Poo

There was an item recently about a "toilet day" in India. (1)  Most of the indian subcontinent we were told uses the great outdoors for toilet facilities.  The use of a flush toilet is not just uncommon, but rare.  Presumably in an effort to reduce contamination of the environment, the government had promoted a toilet day to encourage use of toilets and discourage continued direct use of the natural environment.

It seems to me that one of the ways we have distanced ourselves from the environment is the use of toilets.  There is no question that our voiding habits have changed substantially in the last few hundred years, to the point where we are blind to what happens.  We flush the toilet and immediately forget about our abluted wastes.  As long as the toilet works, we dont worry about it any longer.

It is also true that the cleanliness promoted through the use of toilets has contributed significantly to our health and consequent population growth.  Without clean toilet facilities, we would not have a clean and healthy societal environment.

At the same time there were two other news items that intrigued me.  The first was about the faeces of whales (2), and the second was about the rebirth of savannahs in desert regions of the world through large herding practices (3).

It turns out that the faeces of whales are vital to the healthy ecosystems of the antarctic, and presumably other parts of the world where whales are dominant.  Whales feed at depths where krill occur.  They surface not only to breathe, but also to defecate, a bodily function impossible at the pressures of the deep.  The faeces are not only fed on at the surface, enabling the growth of plancton, but descend gradually to the deep where they fertilize in turn, the growth of krill.  Without this cycling of nutrients, the ecology of the seas would be relatively infertile.

The role of deserts and of grasslands in the world's ecology is subject to some controversy.  A recent TED talk addressed this issue head on: deserts may be deserts only because of our extreme success is eradicating large herds of animals from the world.  When large herds roam over the land, they Are part of a cycle very similar to that of the whales.  They chew up the grass, and they disturb the soil.  They leave behind their waste and move on to other pasture.  Their faeces become the fertilizer that enables the growth of the rich grassland to which sometime later they will return, to feed again, and repeat the cycle.  Without the herds, the cycle does not happen, and the grassland becomes desert.

This has evidently happened to the grasslands of North America, where the loss of the vast herds of bison, has led to the dustbowls and desert conditions of the south west.  It has happened in Africa, and may explain large swathes of the Sahara, where there is certainly evidence of past vibrant civilisations.

Which leads me to wonder about the way in which we distribute our waste.  Are we doing our environment a favour by removing our faeces from local biological ecological recycling?  Should we not be composting and reusing our own waste? (4)  Rather than pumping it all across our cities in vast concrete corridors to be concentrated and dumped in very large volumes into our waterways?

John Crapper did us a favour with his invention.  But we have not done ourselves a favour with the use of sewage works.  We should reconsider how we dispose of our wastes.

1.  World toilet day, November 19th, is celebrated throughout the world, not just India. http://www.un.org/en/events/toiletday/
2.  George Monbiot.  http://www.monbiot.com/2014/12/12/everything-is-connected/
3.  Allan Savory.  http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change?language=en
4.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet