Option 2: Ass what you can doo for your country.
SQUEEZE YOUR PEACE!
A (com)posting about Gabe's urban HUMANURE experiment! Butt first, a little back-ground:
- Humanure composting is the name given to describe the thermophilic (hot) composting of human excreta, kitchen and garden scraps, and a local and readily available carbonaceous material (straw, sawdust, leaves, newspaper). It is NOT the throwing of raw human excrement onto fields. It is NOT the mouldering (cold) composting process that most conventional composting toilets use. It IS composting in a thermophilic way: releasing the latent thermophilic bacteria that lives in everyone's excreta by using the proper ratios of "greens" (human extreta, kitchen and garden scraps) to "browns" (carbonaceous material), achieving temperatures that kill all harmful pathogens and bacteria, letting the pile 'season' for a year, and producing the most nutrient-rich, 100% safe, pathogen-free garden soil you could possibly ask for.
- Groundwater use in the US exceeds replacement rates by 21 billion gallons a day. Americans use three times as much water as everyone else in the world while 1.2 billion people lack access to fresh water. UN: "Water shortages will cause wars in the 21st Century."
- We believe it is civilized to shit in drinking water. However, there's not enough water on earth for the entire world to adopt the civilized practice of defecating in water and then treating it. The practice is unsustainable.
- We dump 3.619 trillion gallons of polluted sewage water into US coastal waterways each year. 7 million Americans get sick each year from swallowing it.
- The US is losing topsoil about 18 times faster than the soil formation rate. Worldwide only 42 to 84 years of topsoil remains. Both North Africa and what is now the Saharan Desert used to grow food, but both were de-forested and over-farmed without compost (the same agricultural model that we implement).
- To keep the nutrient-depleted topsoil producing we manufacture 140 million tons of chemical fertilizers a year: the #1 source of water pollution.
- Sewage plants (and city drinking water plants) "treat" all water with a chemical not found in nature called Chlorine. Chlorine is known to cause severe memory problems, stunted growth, reproductive problems, cancer, and death in mammals. Over 10,000 cases of cancer each year are directly caused by consumption of chlorinated drinking water. Our culture justifies its use by citing no alternative.
- The process of composting humanure and applying it to agricultural land solves both the problem of sewage-pollution and of diminishing topsoil!
find out MORE!
- www.JenkinsPublishing.com - Here is the whole process laid out plain on the website for the coolest shit expert on earth: Mr. Joseph Jenkins, author of the acclaimed Humanure Handbook (which I own and highly rectal-mend)
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THE URBAN PREDICAMENT:
I've wanted to compost humanure in my own backyard ever since I first studied it and experienced it firsthand while volunteering on organic farms in N. Carolina and California. What always stopped me was the simple fact that I had no backyard!
THE POOR URBAN ARTIST'S CHALLENGES TO COMPOSTING HUMANURE:
1) PERMANENCE: I’m a renter and I constantly live under the threat of having to pick up again and move all my stuff (whether because rent gets raised, or because the housemate downstairs who got addicted to heroin has started to light things on fire and throw paints at me). Given that a humanure compost pile usually takes about a year to build, then needs an additional year to chill-out undisturbed, the conflict becomes clear: how can I provide a stable environment for my humanure pile for at least 2 years (I feel like I’m talking about a pet dog. I guess both are warm and smell sort of funny from time to time) when I can’t even provide a stable environment for my urban self!
2) PORTABILITY: When I move next, since neither leaving the work of my behind behind (serious fines from the landlord and the city), nor throwing it in the garbage (bad karma from earth) are cool options, I need to be able to take my pile with me! How could I relocate my compost pile to wherever I moved to? Since I don’t own a car or truck, and neither do any of my close friends (god bless their car-less ways!), and I’d rather do just about anything then drive a car full of shit around, I have to think about being able to transport all that I own via Xtracycle longbikes at any given moment. How could I transport my compost pile on an Xtracycle?
3) COMMUNITY: To do humanure composting in a city you have to have community support or else be sneaky as hell. Though I live in a Latino musician's collective (see picture of me as a vato fiddler) and we're technically supposed to be all about "the revolution," as Abbie Hoffman pointed out: “hanging up Che Guevarra posters and smoking pot doesn’t make you a revolutionary.” It's pretty likely that at least some of my housemates won't enjoy the idea of putting up with more and more of my crap so-to-speak... My neighbors, who can easily see onto our back patio, are decent Tide with Bleach-washing city folk who'd freak out if they found out (or even slightly sniffed) what I was doing and where I was putting it. After they called the cops and I got fined, the cops’d take away my warm little humanure pile in a scary truck, the sanitation men in uniforms would kill (“cleanse”) it in the chemical chambers, and when they were sure it was dead, they’d dump its remains into the San Francisco bay like they do with the rest of the city scum. Yikes! Frankly, maybe I should buy my humanure a diary and hide it in the attic…4) LAND: Compost piles need land to sit on. The problem for me is that the closest bit of exposed earth (not covered by concrete or asphalt) to me is the public park 3 blocks away. Beyond that, the only space on this planet earth that I legally have any jurisdiction over, like many urbanites, consists of only the small concrete patio area where we keep our trash, recycling, and green-waste bins.
SOME SOLUTIONS:
Taking on the challenges one by one has revealed interesting, and always comical, solutions to overcoming humanure hardship.
1) Permanence: I can't do much about this one except have a temporary storage space for when I'm finding a new place. My thought at this point is that if I have to move suddenly and need a temporary place to store my stuff, I can always store my compost bin in a self-storage unit with all my other possessions for $30 a month. If I'm going out of the country for a year or more, I have friends at the local community garden who said I could leave my bin there with a padlock on it until I got back.
I solved #'s 2, 4, and part of 3 by realizing that a standard city garbage bin was my answer. With it's wheels I can rope it onto the back of my bike and haul it around. With it's inconspicuous and dirty reputation, a garbage bin won't draw the attention or undue curiosity of anybody in my community, provided I can keep the smell down. Given that the only piece of land I have jurisdiction over is the cement patio where the garbage bins are stored, what else could I store it in, but a garbage bin!?
EXPROPRIATED BY ALIENS:
Noun 1. Expropriation - taking out of an owner's hands (especially taking property by public authority).
With public authority, I expropriated a garbage bin from a Walgreens who I (and common sense) figured could deal for a day without a bin. I left them this message in place of their bin:
“Your compost bin has been abducted by aliens from the planet under this paved one, who will conduct experiments on it for the sake of science. Be comforted by the knowledge that our science will one day save this planet. You can call 415-330-1300 (NorCal waste) to get another one for free. Warmest Regards. (geek victory #634)”
THE SMELL:
3) Community: making sure my community was cool with it had a LOT to do with smell control.
Some of you have heard the story of the infamous "poo suitcase" that I used on my houseboat Gypsy, and how a whole office building was shut down for a week from the smell that was left in their bathroom after I'd flushed the contents of the poo suitcase down their toilet (they thought it'd been a terrorist threat... seriously). The last thing I wanted was the NYPD to come out again, and this time all the way out to San Francisco...
What I didn't know then was that to keep your shit from smelling, you have to have a LOT of carbonaceous material mixed in with it. The way nature lets you know that you need more carbonaceous material in your humanure is by smelling. Smelling is evidence of an anaerobic process - that is, the humanure not getting any oxygen and turning into a liquidy putrid sludge. Carbonaceous material (leaves, straw, sawdust) keeps the pile fluffy and aerobic and not smelling. How much carbonaceous material to put in your pile is simple: if it smells, put in more.
NO SAWDUST IN SF:
The Humanure Handbook recommends that you use a carbonaceous material that's local and readily available. The author uses sawdust, getting a truckload delivered to his New England farm every year.
In the heart of San Francisco, where there is no straw, no usable sawdust (all the local carpentry shops use chemically treated and kiln dried wood), and no Fall season that produces leaves, I thought for a moment that I'd run into a problem.
The answer however, is simple enough: what carbonaceous material do cities have TONS of - that blows down the sidewalks and gutters, and is replenished every single day? The answer is excess newspaper and cardboard. Now, I haven't yet figured out a way to simply and cheaply shred cardboard (although finely shredded cardboard would make SUCH good carbonaceous material) but newspaper's easy to tear with my hands, easy to carry on my bike, and it's fun to shit and piss on it when there's a politician, advertisement, or 'scare story' staring at me from inside my bucket!
So far, my compost bin doesn't smell AT ALL, even if you're standing right next to it! What I do is, after I pee or poo into my 5-gallon bucket, I tear up 2-4 issues of the San Francisco Chronicle and throw it on top. After my bucket gets full I carry it downstairs to the expropriated garbage bin/ now compost bin, and dump it in. Then I tear up about 10 SF Chronicles and throw that on top, like a fresh falling of leaves in the forest.
WHAT'S-HIS-BUCKET?
My toilet set-up is ultra simple and also lends itself to low odor. I went to the hardware store and bought a new 5 gallon bucket with a leak-proof lid for $10. Then I went to the salvaged building supply store and bought a toilet seat for $3. I put a covering of 2-4 SF Chronicles at the bottom of a fresh bucket, then I put the lid on top, and I place the bucket next to the conventional toilet in the bathroom upstairs (the closest bathroom to my tent on the roof). When I need to excrete, I just take the leak-proof lid off and do my thing, putting the toilet seat on top of the bucket if I have to poo. After I'm done, I throw my toilet paper into the toilet and then rip up 2-4 SF Chrons and throw those in. Then I replace the leak-proof lid.
After I've filled a bucket (about a week) I walk it down to my compost bin and dump it. I then use a toilet brush, some eco-cleaner, 
and just the slightest bit of hose water to clean the bucket as best as I can. It's important to dump the resulting sudsy graywater into the compost pile and not outside on the sidewalk, as doing so would pollute the environment. I've found that leaving my bucket filled for too many days and not dumping it results in stronger odors and makes it harder to clean the smell out later (the bucket is only plastic after all, not stainless steel).
My housemates have actually started warming up to the idea of Humanure. In fact, my housemate Israel borrowed the Humanure Handbook from me and is currently poring through it in the other room (they've yet to try it however). My girlfriend Sonya has peed in the bucket a couple times and is working up her comfortability gradually. I haven't had any neighbor or house-visitor complaints about smell or unsightliness. In fact, I've been surprised at the positive reception I've gotten from just about everybody I've told about it.
I remember what it was like to poo when I was my nephew Pace's age. It always made me want to sing, sitting on that smooth white donut with my pants pulled down and feeling the wonderful release of a bowel movement. I thought I'd lost that joy forever. But now, Ah, now I feel I've rediscovered what it means to poop with joy. Now every time I do it I feel like I'm linked-in again to the planet, my home - and the innocence, and the redemption that comes when one participates in the great interdependent symphony of life. (*fart*)
Who knew that saving the planet could be so
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