POO

Our summer house in Wisconsin did not have indoor plumbing until I was about 10. I remember once, I must have been 5ish, going out to the outhouse in the middle of the night and being stuck in there because a black bear was wandering about. The weird thing is that the outhouse only had a screen door on it….so I clearly remember watching the bear for a good amount of time and thinking “if it realizes that this is just a screen door, I’m dead”. I brought this up with my mother many years later and she said that I made that up. Maybe—but it is very vivid in my mind. I remember everything about the encounter down to the fact that I was barefoot [yeah, gross] and quite cold.

I just finished the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. It’s so good. It was recommended to me while I was at the Azhen Sanctuary retreat in August. Same old same old about how humans take nature and f#ck it up. Our current waste systems takes clean water, pollutes it with our waste, and then cleans it with chemicals that kill the natural organic materials which should be used for compost. Of course it’s more complicated than that, but the bottom line is that in the past 150-200 years we’ve flipped the script on natural processes. Our current systems produce less energy than they consume…which is not sustainable.

While at Azhen they taught us how they built and use their Humanure system. Their land has no zoning restrictions so it is a legal solution for them—and much better for the environment.

The solution I will be testing on my land is the HomeBiogas system. Your waste goes into a large container and bacteria turns it into methane gas and garden tea. The gas is used on a special stove for cooking! Complete circular and 100% renewable energy! Poop gas.