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Humanure Part 1: Why Should We Give a Crap?
HUMANURE PART 1: WHY SHOULD WE GIVE A CRAP?
Permaculture is not just about garden design. Even if you don’t have land or access to land, looking at life from a permaculture perspective can help you to make life decisions and take actions towards upholding the ethics of permaculture in your daily practices. This article series will take a look specifically at one of these practices which we all share, examine the benefits of changing our habits from a scientific perspective, and offer some practical ideas of what to do next.
That which cannot be named
It’s something which everyone engages in, sometimes as often as once or even twice a day. It can often be the first sign of illness if it is uncomfortable, and if it’s comfortable can help us to feel healthy and of course relieved. We do it almost as often as we eat and yet many people only feel comfortable talking about it with their closest friends or doctor. This could be seen as unbalanced, but probably even more unbalanced (especially from a permaculture perspective) is how we deal with our faeces. The most popular way of treating faeces globally is still by using water, either to flush to a public sewage treatment facility or to an onsite septic tank, or, in many places, by flushing it directly into the sea or a river (1). There are many reasons why using water to treat poo is environmentally detrimental, and most readers may well be familiar with these already. However, below I will briefly go into a few. Likewise with reasons why you may wish to change your pooing habits (if you haven’t already) to that of non-water treatment.
Why do we do what we do with poo?
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Water Saving Irrigation Practices
WATER SAVING IRRIGATION PRACTICES
Saving water in the soil is without a doubt the easiest and most effective way to manage the water flowing through your land. If you need extra irrigation, however, the water stored up in your soil isn´t easy to access. For irrigation needs, you´ll want to use water that you store in cisterns or tanks. This water can be harvested either from the sky in the form of rain or through capturing water from a spring, river or another source of fresh water.
Irrigation, unfortunately, is one of the most wasteful practices in modern day agriculture. From traditional sprinkler systems to large-scale irrigation by airplane and helicopter, millions of gallons of water are lost each year by irrigating pieces of land where nothing is growing.
For a plant to grow properly, it obviously needs water. That water resource, especially when limited, should be focused on the root area. While sprinkler systems, to name just one example, indiscriminately spray water over entire fields of plants, drip irrigation systems can focus water directly to the root zone of the plant where water is needed.
Drip irrigation systems have been reported to use 80% less water than traditional irrigation practices. Furthermore, since these systems direct water only underneath the plant, fungal diseases caused by excess water accumulating on the leaves can also be avoided. We will briefly look at two easy to set up drip irrigation methods below.
BAMBOO DRIP IRRIGATION
If you have the money, you can purchase drip irrigation systems that include everything from primary lines to secondary lines to emitters. These complete sets are usually pretty reliable though costly, and if treated correctly will last for several years. If you want the easy approach to drip irrigation, you can search the web for any number of drip irrigation systems.
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The Problems With Our Industrial Water System Today
THE PROBLEMS WITH OUR INDUSTRIAL WATER SYSTEM TODAY
Imagine that you´re in your home on a rainy afternoon. It has been raining for two days straight now and your front yard is full of puddles. The water is rushing along the drain ways on the side of the road and the local news is talking about the stress on the local sewer system that this extra rain is causing. When you turn on the faucet in your kitchen sink to wash up the dishes from lunch, however, the water that you use may very well be coming from hundreds of miles away in an area that may very well be experiencing a drought.
Our conventional, industrial water supply has very little connection to local watersheds or local ecosystems. Rather, the focus has been on taking water from areas where water is apparently abundant and moving it to areas with high population densities or areas where water is scarce. To do this, we depend on huge, energy dependent pumping systems that most likely depend on the continued availability of cheap fossil fuels to fuel these pumps.
A CITY IN THE DESERT
Las Vegas, Nevada is the epitome of unsustainability (and lunacy) when it comes to water. Located in the middle of a desert where water is scarce, Las Vegas has depended on Lake Mead for its water. However, in recent years it has become apparent that the thirsty city of Las Vegas is pulling water out of Lake Mead faster than the natural inflows can replenish it. To solve this problem, the city of Las Vegas has begun purchasing rights to groundwater throughout the state hoping to assuage their water crisis by pumping water out of the ground and sending it hundreds of miles away to irrigate the many golf courses in Las Vegas and offer luxurious hot showers to the over 100,000 hotel rooms of the signature casinos of the city.
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