(image via brianfey)
Goooood Morning SuperForest!
I poop in a hole in the ground. So do you. The difference between our holes is that mine is dry and composts directly into the earth, and yours has water running through it and leads into a series of pipes before it empties into the ocean.
When I moved back to Kauai and was living at the first incarnation of Zero One, I used a conventional flush toilet. It was stinky. It ran unless you jiggled the handle. It got stopped up from time to time and needed plunging. It was a pain in the rump. A stinky, nasty, needs to be scrubbed, pain in the rump. Also, sitting to poop instead of squatting straight up inflamed my roids. There, I said it.
One day, Mama Mea, in all her pregnant glory, dug a hole at the back edge of the property. It wasn’t a very big hole, maybe two and a half feet square? She built a wooden box with a nice fitted lid and she painted it and set it atop the hole. This became tree machine version one.
I found myself going out to the hole to do my thing more and more, using the inside toilet less and less. It was so much nicer. No lingering stinkyness, no overflowing, no need to scrub the beast, just do your thing, sprinkle some wood chips on top to keep the flies away, replace the lid, and walk away.
This made sense to me. I keep my tooth brush in the bathroom, why would I want to poop in the same room as my toothbrush? Furthermore, why would I poop so near the kitchen? Why poop inside the house at all? Any Japanese person would read this and go: of course, silly, we figured that out like a thousand years ago.
The tree machine, as we lovingly referred to our composting pit latrine, became an indispensable part of life at Zero One. There were quite a few of us living there, staying there, or just passing through. To have had all of those people using the same indoor toilet would’ve been funky. So I became the de facto tree machine wrangler. I would watch as the hole gradually filled up, and when it was nearly full, I would cover it with fill dirt and plant a papaya seedling on the top. Then I would dig a new hole and drag the cover over to it.
Here, I’ll just say it for you: EWWWWWWWWW!!!!! OMG! Gross! What about diseases? What about touching poo? What about infection and cholera and typhoid and your poo going into the water table?!
Here’s what I learned: The chances of you picking up a nasty bug from a conventional toilet are much higher. People have this false sense that toilets are clean because they are white, and have perfumes and deodorizers sprayed on them, and have clean water running through them. A well tended composting pit latrine is cleaner, less smelly, uses zero water, will never splash your bum with poo water, will never overflow, and provided that you dig your hole a bare minimum of five feet above the water table and at least fifty feet from a water source, your chances of cross contagion are basically nil. In the tropics, where the air is humid and the days are warm and the soil is still relatively healthy, the average time it takes for soil microflora and fauna to find your poop and start eating it, thereby rendering into rich, beneficial humus is five minutes. Five minutes. Five minutes from poop to compost. That my friends, is a miracle.
The average toilet uses 1.6 gallons of fresh clean drinking water every time it is flushed. Flush a toilet three times a day and you’ve polluted nearly five gallons of water. That’s an Arrowhead bottle. That’s a lot of water. Now, times that five gallons of water by the number of people in the US, which is approximately 312,205,804 and you get the astonishing figure of 1,561,029,020 billion gallons of drinking water pissed and shat in every day. I am very happy to have opted out of such insanity. Furthermore, the energy and infrastructure required to move and handle and process and sterilize and vent all that now waste water is incredible, and too massive a metric to wrap my head around. Now consider all of the toilet related products being sold, created, shipped, put on shelves, bought, used, thrown away, etc. All so that our toilets don’t smell or look like that which they were created to whisk out of our lives.
So what is to be done? How to fix this glitch in our life operating system? How does someone living in a city, or a suburb, or a house with no lawn or garden make moves to compost their own waste responsibly? My answer is, for now, they can’t. I mean, they could, but it would involve far more contact with uncomposted waste than I feel comfortable advocating. It will come down to the private sector. Someone, somewhere will design a building or settlement or habitation where the toilets all compost the waste either as individual units, or by combining the humanure into a larger mass and composting it thusly.
The benefits from switching over to a massive humanure composting system are too many to name. Firstly, think of the water used, which in a composting system is zero. Imagine going from polluting 1.5 billion gallons of drinking water a day to polluting zero gallon a day. It makes a big difference. Then there is the fact that our poo contains a lot of what plants like to eat. Nitrogen, urea, phosphorous, magnesium, iron, proteins, carbohydrates. Plants looooove these compounds and people pay a lot of money to drive to gardening stores and buy them and then take them home and spread them on their trees and plants. So we’re pooping money down the drain. Also, if you’re clever and set the system up right, you can collect the biogas that the microbes exhale as they digest and use it to heat your home, heat water, and cook with.
(image via i-sis.org.uk)
All of this talk might not sit right with you. It may very well upset you. I think I might have an insight into why this is: One of the very first things we are taught as human beings is to poop. Where to poop, when to poop, how to poop. This teaching is a fundamental building block of our operating system. Poop in the wrong place or at the wrong time and face the wrath of your peers. Poop in the nice water filled bowl and you’re a good boy or girl. Pee pee in the potty and you get a smile from mommy!
This fundamental component of our OS is deep rooted and a hard place to challenge without the right idea framework to buttress an objective observation. To challenge the idea that we should and need to poop in our water is practically sacrilege. I understand this. So thank you for listening to me.
I have cleaned many toilets in my life. I have plunged them, scrubbed them, unclogged them. I have examined and adjusted and fixed many a toilet, and I know them well enough to say that they simply don’t work very well. Here’s a post I wrote about toilet hacks from 2008. I believe that in the absence of a responsible system of waste management, our only option is to create one for ourselves. If that means moving out of the city to a place with a bit more space where an outhouse style system is feasible, well, that’s exactly what I did.
Ideally, the bathroom experience would be beautiful. In all ways. It would look nice, smell nice, feel nice, and be totally environmentally responsible. It would make you feel good to use because you knew that it was harming nothing, and adding beneficial nutrients to a system that craved them. In addition the ideal system would have an input for poo and pee on one end, and at the other end a nice little door where you could open and shovel out magically perfectly decomposed and non-gross compost for use on your fruit trees, ornamental plants, and herbs.
At the old Zero One one can see the remnants of the old poo-system we utilized. Just look for the papaya trees. Every time the tree machine moved, a papaya went in the ground. When I visit Zero One version one, I see vibrantly healthy papaya trees dotting the foodscape, each one sitting atop a perfectly composted pit of nutrients, and each one totally stoked to be there. In an ideal system, everything is in its right place and nothing goes to waste.
Our system wasn’t ideal. I had to dig new holes once a month or so, which was hard, sweaty work. Sometimes our peeps would use the hole and not cover up their leavings, so flies would appear. Sometimes people would use the hole barefoot. Sometimes a bit of poo would get on the edge and need scraping off. It was by no means perfect. But it used zero water, served the needs of approximately four hundred people, polluted no water tables, and no one got sick. No one got worms, cholera, typhoid, or an infectious disease of any kind from using the tree machine. AND we planted many new papayas. In contrast to the current flush-and-forget, system, the tree machine was a massive success.
We use the same system now at Zero One. Luckily the holes were already dug when we got there and nice wooden covers already waited for our squatting selves. (Squatting to poo is light years better for your digestive tract than sitting.) It does mean that I get the occasional mosquito bite on my bum, and the occasional raindrop on my head, but it also means that while I’m doing my thing I can look out at my chickens walking by, or look up at the blue sky, and be surrounded by flowers and plants, and know that I am taking full responsibility for my outputs, and am using them to feed trees and create healthier soil. And it never smells. And I never have to plunge it. And it has never once splashed my bum.
To opt out of the consumer lifestyle takes some getting used to, but the results are extraordinary. I feel great. It is a feeling I want to share. Now when I poop into a flush toilet it feel so decadently naughty. Like eating a whole pint of coffee ice cream by yourself. There’s a weird naughty pleasure in it. Take that, conditioning. I’m a good boy and I poop in a hole.
Love to all,
-Jackson
They can live for a long time (
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