If civilization were to end tomorrow, we'd find ourselves overflowing with shit two weeks later. In this excerpt, Mr. Jenkins discusses that, and introduces us to the idea of human manure composting.

As I was writing the second edition of Humanure, I got a phone call from a fellow who was working on a national Community Disaster Preparedness Manual, a project with a federal mandate and federal funding. This project was precipitated by the concerns surrounding the "Y2K" (Year 2000) scenario, which was supposed to be

The Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins

fraught with the wholesale collapse of civilization due to pervasive computer design flaws. Computers would not be able to recognize the beginning of the new century and would just crash. This could result in wide-ranging and possibly prolonged disruptions of electrical, water, food, and fuel supplies, among other things. Or so we were warned.

The authors of this manual had to assume these disruptions could occur for two days, two weeks, or even two months, and the manual had to include instructions for all three of these contingencies.

The people working on this problem seemed to be able to come up with stop-gap solutions for every potential obstacle: food shortages (food can be stored), fuel shortages (wood or kerosene stoves can be used as backup heaters), or no lights (candles would work). There was one problem, however, for which no solution could be found. In fact, the fellow on the phone confided that they were considering abandoning the project altogether, because, in the words of many experts in the field, "it can't be done."

What exactly was this impossible problem, you may wonder? In a word -- sewage. What do you do when the toilets won't flush? What happens when the water doesn't pump and the drains don't drain? Conveniences like flush toilets are totally dependent upon the electrical grid and completely reliant on a constant water supply. When the electricity is out and water is unavailable, how do you flush a toilet? Answer -- you don't.

When this question was posed to the professionals in the field -- wastewater treatment managers, waste management people, and sewage experts, they all drew a blank. One suggested that gravity drains would still work; sewage could be dumped down those drains, eventually reaching a wastewater treatment plant. It could then be heavily chlorinated before being discharged directly into the environment. He admitted this would only work for about two weeks until the chlorine supply ran out, after which the sewage would be released directly into surface waters, totally untreated. He also admitted that wastewater treatment plants only keep about a two week supply of chlorine because it is such a dangerous chemical. After two weeks, in a disaster scenario, raw sewage would be dumped into the environment -- a situation that usually precedes the spread of deadly epidemic diseases.

Two things came to mind when I talked to the disaster-manual fellow. First, people need to realize that life as we know it won't continue forever. The environmental repercussions of our consumptive, throw-away lifestyles may catch up to us sooner than we think. Computers crashing may look like a Girl Scout picnic compared to global climate changes, cancer, new epidemics, and other calamities that can now be directly linked to our excesses. People also need to realize how fragile their lifestyles are, hanging by a thinner thread than they can imagine. Some power outages and food/fuel shortages could be a wake-up call for many.

Second, I never cease to be amazed at how thoroughly our society has ignored any constructive alternatives to sewage. We've put all our eggs in the flush toilet basket, and when the toilets won't flush, we're clueless. Ironically, it's this squeamish refusal to look at our own excrement that makes it such a threat to our health and safety. If we can't flush it, since we've developed few alternatives, we just dump it. This is a big mistake, not only because we're discarding valuable organic resource materials, but also because we're polluting our environment in the process, perhaps dangerously so.

So I told the disaster-manual fellow that two five gallon buckets and a large bag of peat moss or sawdust will make an emergency toilet for one person for two weeks. If a compost bin and a steady supply of sawdust or peat is available, that toilet could last indefinitely. With proper oversight and management, that person could be in a Chicago high-rise or in a Boston suburb. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The point is that we don't know how to deal with human excrement because we don't see it for what it is. It's not a waste material, it's a resource material. When we see it as a resource, we can understand how to recycle it. When we adamantly insist upon seeing it only as a waste material, we're painting ourselves into a corner. By believing we have to dispose of that waste, we burden ourselves with an increasingly impossible challenge.

To learn more about humanure composting, and to read more of The Humanure Handbook, visit the humanure website.