This past spring I spent 3 months on a conservation corps where we were camping in pretty remote areas and had no access to plumbing. We did have pit toilets at about half of our camp sites, but the other half of the time we would just go out into the woods. There was a big emphasis across all of our day to day activities on “leave no trace”, so as to not mess up the environment with our human impact. This really made sense when it came to food wrappers and man-made trash, but it felt a little bit different when it came to shit, and I still don’t really know where I stand on it. At the sites where we didn’t have pit toilets, we were very far from civilization- not even at any established camp site. We would be told to make sure to dig cat holes whenever we went to the bathroom, and not go in the same place twice, and go a specific number of yards from any body of water (even the ones that we were never getting drinking water from), and just to take all sorts of precautionary measures around our bathroom habits, and I didn’t quite get the point. It got pretty old when you were making sure to pay attention to all those different requirements every day for months. Of course, I understand that these measures are good rules of thumb in general for camping and hiking, because if there were too many people just shitting all over the place it would be pretty unpleasant and potentially bad for human health and the health of the ecosystem. But, in my specific scenario, there were 4 people on my crew, out in the middle of the woods, and there was this general feeling that permeated all of our shit related conversations that we would be doing something extremely unclean and bad for the health of the environment if we didn’t follow the correct shit procedures. There were deer, bears, squirrels, and all sorts of other wildlife in those woods who were going about their business without thinking about any of that. Isn’t shitting a natural part of life and of the environment? It felt to me that our learned beliefs about poop as a shameful and unclean thing were affecting the way that we were thinking about it as it pertained to “leave no trace”. At the same time, I don’t really know enough about what the potential consequences of shitting freely in the woods may be, so they might exist. I can’t really say.