasted last night; Dresden was laid to waste. And wastelands refer to places which are not or cannot be used by agriculture or industry, or places that cannot support life because of agriculture or industry.
Various meanings of waste hold two common threads: utility and destruction. Fundamentally, something that is wasted is either not being used to its full (usually economic) potential, or has been used up and cannot be used any more. A waste of time; A waste of money; A wasted life.
At the center of utility, and of utilitarian viewpoints, is the user. The labeling of anything as waste derives from the perspective of that user.
Here’s another way to say it: waste is a matter of perspective. Last week a cow was slaughtered on the farm where I live. The guts, from which, remember, comes the original word for garbage, were buried in a field (although I didn’t know this at the time).
A few nights later I heard coyotes howling as I fell asleep. I often hear them at night, but this time they seemed much closer than usual.
The next morning I went to get a wheelbarrow full of compost from that field and smelled something unpleasant—like rotting meat. I looked closer, and saw that that the coyotes had dug up the entrails and scattered them as they ate. Since the guts were exposed to air, and since it was an unusually warm day, the entrails were already covered in flies eating and laying eggs.
Now here’s what I mean by waste being a matter of perspective: to the humans who slaughtered the cow, those guts were waste, garbage by both the original and modern definitions. To the coyotes they were a meal, worth the trouble of smelling out and digging up. To me the smell of rotting guts was nauseous. To the flies it was an enticing aroma signaling a place to eat their fill, a place for their children to grow.
It’s a couple of weeks later. The guts are long gone. Or perhaps I should say I no longer see or smell them. But the nutrients from the poop of those who ate the guts have filtered into the soil, enriched it. The worms and the soil microbes have benefited, as will the cows who will someday eat these grasses, and the humans and other predators who will someday eat these cows.
That’s life.
What does it actually mean for shit to break down anyway? The dogs don’t always eat it, and I’ve seen what happens when they don’t. In the summer, flies arrive within a few minutes. They buzz, land, crawl all over. I presume they’re eating, but they never seem to make a dent. I also never see maggots later, so I guess they don’t find my feces suitable for a nursery.
Over the next several days, the shit crusts over, turns dark. Sometimes slugs find it and gnaw off chunks, revealing that the inside is still the original color. The pile shrinks as it loses moisture, but still it may last through the summer.
Winters here are wet, with pouring rain that can easily accumulate a half-dozen inches in a day. When that happens, shit disappears. It’s broken down mechanically, carried in rivulets or dissolved and carried into the soil.
But me not seeing it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Two experiences taught me this.
When I first started shitting outside I already had a theoretical understanding that shit is good for soil. So I started casting about for some place to bless with these nutrients. Pretty quickly I thought of the slightly worn path below my clothesline. The line itself runs about ten yards from one redwood tree to another, wraps around branches, turns ninety degrees to the left, then stretches another ten yards to another redwood. Because I damage the plants through the summer by walking on them, I thought I might compensate through the winter by giving them nutrients. So I started pooping at the far end of the path, each time moving a few inches toward the near side. Because it was winter, the poop not eaten by dogs was within a day or two beaten into the ground by rain. It disappeared. But—and here’s the point—it reappeared the next spring as especially lush and vibrant—happy—foliage. I could see a stark line between where I pooped and where I didn’t.
The other experience started a couple of summers later. I got a pretty bad prostate infection, and the urologist put me on heavy doses of antibiotics—mainly cipro and levaquin. It took me a few months to realize that this time my waste products weren’t helping, but instead harming the plants, which were dead or dying. The soil in the two main spots where I relieved myself became bare, something pretty rare in this temperate rainforest. The spots remained bare for the next two years.
I know, I know. My sample size is only one, and I certainly can’t point to reams of studies showing that waste materials containing metabolized, partially metabolized, and unmetabolized cipro and levaquin kills bacteria in soils, but I know what I saw. And what I saw was dead ground.
How can killing bacteria kill plants? The answer goes straight to the question of how things break down, and especially how shit breaks down.
When shit falls to the ground or is buried in the soil, its nutrients are not all immediately available to plants. Plants drink up water, and many nutrients dissolved in water through their roots, but larger molecules and water-insoluble molecules can’t be taken up so easily. Unlike animals, plants (with the exception of carnivorous plants like Venus flytraps) have no digestive systems, meaning other creatures in the soil must first break down those larger molecules to free up certain nutrients and make them available for plants to drink through their roots. This is a process called “mineralization,” where complex molecules are broken into simple, mineral forms. The process of reducing the body of a plant or animal or an animal’s droppings into mineral form can involve many creatures, from coyotes and vultures to earthworms and slugs to bacteria and fungi.
When an animal dies it immediately begins to break down its own tissues, in a process called autolysis, in which the digestive enzymes in each cell break it down from the inside.
For example, the cells in your brain will begin to digest themselves after as little as four minutes without oxygen. That’s why people whose hearts stop or who drown sometimes get brain damage or die between the time 911 is called and paramedics arrive to administer oxygen and perform CPR. If the brain didn’t deliberately start to digest itself but instead went into a state of hibernation (as it can in some cases of hypothermia), it could, in theory, last longer without actually dying. Instead, a cell’s last act is to digest itself, and liberate its nutrients so they can be used by others.
The next step in a body’s decomposition is putrefaction, in which bacteria start to break down and eat the body. The body’s own bacteria, such as those who live in the digestive tract, get started very quickly and are a major factor in animal decomposition. (This means, by the way, that newborn babies who die before ever eating and who therefore do not have bacteria in their digestive tracts may, if in a relatively dry environment, mummify rather than rot.)
And then there are those on the outside who also help to break down the dead, scavengers happy to make a meal of either plant and animal bodies or shit. When an animal like a vulture eats part of a dead body it gets a meal, and at the same time it and the bacteria in its digestive tract help to mineralize the organic matter, which brings the nutrients a few steps closer to being available to plants again.
In decomposition, along each step of the way, every creature wins. Each scavenger, from the biggest to the most microscopic, gets its meal, and each scavenger produces a smaller meal for the one after. And when those nutrients become fully mineralized by bacteria, they get taken up by plants and the plants themselves are eventually eaten for that cycle to begin again.
A very close and mutually beneficial relationship exists between plants and the bacteria in the soil around them. Plants shelter the soil with their leaves, moderate the temperature, and increase moisture levels in the soil around their roots. Further, contrary to common belief, roots aren’t simply one-way siphons sucking water from soil. Plants excrete many different mineral and organic substances (including sugars, vitamins, and amino acids) through their roots, and those substances attract and nourish bacterial populations of many different species. The plants themselves grow and shed roots during their lifetimes, much as we grow and shed hair, and those shed roots and root cells also act as nourishment for beneficial bacteria.
Different kinds of plants release different kinds of exudates through their roots. In essence, they are soliciting companionship from specific kinds of bacteria. For example, One corn plant in a sterile nutrient solution excretes 57 mg of sugar and 84 mg of acids in twenty days of growth.
4 We both found that profoundly sad. The corn was not in its community—in common language it was lonely—and by excreting all that sugar, it was calling out for bacterial companionship. Because it was in a sterilized environment, it was calling out in vain.
Conversely, different populations of bacteria produce different kinds of soil environments conducive to different kinds of plants. Both plants and bacteria ask for and encourage specific partners. They choose those they wish for companions.
The length of the roots on any given plant, laid end to end, would be hundreds of miles long. If you include the tiny “root hairs”—very thin projections from the roots that allow plants to absorb more water and nutrients from the soil—the total length may be measured in tens of thousands of kilometers. Even so, plants still need help from their microbial neighbors to be healthy and get all of their required nutrients.
In some cases bacteria and plants have such a cozy relationship that the bacteria will actually take up residence inside a plant’s roots. In legumes (the family of plants including peas, beans, peanuts, alfalfa, and clover) tiny nodules form to house symbiotic bacteria, which “fix” nitrogen for the plants. This is because nitrogen (N2) in the air cannot be used by plants. But bacteria can convert gaseous nitrogen into compounds like ammonium (NH4+) that plants can use. The bacteria get food and housing, and the plant gets the nitrogen it needs to grow and thrive. And when that plant dies or sheds leaves, the nitrogen in its body is given to the soil for other plants (like those without nitrogen-fixing bacteria) to use.
Even those bacteria who don’t actively fix nitrogen take up nitrogen in their bodies and keep it from turning back into a gas and leaving the soil. Similarly, many minerals are taken up into the bodies of soil microorganisms: this is called the “immobilization” of nutrients. If those minerals which are dissolved in water in the soil aren’t taken up by plants or other creatures, they will be washed away into rivers or deep into the subsoil where fewer creatures live. Immobilization helps to keep nutrients available in the soil for many different creatures.
Bacteria help plants in plenty of other ways as well. Many bacteria are even capable of breaking down pollutants or pesticides in the soil. Beneficial bacteria on a plant’s roots will also “out compete” other pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria by taking up all of the available space. When beneficial bacteria are killed there is a niche for pathogenic bacteria to move in to, which is what happens to humans in cases like “thrush” (a yeast infection in the mouth) or a C. difficile infection (an intestinal infection that slips in once antibiotics have killed off the natural microorganisms).
These mutually beneficial relationships in the soil aren’t limited to the partnership between plants and bacteria, of course. Fungi also form many essential relationships in forest soils. And insects and earthworms also help by breaking down organic matter and tunneling through the soil to produce channels for the movement of water and air. Plants need air to reach their roots—although they breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen at the leaves, their roots must breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Just like us, roots die without oxygen.
Now at last to the antibiotics. The antibiotics cipro and levaquin are both “broad-spectrum” antibiotics, meaning that instead of targeting any specific type or family of bacteria, they have an effect on a wide variety of different families and species. A significant amount of both cipro and levaquin passes through the body into urine and feces.
5 In the case of cipro, some 20 to 35 percent of any given dose will pass through and out of the digestive tract in full-strength unmetabolized form. This allows it to pass into the soil.
The essential point of all the discussion above is that a community of plants cannot grow and thrive without a community of bacteria in the soil.
6 The broad-spectrum antibiotics I was taking killed the bacteria in, on, and around the roots of the grass. That unraveled the many tight and mutually beneficial relationships the grasses depend on—and in this case it killed them.