PUTNEY — Before the excavators came, before the house was built, before the septic system was installed, there was a yurt and an outhouse and a Loveable Loo.
Instead of a hole under the outhouse, my partner Alison set up a humanure system with sawdust, five-gallon plastic buckets, and an above-ground structure built out of wooden palettes and insulated with hay bales.
The sawdust didn't just temper the smell in the outhouse; it contributed carbon-rich material to balance the nutrient-rich humanure. The hay bales didn't just insulate the compost bin, they provided a filtration system that kept any seepage clean.
We monitored the decomposition process using a long stick thermometer. Even in freezing weather, the center of the compost remained warm. In spring, it rebounded to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to kill dangerous bacteria.
Explaining our waste system to visitors took a little finesse. While all appreciated the moon-themed art hanging in the outhouse and how the loo smelled like a freshly cleaned stall, visitors were divided on the sanity of keeping our poo for future use.
Most visitors were happy to have the explanation end at the outhouse. Only back-to-the-landers and apocalypse-anticipators approached the stack of hay bales with eagerness.
“No stinky runoff!” they observed with admiration. “When will you use it for fertilizer?”
“Two years,” we explained, “And only on fruit trees and shrubs.”
* * *
Before the chickens and the ducks and the goat with her babies, the only manure-producing creatures on the premises were the ladies of the yurt.
For more than eight months, “barn chores” consisted of cleaning out our own waste and preparing the buckets for fresh installments. We were farmers who were also livestock, manure-makers who engaged in animal husbandry. It was a small, intimate cycle, entirely suitable for a couple of lesbians in a 20-foot yurt.
But then the earth-moving machinery arrived and a half-mound septic system made the outhouse superfluous.
We moved out of the yurt and into the little house on the hill. I insisted that I would stay put, encircled by the soft lines of the yurt, but a daughter and her boyfriend had other plans for its use.
Alison insisted that she would boycott the flush-toilet and continue the noble life of a manure producer, but by the following winter the convenience of indoor plumbing was too seductive.
We did barn chores for the daughter and her boyfriend until they, too, built their own little house on the hill, with their two flush toilets connected to the half-mound system.
Two years into the project, the only creatures using the outhouse were the voles and mice.
* * *
From a systems perspective, our move to indoor plumbing was a step in the wrong direction.
The flush toilets broke the link between soil fertility and human waste. We ate, we drank, and all those precious nutrients went deep into the mound between the two houses where it was inaccessible to any wheelbarrow.
Still, we had our goats and their chocolate-brown pellets and the poultry and their gooey mess. While the chickens did a good job of creating rich compost, the pile of goat manure mixed with wood shavings wasn't as wet as the material collected in the Loveable Loo. We now need a hose to get the bacteria excited enough to raise the temperature. In the past, all we had to do was pee.
The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro is exploring ways to bring urine back in the food nutrient cycle. Urine, they explain, “is a powerful and renewable fertilizer that is storable, transportable, and local.
The organization is developing toilets that divert the urine flow to fancier five-gallon buckets and is encouraging more of us to carry our pee to farmlands.
A precious product that had been languishing in wastewater treatment system will now improve the fertility of a Brattleboro farmer's soil.
A cornerstone of our food system will no longer be rejected.
* * *
Which makes me wonder why human waste has been such a taboo topic.
Besides the legitimate concerns that improperly handled human feces can cause cholera outbreaks and contaminate water supplies - both of which can be addressed using simple technology (buckets, hay bales, sawdust) - the level of concern about pee and poo borders on the irrational. Why would we develop expensive wastewater treatment systems when a cheaper method is readily available?
My sense is that, like other irrational fears such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, fear of humanure stems from a disturbing notion that we aren't as different from a perceived lower class of citizens as we had hoped. If our waste can be put to agricultural uses, then what distinguishes us from livestock?
A few minutes pondering that question, and a person might reasonably worry that maybe the goat produces a better sort of poo. How's that for a blow to the ego?
Here we face the big problem of being human: we are bedeviled with feelings of inadequacy, which we hope to ameliorate by imagining ourselves to be better than someone else.
For white supremacists, inadequacy is addressed through racism; for we moderns, inadequacy is addressed through flush toilets. If I don't investigate the product of my bowels, then I won't have to compare its worth to that of my chickens.
It takes a mature soul to get beyond one's irrational beliefs, a soul willing to go without the consolation of social superiorities. We found those eight months of doing barn chores with the five-gallon buckets demanded just that sort of maturity.
Luckily, most of us had those sensibilities when we were five years old, before we learned the necessity of believing we were better than a goat. Back then, we were infinitely curious about what the world contained and what our bodies could do. Back then, we were makers of strange sounds and things that went plop in the john.
That kind of curiosity restores self-esteem as effectively as poop builds soil.
These are our gifts, readily available. It's only the foolish side of declaring ourselves grown up that gets in the way.