Giving a crap about crap

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sanitation, human waste

I know the Rose George would prefer that I use the word s**t rather than crap, but I simply can't do it. Ms George's new book about crap, which uses the s-word quite consistently, is The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. To anyone reading this: if it is lunchtime, you may do well to finish eating and take a little stroll before reading further.

What we do, or fail to do, about crap is a measure of civilization. After reading the book, I'd say it is an accurate and quantitative measure. Perhaps it is no surprise that the numbers are falling, not rising. Today's figure: 40% of the human race—that is 2.6 billion people—have no toilet facilities whatever. A term I've heard applied to primitive childbirth is more appropriate to the daily experience of half of humanity: when the urge comes, squat and drop it.

I typically really savor a well-written book; the longer, the better. In this case, I found myself wishing it would all be over. It takes 238 pages of reading to get to the end notes. In the ten chapters, we get a continent-by-continent tour of what is being done to improve sanitation. Again and again, we find the ironic fact that there is often a ministry of water, and often one of water quality, yet there is hardly a nod in the direction of what one does with used water or used food. The keenest measure of water quality is whether you can keep the crap out of it. For most people, to date, it isn't being done.

Indian activist Joe Madiath is able to get people to help themselves by igniting the disgust factor. He leads them to see what they don't see, the amount of feces lying about, an ignored "feature" of their landscape. He leads them to calculate, step by step, the amount produced daily in their village, the various ways it migrates into the air, the food supply, and the water supply. Finally, they conclude, "Each of us is eating 10 grams of crap daily! Not just our own, ten grams of our neighbors' crap!!" At that point, a tipping point is often (not always) reached, and the people of a village will band together to build effective latrines (or build better ones if theyv'e had poor ones), and socially enforce 100% compliance with their use. Once they "get it" that a single open defecator contaminates the environment of everyone, they get genuinely serious about cleaning up the place and keeping it clean.

But progress is slow. Tradition, particularly a tradition as convenient as squat-n-drop-it, is strong. Joe Madiath's grassroots initiative is one of several that might transform India over a century or more, but that is quick compared to government top-down initiatives. The other country as large as India, China, has had more success than anyone else with top-down imposition, but only locally. The fact that one of those localities is Beijing owes most to the Olympic aspirations of the nation. The small successes of China, great though they are compared to almost everywhere else, derive from one factor: Mao instigated them. What he said was what was done, for thirty years, and to some extent, still is.

Even as such slow measures are going on, the "first world" is falling back. Major cities are closing public toilets, finding them harder and harder to maintain. It has been a long time since I saw a public, truly public government-owned, toilet facility (our Americanisms "restroom" and "bathroom" are so wimpy). When I am out and about and need "facilities", where do I go? I have my short list of stores and fast-food joints that have clean toilets I can use, either freely or for the bribe of buying a soda. At least the businesses know it is good business to care for their customers.

The hardest cultures to sanitize are those with little water. Our Western "civilization", built as it is upon the flush toilet, simply cannot be imposed on a place which doesn't have a gallon of water with which to flush every pee, or two gallons to flush every defecation. Various pit composting methods are a requirement, and the jury is still out, whether enough people will be inventive enough to produce products and methods that are cheap enough, and simple enough, and safe enough, for the poorest people in dry places. Yet, as both China and India have shown for centuries, composted crap is a helpful fertilizer, and using it as such saves huge amounts of water.

India is one of the "wet" cultures, meaning that they use a little water to clean up, rather than dry paper as used in "dry" cultures. There is a whole chapter on this. The author mentions several habits of her own that she has changed after researching the book. Whether she, a denizen of a "dry" culture, has become a "wet" is not stated, even though she expresses profound disgust at the way dry paper is used to clean the filthiest part of the body. Let me take a personal digression.

I compromise. I grew up "dry". After cancer surgery that removed half my colon, I became a member of the four-times-a-day club. There isn't enough colon to reliably dry the chyme my small bowel produces and make it into suitably solid turds. Some days are almost as "normal" as my before-operation condition. But usually, it is like having chronic mild diarrhea—and some days I am a fire hose! That stuff is sticky. Dry paper just won't get it off, and I really hate cleaning skid marks off my undershorts. So I began to use baby wipes. Things developed over time; eight years have passed. Nowadays I carry a small pack of moist, flushable wipes. I first wipe two or three times with folded, dry paper. Then I fold a moist wipe once, wipe, fold it and use the fresh surface to wipe a second time. That is usually enough, but sometimes I use a second wipe. Then a bit of drying with some of the dry paper gets me ready to pull up my shorts and get out of there. Even on days when my bowel is behaving very well, this cleans me better than any possible method using only dry paper. P.S. There are flushable wipes made for adults, but they are hard to find and cost four times as much as flushable baby wipes. I'm not proud.

I wonder if environmentalists will ever wake up to the crap situation. It is amazing how much water we waste with our "flushing civilization". Raw waste is too dangerous to put on crops (don't eat salads in China). But properly composted waste is another story. Though some people oppose its use, and it is outlawed in most Western countries, it is a fine fertilizer. By contrast, "sludge" made from composted wastewater solids is too often contaminated by chemicals that have not necessarily passed through humans on their way to the sewage plant. Sludge is also not usually composted sufficiently to destroy all pathogens. Though it is often legal to use on crops, many people oppose its use, and a number of lawsuits have been won by people claiming to have been harmed.

The human race is a work in progress. What we do with our waste stamps us. If there is a galactic civilization out there, I suspect we are labeled, "A civilization in infancy, with slender promise of maturing".