Durable life-style: Cook on poop | 13 comments (13 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Durable life-style: Cook on poop (4.00 / 3)

well it's about time :-) but I do point out that waterless toilets can be done with extremely simple low technology -- sawdust and redworms and time -- and then you don't need the electricity to power the vacuum pump, or to mine the magnesium to add for the chemical processing, or all the fancy plumbing and tankage, or indeed much of anything except some old biomass, worms, a suitable bucket, a comfy seat, and a worm box/compost pile. and a few minutes fof labour per person once a week to empty the buckets (separate for pee and poop).

for a condo, hotel, dorm, apaatamentu or similar concentrated dwelling form, the more complex centralised power-dependent system is probably justifiable as the energy it consumes is more than offset by the energy savings of the multifamily unit (big win in heating and water delivery and so on).

of course Chinese villages have been using biogas digesters for years and years and years to generate cooking fuel.

affluent western notions of human waste management are right up there with SUVs as primary indicators of social psychosis imho <grin> 1) throw away a valuable resource, deliberately interrupting the nutrient cycle and starving the soil; 2) waste a lot of potable water; 3) introduce a lot of artificial toxins ih processing to "neutralise harmful products" in the blackwater before 4) dumping the hypernutrified water into local rivers, streams, near-shore ocean areas where it causes all kinds of havoc and mischief from excessive nitrogen concentration plus the chemical processing cocktail... and of course 5) the icing on the cake is a random melange of half-digested medications, toxic cleaning and cosmetic products, etc.

and yet our culture thinks that the flush toilet is an emblem of advanced civilisation -- when it oughta be an emblem of colossal cluelessness, right up there with the other moai of our times.

I'll bring some more links to this party when I have a mo to riffle through the files. good topic Nomad.

[btw don't you owe me a diary or a post on noise from wind farms?]

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 06:32:36 PM EST

Holy cow (none / 0)

You're a durable extremist, De... Not everyone wants a waterless toilet... and I hope I can make you consider the position that for the Netherlands there is really no scarcity in water... Durable is fine, but it can come in different degrees in my book, depending on the differences in environment. You're not going to see me denounce waterless toilets in arid areas. There was an interesting project in Utah to safe water I read on in 2002 when I was there, but of course I threw it away. I won't be surprised if waterless toilets are the bomb over there.

And you're not going to make plumbers happy campers with your suggestions either, although I see a commercial opportunity in introducing weekly "Bucket Turners", coming at your place once a week to "relieve" the faeces buckets.

I've been too long disconnected from my lectures on natural element cycles to remember on magnesium, so you have the point there.

In practically every nature-oriented culture, (human) waste has been incorporated within the lifestyle; it makes so much more sense to stop seeing it as waste-only.

On the wind noise topic, did you see this reply?

by Nomad (Bjinse) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 07:03:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Holy cow (none / 1)

what alarms me is that my "durable extremism" doesn't nearly go far enough to ensure sustainable survival for current human population, let alone 10 bio souls in another 10-20 years or so.

we keep coming back to a threeway collision between
(1) a fantastic attempt to provide the masses with an ersatz copy of the lifestyle of barbaric kings (to which a dangerous percentage of humanity has become habituated and now regards as an entitlement),
(2) an irreversible drawdown of planetary resources as a result of (1), and
(3) a resurgence of tribal/patriarchal fundamentalism arising in part from the fallout of (1) and (2), and directly militating against sanity (in the form of reducing birthrates, slowing growth, etc.) and towards madness (nationalist and race war, exterminism, fantasies of hegemony)

despite our superficially k-selected behaviours we seem to have r-selected memes encoded deeply in our religious (I include neolib economics and race-supremacist ideologies as forms of religion) wetware, long after its adaptive value has passed. worldwide, with resource bankruptcy staring us in the face, we are seeing religious and political leaders shouting "Breed more, breed faster, don't let Them outbreed Us," and the barons of commerce shouting "Consume more, consumer faster." pouring gasoline on a fire won't put it out -- except the hard way (burn everything combustible in sight and reduce the playing field to ashes).

all of which is taking us far from waterless loos, but just shows-ta-go-ya that I really can't consider myself an "extremist". what is extreme -- hallucinatory, insane, Martian-anthropologist-would-need-a-Valium -- is the wacko, illusory, divorced-from-biology, divorced-from-physics, divorced-from-basic-integer-math culture that we busy little meme-termites have managed to build.

I think I'm in Kassandra mode again, is there some Alt-Shift-something key that gets me back out?

anyway thanks for posting summat cheery :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 07:29:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I'm going... (none / 0)

...to print that comment and hang it above my desk. Sheer brilliance. "Meme-termites" had me in stitches.

Try Alt-Shift-Milkshake at the Dairy Queen. Sometimes you must just surrender. ;)

by Nomad (Bjinse) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 07:37:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: I'm going... (none / 0)

thanks for the kind words :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 07:50:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Holy cow (none / 0)

On the wind noise topic no I hadn't, now I have, it was a great read, thank you, and I share your quest for silence...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue May 23rd, 2006 at 07:30:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Return of the Gongfermers (none / 1)

Gardez l'eau! > loo

Good subject Nomad! just right with my breakfast.

Thomas Crapper has much to answer for...

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Wed May 24th, 2006 at 01:00:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Durable life-style: Cook on poop | 13 comments (13 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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