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"Extremely dangerous to your health, the health of our community, and the health of the soil". "One of the most important books ever written". Environmental and small publisher awards won. That reactions to The Humanure Handbook have been so polarized says something about the weight of its message. And its message is, principally: Instead of flushing our shit into our drinking water, we should instead be composting it onto our food, as fertilizer. Jenkins proposes a revolutionary idea: that instead of seeing human feces as waste, a product with no value that must be disposed of, we should see it as a resource, and utilize it for our own benefit. Excrement can be dealt with in three ways: a) at a cost to the environment and with no benefit to society, b) at no cost to the environment and also with no benefit to society, and c) at no cost to the environment and at with benefit to the society. Jenkins outlines all three ways and proposes that we, as a society, switch from the first way to the third. He contends that fertilizer-making, like bread-making, wine-making, and cheese-making, is a form of husbandry; microorganisms that are present in the humanure break it down into humus, a pleasant-smelling soil that enhances plant growth and reduces plant disease. This process is also used to purify not only solids, but also liquids and gases; composters can filter water and air, as well. There are three ways to use human feces as fertilizer: untreated, as it is in the Far East, where it is called night soil; composted at temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius or less, in which pathogens are gradually broken down over a long period of time; and composted at termperatures of 50 degrees Celsius or more, in which pathogens are broken down quickly and completely. If there remains a(n illogical) fear that feces treated by the second method still constitute some sort of danger to humans if the vegetables that are fertilized by the feces are ingested, then they can be ingested plants that will be eaten by animals, or by plants that will not be eaten at all.
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Jenkins details the construction of a cheap DIY composting toilet and the basic methods of its maintenance: ensuring a carbon / nitrogen ration of about 30:1 by composting food scraps, high in carbon, together with the humanure, high in nitrogen; the stacking and moistening of the compost to prevent dehydration before the chemical cycle is complete; and the building of two composting chambers, so that one compost can be utilized as a catchbasin for the toilet while a second compost cures into humus. The Humanure Handbook also includes resources for purchasing one of a myriad of commercially-produced composting toilets that require much less human intervention. But Jenkins also needs to dispel some widely-held fecophobic assumptions by English-speaking consumerist societies: that the composting of excrement of any kind is malodorous; and that the use of excrement of the human kind as fertilizer for human food is a health hazard. He points out that by covering fresh feces with a thin layer of carbon-based solids, like a handful of sawdust, oxygen on the feces is not allowed to evaporate, ensuring that the feces will undergo a chemical cycle that is aerobic, and hence odourless. He goes on to explain that the composting process destroys human pathogens, making the resulting humus safe to use as fertilizer for plant life that is destined for human consumption. If the low-temperature composting method is used for two years, the likelihood of pathogen survival is extremely low, and if the high-temperature method is used for two months, the likelihood of pathogen survival is nil. The ideas set forth by Joseph Jenkins in The Humanure Handbook may be anathema, even heresy, to some. But they make perfect sense; and, moreover, unless they are near-universally adopted in the near future, the human race may soon find itself up shit's creek, most literally.
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