Let’s Talk About Poo

I’m a father, cook, aspiring gardener, animal lover and environmentalist and there’s one thing all these roles have in common: poo.

I spend a lot more of my life managing what we call waste than I would ever have guessed I would as a young man. But let’s talk about poo, waste and paradigm shifts. 

Disgust of course is a useful emotion. We’re often disgusted or afraid to touch things which could do us harm. Like many things which we’re disgusted by it’s also a social taboo. I’ve known people to have a go at talking about taboo subjects openly and it always rang untrue to me. It was always as if we were daring each other not to be embarrassed. I’ve had many of these psychologically contorted chats and I’m done. We don’t need to tell each other how our poos are, it just doesn’t need to be said. Unless it’s a problem or if it’s genuinely hilarious.

That’s the brilliant thing about taboos, they present the ultimate opportunity for juxtaposition. You create tension by approaching a subject which is uncomfortable and release that discomfort all at once with a joke which gives people permission to laugh at the (often) arbitrary silliness of it all. Because it is a bit silly that we don’t want to talk about it. 

Avoid it, certainly. I repeat: I don’t want to know about your poo. Or smell it. But in my experience there’s a great many intriguing or taboo subjects which plain (or worse, academic) discussion can make drier than a British Prohibitionist in the desert. So if we can talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll without getting offended or silly why not faeces? 

Whatever the reason, I think it’s important that we started talking about our poo. And that of other animals. It’s a trapping of modern economic thinking that we get excited about food and avoid talking about what we now call waste. We’ve become so sheltered and embarrassed about a basic bodily function and so loathe to deal with the consequences of our biology that we ignore this step in a naturally cyclic system and treat it as the end of a journey of consumption. As an old roommate of mine used to say of any food: “it’ll make a poo”.

Bizarrely, even our well-founded disgust for the subject is probably a learned behaviour. While it’s true that handling faeces of any kind could transfer potentially harmful microorganisms to the handler’s micro-biome and present a risk of infection, it’s not a given that we find it disgusting. I’ve never personally had the experience (and I’m very grateful for that) of cleaning up a baby or toddler who’s played with their own poo but many parents and caregivers will tell you it’s not just monkeys who’ll throw their poop at you.

At a certain age we learn to be repulsed by poo; we’re told with good reason to avoid it. It seems to me though that we’ve become a little too avoidant. Over the past few years the most prominent poos I’ve had to clean are those of my first child. He wears washable nappies which means no sealing it up and throwing it away for someone else to manage. As an aside, apparently a full third of what we in Australia send to landfill is soiled nappies. It’s great that many of these are now supposedly biodegradable but just imagine the landfill filled at least one third full of used, biodegrading diapers. The primary reason most people use these kinds of nappies of course is convenience and cleanliness.

But like so much in an economy we pretend is linear on a planet of circular ecology, what appears convenient and clean is anything but when we look at the bigger picture. The energy, fossil fuels and generally carbon which go into making, transporting and disposing of all those nappies (not to mention other single use sanitary items like toilet paper and wipes) is difficult to calculate but certainly not clean. It’s polluting our world to have such clean bathrooms. 

And by our world I don’t just mean far off lakes, mountains and beaches. As anyone else present during the Toronto garbage worker strikes in the summer of stink can attest, it isn’t always so convenient to toss everything into bins and hope for the best, either. 

The truth is that the problem is treating our waste as waste. It isn’t. It’s a resource like any other in a circular economy. Any way you spin that wheel, ours and our animal’s ‘waste’ is just as important a step in a healthy ecological cycle as water or sunlight. 

In case it wasn’t clear; poo is where soil comes from. The excrement and decaying bodies of other organisms are rearranged into bio-available organic matter which feed and give support to plants, fungi and even some animals. Even sand, a truly clean kind of soil, is  often composed of the granulated bodies of long-dead sea creatures. 

Most industrial crops and animals are raised on laboratory fertilizer. Instead of receiving their nutrients and structure from the soil they’re fed synthetic NPK made using fossil fuel energy and fossil fuels directly. This doesn’t give plants and the animals who eat those plants everything they need. The plants are mostly water and fibre and the animals who eat those plants are large and unhealthy. It’s not hard to understand that eating an unhealthy plant or animal will make the eater unhealthy. We exist, and in large numbers, but we are starting to see the long term effects of this micronutrient-poor diet. 

Our population has bloated on bloated produce. By some calculations, if it weren’t for the Haber-Bosch process which allows atmospheric nitrogen to be fixed in a lab rather than in soil, some forty percent of humanity wouldn’t be alive today. 

This is particularly striking to me since I spend so much time thinking about our responsibility to each other. Trying to make humanity a more equitable species on the only planet we could hope to thrive on within human timescales is the great challenge of our time. Even climate change, our Great War, might be less of a burden if our population weren’t what it is. Those who were never born wouldn’t suffer and those who were might know a much more stable environment.

So many of our environmental missteps have been the result of industrializing nature and our economy. Seeing the earth as raw materials and human needs, even for comfort and amusement, as a moving target to be never quite satisfied. From what we understand of natural systems, anything sustainable is cyclical. On a human timescale, if we’re to build a society to be proud of, we need to treat our needs as part of a cycle as well. 

And in a cycle, no part is more important than another. 

Already there’s plenty of people who’ve adopted the idea that a little dirt is good for us. The role of our micro-biome plays in who we are is a hot topic and the importance of maintaining this ecosystem through diet and lifestyle is better understood every day. In a race for cleanliness, we’ve gone too far. 

In the past, there was good reason to get rid of our waste as fast and safely as technology afforded. It was shown that our disgust was well-founded. Living in close proximity to excrement made people sick and (relatively) clean water kept us clean. So we built complex systems to allow clean water in, dirty water out and because water is precious we would treat the water and re-use it forever. 

The problem with these systems is that this is an energy and resource intensive way of meeting a need for which nature already (mostly) provided. In most parts of the world, rainwater harvesting and composting toilets are nearly nonexistent despite the fact that these economically free or very affordable ways of maintaining ourselves would at least shift some of the ecological carrying capacity to a sustainable, cyclical system. 

Rain and compost might not provide for everyone. They certainly won’t help maintain the current quality of life many, myself included, now enjoy. But with a few simple tweaks to where the water in our taps comes from and the waste in our toilets goes we could live in a much fairer world. Which is something I for one want to talk about.