Dear Friends,
Last month I joined with ten other poop-and-pee enthusiasts (crazy people) to form the founding Board of Directors for the Rich Earth Institute.
This is how I feel about it (...partly because many of the people I'm currently working with are of the age bracket featured in the video).
The Rich Earth Institute expresses its mission thusly:
The Rich Earth Institute is dedicated to advancing and promoting the use of human manure as a resource. Through research, demonstration, and education projects, we strive to illustrate the positive effect of this approach in important areas including water quality, food security, energy use, soil health, economic sustainability, carbon footprint, public health, and emergency preparedness.
The goal of the Rich Earth Institute is to change the way our society understands human manure: to stop seeing it as a waste to be disposed of, and to start recognizing it as a resource to be reclaimed. Our aim is to lead by example, creating working systems that recycle human manure (which includes both urine and feces) into sanitized fertilizer that is then reused on farms.
Pretty funky stuff, huh? Ricky definitely approves (see: conclusion of previous post).
Though the idea of recycling humanure into agricultural soils seems pretty off the wall and even downright DANGEROUS to most -if not all- of us modern beings, the practice is what has sustained human civilizations since the agricultural revolution began around ten thousand years ago. The American soil physicist F.H. King discusses details of this humanure agriculture practice in the East in his 1911 book Farmers of Forty Centuries; or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan. These days this book is published under the title "Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan." I call attention to this edit in light of a definition recently presented to me:
My mentor at Seeds of Solidarity Farm and Education Center, Deb Habib, defines Organic as follows:
"People have been gardening without pesticides or chemicals for thousands of years. This is what organic means, plus fostering a healthy garden and soil ecosystem."
Yes! Despite today's grocery labels, "conventional" agriculture has
never been the synthetically-manufactured kind, but rather the organic, the permanent. Since the first agricultural revolution, many human societies have cultivated food sources from soil rather than/in addition to previous habits of hunting, gathering, or herding. Maintaining soil fertility over seasons, years, and decades has been a vital inquiry ever since. Logically, many solutions to the soil fertility issue were thought of and practiced long before the USA-funded Green Revolution of the 1940s-1970's, yet how quickly we succumb to amnesia and believe without questioning that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are absolutely necessary to grow food!
(For more on the agricultural revolution from the institutional perspective of a Western white guy, you will find this informing and entertaining--UNLESS you are the Mongols.)
So yes, today's global population is MUCH larger than in ancient times, and many people use this fact to justify the injection of synthetic chemicals into our ecosystem or the artificial manufacturing of food genetics. This terror-inducing argument, though, is propelled by a myth of worldwide food scarcity. I promise to write another blog post on The Myth of Global Food Scarcity soon--with any hope and some pretty ridiculous school/work procrastination, that is.
And what does HUMANURE have to do with WORMS? Well, at the moment not much-- but hopefully in the near and nearer future we will incorporate vermicomposting into human waste processing to build fertile soil locally and autonomously across this region and beyond...
A big thanks for reading my post from the new Board of Directors at the Rich Earth Institute- please read more about humanure philosophy and our group's contributions to the field of nutrient recycling at our website.
Look at those chummy folks, and the tea cups! :)
Thanks for reading. Peace, Cat
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