Poop Worlds: Material Culture and Copropower (or, Toward a Shitty Turn)

IV. New Poop Ecologies: Recouping Shit

With over seven billion people on the planet, the human digestive interior offers a vast and unique microbiome—an alien landscape divided into four zones, with environmental conditions such as acidity in the stomach and an anaerobic habitat in the large and small intestines. A 2011 paper in Nature identified a new universal categorization of humans into three distinct “enterotypes” of gastrointestinal microbial colonies that, like blood types, are not distinct to particular continents, nations, cultures, or foodways.¹ The research relied on genome sequencing of fecal samples in a lab in Heidelberg, Germany.

Whether or not the gastrointestinal habitats in us pan out as three or more enterotypes, what leaves our collective digestive systems opens up potential habitats that, we argue, cannot be categorized into any number of types, but instead may bloom into myriad ecological worldings of fecund decomposition. If we turn the body inside out and externalize our collective digestive organs as a cloaca maxima, status quo sewerage amounts to a program of permanent antibiotic administration that aims to leave our gastrointestinal tracts void of life, as sterile as a fetus’s guts. But copropower offers up a different biopolitical relationship to collective shit that might revalue its liveliness, its generativity of life itself. While status quo waste management demands a nullification and, ideally, absolute sterilization of human waste—the only good shit is dead shit—alternative probiotic approaches to what comes out of us can diversify into a range of managed biomes suitable to local climatic conditions, population densities, financial capacities, and collective needs (like producing food or energy). What would urban sustainability look like if these external organs followed the model of the healthy gastrointestinal system as an ecological niche flourishing with multispecies in symbiosis with their macrohosts?

The antibiotic mode of copropower is decisively aimed at decimating invisible life forms to make the world safe for humans. Status quo wastewater management relies on micro-filtration, reverse osmosis, UV radiation, and peroxide or chlorine to kill microorganisms in blackwater² before releasing treated wastewater back into the surrounding environment. When this water is strategically streamed into groundwater reserves, the process is nicknamed “toilet-to-tap” with a grotesque rhetorical flourish that consistently raises public outcry. Carol Nemeroff, a psychologist working for the WateReuse Research Foundation, has dubbed this “cognitive sewage”: former sewage water picks up a psychic contagion that cannot be purified with wastewater treatment technology, but only by imagining this water streamed through “nature” in the form of an aquifer or river.³ Municipalities in southern California have reluctantly accepted the necessity of toilet-to-tap strategies in response to drought conditions and an overtapped Colorado River, and to protect endangered species in river deltas. To decrease its reliance on water imported from Malaysia, Singapore (a spaceship-like island nation) “has become known for its military-like efficiency in implementing wastewater recycling.”⁴ Cities in Texas are considering or constructing such systems after multiple years of drought. Proponents of “toilet-to-tap” may try to put an appealing high-tech spin on closed-loop urban water cycles, for example, by relating Fort Worth’s new $13 million water recycling plant to the systems used by astronauts on the International Space Station that turn urine and sweat into potable water.⁵ However, this focus on the technoscientific production of pure water misses shit’s alternative openings to more fecund and delicious worlds through what might be summed up as a “poop-to-food” loop.

Only a century ago in northwestern US cities, people cultivated copropower’s lively side by transporting “night soil” to nearby agricultural fields for use as fertilizer. After a 2008 embargo on rice and fertilizer imports from South Korea, North Korean markets began selling cured human feces as fertilizer. Given the contemporary urgency surrounding food and water security, the question posed to publics, scientists, policymakers, and engineers is how to indirectly and safely drink and eat feces.

Probiotic approaches to waste management include dry composting toilets resulting in “humanure”⁶ and constructed wetlands that act as “living machines” to filtrate and purify wastewater.⁷ While a scattered subculture of eco-people have been reclaiming copropower from experts by building and using off-the-grid composting toilets and wetlands since at least the 1960s and 1970s, mainstreaming this technology has met the resistance of municipal departments of code compliance as well as a public gag reflex that kicks in anywhere near adult human feces. “If shit were white and smelled like roses, our problems with waste management would be over.”⁸ To get over the problem of cognitive sewage and our disgust and fear of poop as deadly matter, we recommend thinking of it as rich soil-in-the-making, black gold to be carefully cultivated to enhance its poopy purity.

To begin with a homely example that went wrong, in 2009 Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn. Soil tests turned up high concentrations of lead attributed to Clinton-era applications of sewer sludge—a collective poop slurry derived from solids filtered out of blackwater in municipal wastewater treatment plants—backed by the EPA to popularize the use of sludge as landscaping fertilizer.⁹ Yet urban soils can also show high lead levels from decades of fueling vehicles with leaded gasoline. Nitrogen-rich poop is one of the cleanest, safest, and agriculturally most useful ingredients in sludge; it is everything else mixed with humanure in the single-stream sewer that poses a persistent threat in local food chains.

One way to avoid fertile poop’s contamination in the sewers is to simply disengage from the sewer system and its modernist promises. The Rhizome Collective is a nonprofit group that addresses environmental and social justice issues through do-it-yourself sustainable design. Before their live-in warehouse was shut down by the city of Austin for code violations in 2009, the site offered working models for reclaiming graywater, harvesting rainwater, composting, gardening and remediating soil, raising chickens and tilapia for food, engineering pedal-powered machines, and the like. Participants at their weekend-long Radical Urban Sustainability Training (RUST) program¹⁰ had the option of using the conventional toilet, or urinating in a field and pooping in a dry composting toilet—an unpermitted anarchist outhouse set above a trash can and hay bales with the slogan “Give a shit for the revolution!” graffitied inside. As a volunteer at the RUST workshop in 2008, Scott helped hand-build Austin’s first city-approved, code-compliant public composting toilet, engineered by David Bailey. It took four years of review for the city to permit the structure. The toilet’s walls were constructed out of over a hundred bags of concrete mixed in wheelbarrows, poured into a plywood form along with demolition rubble gathered from the land. The design is divided in half so that humanure in one side can cure for a year while the other side is in use. The resulting pathogen-free compost feeds the garden downhill from the toilet. The system produces free fertilizer while saving water and the energy consumed in water’s production and treatment: “Austin Water Utility uses as much electricity as all other city departments combined.”¹¹

As the Rhizome Collective’s success with code compliance shows, cities are now recognizing their constant flow of shit not as a worthless externality but as an important raw material that can be refined into technoscientifically managed “biosolids” for methane and fertilizer production. In Austin, the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant processes one million gallons of sewer sludge a day, only 1 percent of the total sewage water treated daily in Austin. Located along a bend in the Colorado River, the grounds are beautiful and a little stinky. The sludge treated here settles out of sewage in the first stage of processing at Austin’s two wastewater treatment plants and is then pumped to Hornsby Bend. Here, the treatment process begins by passing sludge over conveyor belt screens that allow liquids to settle out. Sludge then enters anaerobic digesters—six huge pressurized floating domes—to be metabolized by bacteria kept warm by gas combustion. The gas itself is methane farted out by bacteria in these digesters. In 2012 the domes were retrofitted with “co-gen”—generators that run on gas combustion while simultaneously heating the domes. After the digesters, biosolids are mixed with mulched leaves and sticks from curbside pickup and composted for several months. They wind up in local Home Depots as DilloDirt, “a soil amendment for your lawn and garden.” Hornsby Bend’s 112 acres double as an agriculture research lab that experiments with fertilizing with biosolids and irrigating with wastewater. Current research focuses on the persistence of industrial toxins and emerging contaminants (from pharmaceuticals such as birth control and Viagra) in treated biosolids that can slip past the purification process to accumulate in landscapes and food chains.

While these experiments with copropower extend human management of collective shit, Hornsby Bend also surprised those who govern sewage as an unplanned emergent wetland. Wastewater removed from raw sludge flows to three pools that, when they were constructed in 1959, immediately attracted bird populations and recreational birders. The multispecies assemblage eventually obliged Austin Water to institute a relationship with the Travis County Audubon Society in a still unfolding apprenticeship with waste.¹² When Scott visited in the winter, koots and shovel-bill ducks paddled around, picking through the pools’ banks. Migratory herons, painted buntings, and swifts nest in the summer. Red-shouldered hawks and osprey also hunt here. The pools are divided by raised levees that are open to the public year round during daylight hours. Here, sludge is remediated into a park for urbanature: ecosystems that thrive in the world only because of highly technical, large-scale, human-made systems—in this case, collective intestines of post-poop. In addition to this unanticipated park, biosolids production animates other surprises, including compost piles spontaneously combusting and smoldering for a month from the bacterial heat inside, or people at the Austin City Limits festival coming down with rashes from mud that had been amended with DilloDirt.¹³

At the individual household level, daily routines of poop management conveniently stream bodily wastes into sewer systems and landfills. Experiments with disrupting this flow range from the humble pile of biodegradable diapers and kitty litter that composted in a corner of Scott’s backyard to citywide collection strategies that separate all manner of organic waste from recyclables and garbage. Portland, Oregon, recently cut its non-recyclable trash pickup to every other week and now has weekly curbside pickup for compostable yard and food waste (including meat) but not yet diapers or pet waste. Toronto’s Green Bin Program is a municipal waste collection program for all organic materials, including food scraps, pet waste, kitty litter, and diapers. San Francisco’s goal of becoming a zero waste city by 2020 focuses efforts on collecting dog and cat poop (which, like diapers, make up around four percent of the city’s solid waste) to be digested into methane by anaerobic bacteria. And in the UK, pilot projects in Didcot and Manchester use sewer sludge in a similar manner to produce natural gas for home uses such as cooking and heating. These large-scale examples of poop management are part of new copropower markets that attempt to transform the valueless into capital and reverse shit’s position as the end result of consumption. They rely on varying degrees of individual adaptation to new waste management regimes; in some cases, consumers must separate trash in new ways, but strategies of retrofitting sewage treatment plants require no changes on the part of individual poop producers.

Hornsby Bend and other municipal facilities in the US are successfully transforming sewage—the ultimate worthless garbage—into commodities, energy forms, and urbanature. But sludge can also start backing up in some kind of megacity-scale hoarder scene: in 2006, Kern County outlawed Los Angeles’s dumping of its processed biosolids as agricultural fertilizer. As sludge piled up, LA responded with an experimental geothermal anaerobic digester at Terminal Island. EPA permit in hand, they inject biosolids into 5,000-foot-deep wells that tap depleted oil and natural gas tables. The earth heats these pits of hell to 150°F. The wells are filled with briny wastewater. Like the domes at Hornsby Bend, bacteria digest the biosolids, producing CO2 sequestered by the water (turning it into carbonated water) and methane gas collected at a second well’s vent. Of course, some people are just waiting for mutant bacteria to evolve in the pits, infecting LA with a pandemic. Others say demons will crawl out. Or the deep wells will activate fault lines to unleash mega-volcanoes. Meanwhile, the methane vents power whole neighborhoods and the biosolids facilities themselves.

Some urban agriculture programs and the mainstreaming of permaculture design principles are pushing consumers to wrap their minds and guts around the concept of the poop-to-food loop as an important component in water and food security. Humanure fertilizer and wastewater reuse in urban agriculture is slowly becoming an accepted, formalized strategy in international development projects. Too many people are tapping wastewater as a more dependable water source than rain for municipalities to realistically police and enforce wastewater use prohibitions. Urban farmers in the Global South have been informally using it for irrigation in urban agriculture for decades, so much so that “urban agriculture cannot be seen separately from wastewater use.”14 Efforts to formalize wastewater use focus on experimental systems that provide a basic level of low-cost treatment through screening out solids and allowing sludge to settle in basins.

An experimental constructed wetland in Cameroon treats sewage from a population of 650 people by streaming it through a series of eight lagoons. Seven of these are stocked with water lettuce, a floating aquatic plant that can double its biomass within a week (giving it the status of a dangerous invasive species in North American waterways). The researchers who built the system suggested maximum phytoremediation is only achievable by removing one quarter of the plants every fifteen days.¹⁵ “Emanation of foul odours, mosquitoes and flies, proliferation and appearance of aquatic snakes are some of the nuisances recorded. These problems become acute when the system is left unattended to for long periods.”¹⁶ The system requires hands-on human labor to manage multispecies labor; but the system does not require electrical energy, endless chemical inputs, machine maintenance, or massive municipal funding to be built in the first place. There are similar experiments in Senegal¹⁷ and Palestine.¹⁸

In tracking between the multiple scales, sites, and entities involved in handling poop’s materiality as well as the socioeconomic, juridical, and cognitive/symbolic sewage systems in which human shit also circulates, our research has aimed to document and critique emerging copropower assemblages of agricultural and municipal laborers, engineers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), state regulatory agencies, bacteria, and plants. An anthropological approach can examine shifting cultural mores for handling and purifying excrement in particular situations of harsh necessity or scarcity as well as day-to-day technoscientific management of feces both in modes of world-changing optimism (we will solve energy shortages with methane!) and world-weary materiality (the century-old sewer system is leaking into the bay again… ). Although anthropology has kept fairly quiet about shit, it has never shied away from socially taboo research objects like sex, drugs, and power. Crucially, the figure of the anthropologist doesn’t turn away from, may not even flinch experiencing, scatological scenes and smells and desires; her humble, amoral but ethical interest overrides visceral responses of disgust. In this sense we are practicing anthropology as what Timothy Morton has imagined as “queer ecology,” which might “begin with open appreciation, for no particular reason, of another’s enjoyment, beyond mere toleration.”¹⁹ Anthropology cuts through the naturalization of shit within social orders as well as its medicalization as purely epidemiological matter, grasping poop as a worlding, a little bang expanding to mythic and cosmic proportions, a matter of life itself.

V. Cosmic Shit

In William Burroughs’s Nova Express, collective metabolic systems that power human bodies and machine cities are in a crisis of waste and somatic excess. The Nova Mob is taking over earthlings through sex/violence/scarcity images. They’re trying to exacerbate the conditions for the “nova date” when the planet explodes in war and chaos. The Nova Police question Dr. Winkhorst, a technician and chemist with the Nova Mob who speaks of irreversible “formulae” ticking down to the nova date of planetary annihilation. “It is a question of disposal—What is known as Uranium and this applies to all such raw material is actually a form of excrement—This disposal problem of radioactive waste in any time universe is ultimately insoluble.”²⁰ Next, the Nova Police pick up a death dwarf, a minor Nova Mob henchman who begs them for a shot then goes into a sputtering trance: “Shit—Uranian shit—That’s what my human dogs eat—And I like to rub their noses in it—Beauty—Poetry—Space—What good is all that to me? If I don’t get the image fix I’m in the ovens—You understand?—All the pain and hate images come loose—You understand that you dumb hick?”²¹

During Roman times, Cloacina, the goddess of purification, watched over the Roman sewers and conjugal sex. She started out protecting the stream that ran through the Forum until she was promoted to sewer deity before finally becoming identified with Venus. Cloacina’s job was to take insoluble problems (like shit and love) and purify their nasty elements by flushing them somewhere else. Pain and hate images bob with poop in the Tiber, then out to sea. Lately Cloacina has been worried about these impurities backing up in an oceanic cesspool. There is simply no more space left for it to accumulate. With Shit Boy as her companion, she at last turns her love to the area of disposal itself. They delicately churn the sea, harvesting nitrogen and e. coli and resettling them in food fields and human intestines, respectively. Shit Boy’s skin amorously gleams in the sun, inviting solar rays to lick off his coat of madness.

The linear inescapability of the nova date—that fated day when all kinds of shit backs up and overflows the piped societies—has transformed Shit Boy and Cloacina into the condition for new worlds only accessible by luxuriating in waste’s utter profitlessness and ruination. Collective poop is the rich dark matter of excess, analogous to the sun’s unceasing diarrheic flow of energy cast off in all directions: like shit, “the sun gives without ever receiving.”²² And like sex flows, this tainted giving, an unstoppable flow dangerous under some conditions but life-making under others, radiates power, possibility, and death. The waste products of metabolism cut across congeries of scales, bodies, and affective and semiotic charges, collecting them together in a raw “circuit of cosmic energy”²³ :

The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels [us], and [we] cannot stop it; moreover, being at the summit, [our] sovereignty in the living world identifies [us] with this movement; it destines [us], in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption. If [we] deny this, as [we are] constantly urged to by the consciousness of a necessity, of an indigence inherent in separate beings (which are constantly short of resources, which are nothing but eternally needy individuals), [our] denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least.²⁴

In our current context of energy and water scarcity, especially in arid zones such as the Middle East or the Southwest US, poop is illuminated as an untapped resource, swinging from untouchable status into a newfound respectability for its potential power. The needy—and it is easy to imagine a near future where need is more evenly distributed than today—now have their labor power but also their copropower. For example, Morph Designs is working with NGOs in New Delhi to distribute small portable toilets that can be used for a week, then traded in at a biogas plant “for energy in the form of cooking gas, warm water for showers, or electricity.”²⁵ Such toilets embody the birth of a new kind of poop, reworlded into forms of energy and life.

Are we seeing the emergence of a “shit positive” paradigm, one that reverses the chain of attention to the daily rhythm of poop, encountering not a problem or a messy ending to be dealt with by some unfortunate, but a beginning and a worlding, an opportunity to think? Are we becoming poop, sliding down into toilets like children wearing cute poo hats in an Osaka, Japan, museum display where “you too can become feces”?²⁶ Passing metabolic waste is required to purge bodies—I poop therefore I am—but in this necessity some have found an opening to new sexualities, prisoners have claimed at least one form of protest or psychic balm, and cities are obliged to respond to their inseparability from a larger ecological realm. We have demonstrated how an array of apparatuses, energy forms (food and methane), sexualities, and collectives constellate around poop and, moreover, through the repetitions of each poop act. Such assemblages literally cannot exist without poop, and in that sense excrement is as cosmic and overdetermining as sunlight. It’s as if each individual poop is a living planetoid, an event that could change everything. Yet disgust with shit seems to be so naturalized, given that we can hardly discuss poop with our intimates, much less with academic colleagues, without feeling a little shamed or embarrassed with our unhealthy topic. “Poop worlds” is our tentative beginning (always beginning!) in learning to talk about the cosmopolitics of bodies’ daily unworlding, letting the rhythm become expressive and more visible and cultivating a hard-nosed sensibility to excremental intimacy.

“Poop worlds” closes with some visceral symbolic play. For the last game at this baby shower, we pass around five diapers, inviting guests and parents-to-be to open them and inspect dark, chunky poops with varying consistencies. One has long logs of poop and another has mucus slicks, and you have to guess what candy bar has been melted on the diapers in the microwave. Visual inspection alone won’t cut it, so you must lean your nose in and smell for hints of peanut butter or mint. After the game the diapers end up in the trash. But poop is no longer the same (and neither are candy bars). It is closer to food than abject waste, and it embodies sunlight, power, shared madness, at once vulgar and innocent. It is matter inside out, our collective shame and untapped fortune. It is inside you right now, waiting to be recuperated.

1. Manimozhiyan Arumagam, Jeroen Raes, et al, “Enterotypes of the Human Gut Microbiome,” Nature 473 (2011): 174–180. [↩]
2. These are the terms for different kinds of wastewater: graywater is laundry and shower water; blackwater is from kitchen sinks and toilets. But it all gets mixed together in sewers as blackwater sludge. The worn symbolic designation of all bad things being “black” was first applied to sewer water in the 1970s. Now the positive identifications with blackness confirmed in the civil rights period of the 1960s seem to be settling on the substance that makes blackwater black. [↩]
3. Alex Spiegel, “Why Cleaned Wastewater Stays Dirty in our Minds,” National Public Radio, August 16, 2011. [↩]
4. Kathy Chu, “From Toilets to Tap: How We Get Tap Water from Sewage,” USA Today, March 2, 2011. [↩]
5. Irene Klotz, “From Toilet to Tap: Texas Town Looks at Recycling,” NBCNews.com, August 5, 2011. [↩]
6. Joseph C. Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure (Grove City, Penn.: Joseph Jenkins), 2005). [↩]
7. John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1994). [↩]
8. Gene Logsdon, Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010), 157. [↩]
9. Josh Harkinson, “Did Sewer Sludge Lace the White Veggie Garden with Lead?,” Mother Jones online, June 28, 2009. [↩]
10. After the city evicted the warehouse, two of the Rhizome Collective’s founders moved to Albany, New York, to start the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, where the RUST workshops continue (now as Regenerative Urban Sustainability Training; see http://radixcenter.org). See Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew, Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-it-Ourselves Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2008). For more on graywater reclamation, see Webel, “Free Water! DIY Wetlands and the Futures of Urban Gray Water,” Anthropology Now 3, no. 1 (2011): 13–22. [↩]
11. Asher Price, “Green Toilet Wins City Approval: Composting Commode Is First to Gain Official Stamp,” Austin American-Statesman, June 18, 2009. [↩]
12. Webel, “Zero Worlds: Waste Apprenticeships at Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant,” Techniques and Culture (forthcoming). [↩]
13. Brandon Roberts, “Austin’s Dirty Secret: Dillo Dirt,” Austin Cut, July 1, 2011. [↩]
14. Mark Redwood, “Wastewater Use in Urban Agriculture: Assessing Current Research and Options for Local Governments,” International Development Research Centre (January 2004), 18. [↩]
15. Théophile Fonkou, Philip Agendia, Ives Kengne, Amougou Akoa, and Jean Nya, “Potentials of Water Lettuce (Pistia stratiotes) in Domestic Sewage Treatment with Macrophytic Lagoon Systems in Cameroon,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Environmental Pollution Control and Waste Management (Tunis, 2002): 709–714, at 711. [↩]
16. Ibid., 712. [↩]
17. Seydou Niang, “Wastewater Treatment Using Water Lettuce for Reuse in Market Gardens (Dakar),” available online at IDRC.ca. [↩]
18. Nader Al Khateeb, “Duckweed Wastewater Treatment and Reuse for Fodder (West Bank),” available online at IDRC.ca. [↩]
19. Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 273–282, at 280. [↩]
20. William Burroughs, Nova Express (1964; New York: Grove Press, 1994), 41. [↩]
21. Ibid., 46. [↩]
22. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 28. [↩]
23. Ibid., 26. [↩]
24. Ibid., 23. [↩]
25. Susan Kraemer, “Israeli Designer Creates a Green Toilet for India’s Slum Dwellers,” Green Prophet, April 21, 2011. [↩]
26. “Toilet!? Human Waste and Earth’s Future” was a 2014 exhibit at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. See http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/spexhibition/toilet/. [↩]