LifeCycling
  • Home
    • Bio
    • Festival - Imbolc >
      • Imbolc 2018
    • New Articles >
      • Living Off the Land
      • If We Could Just Get Rid of That 'Thing'
      • Follow the Resources
      • Can Capitalism and Socialism Unite for Our Future
      • An Introspective Look at Physical Education
      • Hitchhiking - The Wave of the Future?
      • Kinetic and Potential Energy and Living a Low Cost Lifestyle
      • A Change of Pace
      • Risky Business
      • Exponential Growth: A Blessing or Downfall
  • Traveling by Bicycle or Backpacking
    • Part 1 - The Great Allegheny Passage
    • Part 2 - The C and O Canal
    • Bike Trip Across the Southern Tier >
      • Chapter 1 - California
      • Chapter 2 - Arizona
      • Chapter 3 New Mexico
      • Chapter 4 - Texas-El Paso to Del Rio
      • Chapter 5 Texas-Del Rio to Austin
      • Chapter 6 Texas - Austin to Louisiana
      • Chapter 7 - Louisiana
      • Chapter 8 Mississippi and Alabama
      • Chapter 9 Florida
      • Chapter 10 The Ride Home
      • Our Nashville to New Orleans Trip: Part 1
      • Our Nashville to New Orleans Trip: Part 2
    • Traveling with Backpacks in Ireland and Scotland >
      • Irish Wedding
      • Our Travels In Ireland
      • Moving on to Scotland
      • The Isle of Eigg
      • Highlands and Northeast Scotland
      • Catterline, the Last Leg of Our Trip
    • Hitch Biking
  • Applying Sustainability
    • The True Foundation of Building >
      • The History of the Yurt >
        • Chapter 1
        • Chapter 2
        • Chapter 3
        • Chapter 4
        • Chapter 5
        • Chapter 6
        • Chapter 7
        • Chapter 8
        • A Visit to Our House
    • Education >
      • Let Simple Machines Do The Work
      • Work, Play and Carbon Sequestering
      • Eighth Graders Stack Functions While Building a Stone Wall
      • Footwear, the Foundation of Our Children's Future
      • Movement Education Part 1
      • Movement Education Part 2
    • Education Part 2 >
      • Waldorf School Eighth Grade of 2014 - Building a Hot Water Solar Panel
      • Volunteers for Peace, Part 1 - Hand Hewing and Building a Foundation
      • Volunteers for Peace, Part 2 - Timber-framing and Plastering with Clay
      • Building A Passive Refrigerator
    • Education Part 3 >
      • The Educational Divide
      • Changing the World Through Observation
      • Best of Both Worlds
      • Why Are They Playing With Strings? Shouldn't They Be Working On Mathematics?
    • Passive Water System
    • Holistic Gardening and Landscaping
    • Humanure and Urine >
      • Urine As A Fertilizer
      • Is Composting Human Waste Possible?
  • Principles of Sustainability
    • Paradigm Shift >
      • The Forward Progress of Technology?
      • Moving Towards a New Paradigm?
      • Immovable Belief
      • The Future or Not the Future?
      • Paradigm, Past, Present and Future
      • From Parasitism to Mututalism
      • Old Ideas, New Intentions
      • Freedom to Choose
      • Law of Diminishing Returns
    • Paradigm Shift Part 2 >
      • Intro to Throughput
      • Throughput: An Illustration
      • Argument for a Low Throughput Society
      • Throughput in Action
      • The Culture of Permaculture
      • Cliff Notes on Sustainability
    • Philosophy >
      • Are We Free?
      • Lucifer and Ahriman's Tug of War
      • The Age of the Will
      • Thinking, Feeling, and Willing - A Real Balancing Act
      • The Age of the Consciousness Soul
      • The Paradigm-Etheric Connection
    • Understanding Exponential Growth
    • Environmental Challenges >
      • Environmental Effects of the Clothing Industry
    • Economy >
      • Economy - Part 1
      • Economy - Part 2
      • Economy - Part 3
      • Economy - Part 4
    • Photos & Videos
Picture

Is Composting Human Waste Possible?

                 I’m 65 years old and have seen technological advancements that have been truly amazing.  The list includes; landing on the moon and exploring the outer reaches of our solar system with unmanned space crafts, organ transplants, cloning, and gene splicing.  When talking about composting human feces however, it is only possible with individuals or small groups of like minded people.  Is this really impossible, or is it the culture that cannot see the possibility? 
                The reasons to seriously explore this are mounting.  Just taking one example of many, California, which is responsible for a good portion of our food supply, has been in a drought for years.  Instead of building the carbon content and fertility of the soil so it can hold water while lessens the need for irrigation, we continue to use our limited fresh water to flush and purify this valuable resource  (for more information see Humamanure and Urine).
               
Wendell Berry captures the picture of our culture
  in his forward of The Toilet Papers by Sim Van der Ryn.
              "If I urinated and defecated into a pitcher of drinking waazy.  If I invented expensive technology to put my urine and feces into my drinking water, and then invented another expensive (and undependable) technology to make the same water fit to drink, I might be thought even crazier.  It is not inconceivable that some psychiatrist would ask me knowingly why I wanted to mess up my drinking water in the first place.
The “sane” solution, very likely, would be to have me urinate and defecate into a flush toilet, from which the waste would be carried through expensive sewage works which would supposedly treat it and pour it into the river from which the town downstream would pump it, further purify it, and use it for drinking water.
Private madness, by the ratification of a lot of expense and engineering, thus becomes public sanity.
The composting toilet springs from an elementary insight:  it is possible to quit putting our so called bodily wastes where they don’t belong (in the water) and start putting them where they belong (on the land).  When waste is used, a liability becomes an asset, and the very concept of waste disappears.  This of course, is the commonest of common sense."
WendellBerry
Proudly powered by Weebly