When thinking about shit and it being used as a resource I remember this youtube video.
https://youtu.be/0tYaXBkiq70?si=qshd9gKm02ovfKxB
During the Edo period of Japan (1603-1868) poop was not just a form of waste it was also seen as a resource. While big cities in Europe had constant issues with contaminated water and dirty streets during this time, Japan had clean streets and the water was not filled with poop. Poop was seen as a valuable resource for farming as a fertilizer one that increased with an increasing population. Japan did not have a culture of meat eating like many European countries so they did not have as much animal waste as a resource so they needed to rely on people’s waste for fertilizer. This is known as night soil. The farmland in Japan was also very limited and with an increasing population, night soil helped keep the land fertile and helped produce more crops. People who collected poop created great wealth for their family but they were seen as public outcasts due to doing the dirty work of the population. This reminded me of the Strike Breaker reading as the family that recirculated waste was outcasted from society in a similar way. This was a useful and safer way to dispose of human waste as other countries would simply throw it into the surrounding waters which were then drunk from. When you collect and divert waste the water supply stays cleaner and is healthier. Using waste as a resource is something that is important to look into as we progress as it can recirculate nutrients and create less harm through our current artificial fertilizers and harmful farming practices.

A space that came to mind is the basement in the Dakin residences. The basement is filled with abandoned student spaces(spiritual life center), controls of heating and plumbing, and some trash. On the other side of the laundry area, there’s a room with a dumpster in it, and possibly a chute connecting it to the building above, followed by the expected artwork. Basements aren’t something you’d immediately associate waste with, unless you’re thinking of apartments and incinerators, so it was unique seeing that there. It’s interesting though, why is it there and closed off, where here at Hampshire waste isn’t something that’s being kept away from us. It’s in our bathrooms, common rooms, inside and outside academic buildings, dining commons, we’re even exposed to composted material. I’m curious what the purpose of that placement was for.

Natural waste is something we distance ourselves from since the stone age and even before that because the smell is built into us as a way to keep humans away from diseases. It was natural back then but since our expansion of the human race we needed to somehow reuse the waste we create or it is going to build up faster than anyway we can dispose of it. Our disgust for waste is shown in our marketing and design of buildings where bathrooms are hidden except for their signs. Waste product disposal often nicknames the waste in more pleasant terms to seem more inviting as a product to buy. This shows the distances we go to as a species to separate ourselves from something that we have to do pretty often. Especially since covid cleanliness has become a top priority and natural waste could not be a part of it and if it was it will be separated from those who produce it.

In today’s culture, shit is seen as a dirty substance we no longer want in our bodies. Along with no longer wanting it around us in general, by creating  indoor plumbing systems that sends our shit away from us so that we never have to deal with it again. There are figures of speech around shit and many jokes made in the media that reflect the ideas many people in society hold around shit. In the farming communities around the world, animal shit is incredibly valuable.  Refreshing the fields with new nutrients each time it is put into the soil. Society tells people what they should think, by when it comes to what comes out of our bodies we can’t change that. Everyone poops. It’s true, there is no animal on this planet that doesn’t shit. Through the readings many things came into the light for me, almost all of the first outhouses and bathrooms in the US were absolutely disgusting. The photos shown in Gerling’s article captured a very gross version of what bathrooms used to be like in cities. I would never want to live in today’s day and age without indoor plumbing. I can imagine a perfectly fine world in which I could live without indoor plumbing systems. 

My everyday behaviors around shit reveal about our culture, history, or power relations making me think about what type of world we live in. Everyone knows that they can make a good decision that makes a huge difference for the world. In the world that we know today, it’s hard to understand and talk about colonialism and racial hierarchies. They’ll think “Oh, I’m more above your level now, I can do this and whatever I want to” which is an abuse of power. Yet, they can make a difference, they just want others to judge them.

We see shit as filthy and unsanitary, and in the past, the disposal of it was used as a way to show class status and create a separation between the classes. Having a clean and sanitary home made you better than those who didn’t, and cleanliness was seen as being closer to God. In the present, if we see an area of a town with visible waste it would often be attributed to people not having a lot of money. People would then go on to think of it as the “bad” part of town, and it would then be associated with crime, and in turn, people of color and marginalized groups. This goes back to what we read in Gerling’s writing, where it discusses how people of higher class status and social status were the first to have access to sanitation resources like plumbing, sewage, toilets, etc, which made the wealthier areas of towns and cities cleaner, and seen as better.

I worked in a daycare for all of my high school years. Something that comes with the job is to change diapers, and generally help children in the bathroom, and I have become very desensitized to baby shit. I have been thinking about recently, with our conversations around shit, how all of my coworkers and I talked about shit. Normal conversations in the daycare would center around how a certain child was eating and how they were feeling based on their shit. We could tell if one child was not feeling well, or if they were not eating enough fiber or fruits, we could also gauge their levels of stress based on how often they went to the bathroom. It is interesting that we can pick up on subtle changes in a child’s mood or health based on something so ostracized in other settings. This mindset around shit is something that is not seen in many other settings and it makes me wonder what it would be like if everyone shared this mindset.

Biomass is biomass, doesn’t really matter where it comes from. My family is huge into composting, so I’m used to dealing with large amounts of the slimy detritus of what used to be food. It doesn’t smell good, and might make you throw up if you eat it, but just wash your hands if you get any on you and you’ll be fine. While theoretically I should feel the same way about digested food as I do decomposed food, I still have a higher level of suspicion around shit than compost. I think this, at least to me, has to do with the way each one is produced. The experience of generating a banana peel is a lot more pleasant than generating a nasty shit. One of these is a joyous, nutritious, flavorful experience, whereas the other one is a chore at best and a soul-destroying, painful, and messy process at worst. In our tour of the Kern, our guide (whose name I am completely blanking on right now) told us that while we can use the products of the composting toilets for planting decorative plants, we can’t plant anything edible. This makes some sense, there isn’t a lot of science out there about what exactly bioaccumulates in human shit and if/how that gets transferred to plants grown in it, but our guide also mentioned that there were some people suggesting the composted shit be allowed to cure even longer before they start planting. To me, this comes from a seed of legitimate fear, but peoples projection of bad memories of how shit is created leads to these fears being overblown, leading to less interest in studying how to best use this untapped resource.

For racism and imperialism to work there needs to be as much separation between the oppressor and the oppressed as can be manufactured. The oppressed must be turned into something subhuman inorder to justify violence. Or the oppressor must become something greater than human, so that those once perfectly human activities can be villainized. The requirements for entry are always changing. They are created to be ever inaccessible. When poop became used to justify racism, the value of poop vanished. Our current waste management is so shit, our human/planet health is so shit because of racism. The health of the earth is the plaything of racism and imperialism. When we hurt each other the earth is hurt in the process. How many of our modern day beliefs around ‘health’ are rooted in racism?

Poop is our connection to the world. The world moves through us! It is a circle, we give back the life that sustains us. We are all interconnected.