The Big Necessity
Author Rose George is joining us this week at TPMCafe for a book club a bit off the normally beaten Cafe path. We'll be discussing her latest book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters. Her excellent book takes a tour of the world's sewage system while addressing the sometimes uncomfortable-- and often controversial-- subject of the global politics of waste.
We've lined up a slew of experts and journalists to discuss along with Rose. Frederick Kaufman, journalist and author of the in-depth sewage study "Wasteland" (Harper's, Feb. 2008); Caroline Snyder, activist and biosolids specialist with the Sierra Club; Vincent Sapienza, assistant commissioner for wastewater operations at New York City's Department of Environmental Protection; Carl Lindstrom, engineer and designer of greywater and composting toilet systems; and Chris Peot, the Biosolids Division Manager with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.
Rose's first post will be up shortly. As she concludes in the introduction to The Big Necessity,
Once I start noticing, I can't stop. And once I start meeting people who work in this world-- who flush its sewers and build its pitlatrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard-- I don't want to. I'd rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity's "wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow." So here goes.
Here goes.















What a crappy topic.
January 6, 2009 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know one thing everyone can do right now to cut down on even more waste than human sewage waste. Largely untreated waste even -- no sewage plants involved. It's polluting our air, poluting our land and water. It's the excrement of farm animals.
Just dairy cows in California, and that's just dairy cows, not meat cows, or pigs or chickens or any other animal, and that's just in California, but just dairy cows in California produce the same amount of waste as 21 million people. Imagine the waste all farm animals produce across this country. We are literally drowning in it.
Al Gore won't talk about it being one of the major causes of global climate change and what you can do about it.
Most environmental groups know about it but don't dare mention it.
The solution is easy really...
Go vegetarian!
January 6, 2009 4:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I live in an area where the predominant means of handling waste is the septic tank. I am always amazed that the topic of the public sewer system to replace these tanks generates no enthusiasm, primarily because of the cost to the homeowner.
January 7, 2009 6:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
What do toilets have to do with healthy food ??? EVERYTHING!
Agri-business became huge after it launched the "green revolution". But it was a fantastic misnomer ... it was in reality entirely a chemical revolution that replaced animal manure with chemical fertilizer. So what ? What's the big difference ? The difference is huge and will impact our health for a long time to come !:
Chemical fertilizer only contains the three principal building blocks for organic matter: N,P,K or nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. The animal manure, however, also contains a large number of nutrients needed in smaller quantities to make food plants nutritious and good tasting. By not replacing those micro-nutrients, we gradually and sometimes quickly, impoverish the soils so they only produce bulk of grain, fruits and vegetable that look good, tastes nothing and almost totally lack nutritious value. The same is sadly true for animals that graze on grass that is chemically fertilized if you wonder why beef also has lost it's taste.
Now huge corporations, like Monsanto, have almost made food production and agriculture a completely chemical affair with pesticides, herbicides, genetically changes seeds to make crops able to stand more herbicides, and only chemical fertilizers ... and still very few people put their foot down because media serves those who pay best for getting the misinformation out and those who can buy advertising space.
Something wrong with this picture ?
As much as this picture has been promoted as "good", the alternatives have been proclaimed as bad, dangerous to health and a way of the past.
Both animal AND human (yes we are animals too) manure is vastly better as plant-nutrient replacement and there are ways to make human excrement into a perfectly safe fertilizer with no risk of spreading human pathogens. See long-term compostinghttp://www.compostera.org
If we used this superior fertilizer in agriculture we would also lower the pollution of rivers, lakes and estuaries since we would return these balanced plant nutrients to agriculture in a clean form instead of using huge quantities of fossil fuels to fabricate chemical fertilizers ... and on top of it we then flush the good fertilizer out with the sewer. Once mixed with all of society's toxic chemicals it is useless as a fertilizer.
Short term there are only a couple of things we can do to get nutritious, good tasting food again: find someone who grows it in a healthy soil with manure fertilizer or grow our own... isn't it sad that it has come to this ?
January 7, 2009 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink