Flush, p.39
Flush, page 39
“Aaah!” she yelled in excitement, and we rushed over to take a look. He was right—there were so many that I could see them writhing in the compost and a few dropped through the bottom door. The worms normally exist in a gradient: the most up top and the least down below; they tend to go where the poop is. These had been well fed. “They multiply like crazy,” Sigler said, a bit in awe. More and more kept coming out with the shit-compost, which meant to Sigler that the process was working the way it should, even if it hadn’t entirely finished. She seemed enormously pleased but confided that she was sad as well. This room was always one of her favorite parts of the building tour.
The workers continued to struggle with a stubborn agglomeration of shavings and poop in the midsection of a digester. COVID-19 had disrupted the building’s normal rhythms and the tanks’ regular input, and the mixture hadn’t been stirred as often as it should have. Without the building’s tenants, Sigler told me later, the composting process struggled and became unbalanced. “The shit is like concrete,” Carlton said. He moved on to the tank where the worms had been thriving and sprayed it with a hose to loosen the remaining matter. He grinned as he turned to Sigler, sprayer in hand. “It’s like a colonoscopy!” She laughed.
The water had made the smell noticeably worse. Sharper, more pungent. Kirk held a flashlight for Carlton. “This is where all the magic happens!” he shouted. And then, to no one in particular, “It’s just poop.” Another worker was still grappling with a stopped-up composter. “Someone needs more fiber in their diet!” he yelled, and Carlton grinned at me. The matter finally broke free in big chunks and the crew bundled them off in blue wheelbarrows. Another worker was on a ladder, spraying a hose into a composter from the top. “Boss, I’m trying to clean the ice cream machine!” he joked, and Carlton laughed again: “I never thought I’d be doing this kind of shit for a living,” he told me. Back up in the alleyway, while his workers secured a tarp over the trailer bed, Carlton expanded on the thought. “This is friggin’ disgusting!” But it was a highly profitable business, and he was paying his workers $50 an hour. “I shower in the morning, I shower at night, and laugh all the way to the bank,” he said.
Six weeks later, a crew of four returned to empty the last of the composters. This time, everything went smoothly and Kirk hauled away the contents, which all fit into a single trailer bed hooked up to a white Ford F-350. Less than three hours after they had arrived, they were all gone, with Sigler and I looking on as the Ford turned right and headed toward the freeway.
It could have ended there: an expensive one-off curiosity by a do-gooder foundation in a liberal city. Only it hasn’t. Not yet. The lessons of the Bullitt Center will help revise and refine the composting systems for other living buildings in other cities, where other visitors will ask to see the bathrooms and wonder at how, well, normal they seem. It won’t all go perfectly, but other septic services will help haul away other worm-filled piles of matter that smell and look nothing like the starting material.
In 2018, the Perkins School’s science wing became the first portable classroom to earn a full designation as a living building. The recognition was bittersweet for the SEED Collaborative; after four of its classrooms had sprouted on both coasts of the US, Stacy Smedley and her colleagues announced that they had made the difficult decision to put the project on an indefinite hiatus. They didn’t have the capacity to continue on their own but made their plans open-access, and in those classrooms with the life span of a tree, other children will clamor to use the “magic toilet” that helps feed a garden.
In the Pueblo of Acoma, Jose Antonio moved on from his position in the utility authority, but he and other caretakers have passed down their knowledge to the next generation, one of whom will answer the questions asked by another group of curious visitors.
In adobe towns and modern plyscrapers, in refurbished houseboats and living schools, our collective power has worth. How poetic it would be if more neighborhoods and cities and rural communities could tap into that surprising source of overlooked energy to reassert their dignity, their independence, their health, and their environment. A shittier future is a joyful one, simpler and homelier than the alternative but far more meaningful and innovative and optimistic.
As the planet’s dominant megafauna, we have both the ability and the responsibility to restore and widen circles of value that sync with natural cycles instead of supplanting or suppressing them. Poop isn’t everything we need, but it’s more than enough to start. Shimogoe. Night soil. Humanure. Terra preta. Black gold. Sometimes hope arrives in unexpected packages. We are the couriers now, distributing them across the landscapes that will define our future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR A BOOK THAT CELEBRATES A COLLABORATIVE ACT OF production, it’s only fitting that I start by acknowledging my dear friends and family. Without their support and encouragement, Flush would have remained a lonely kernel of an idea. They have listened to me blather on about it for years without flinching, made donations of pig manure in my honor, shared their own stories about the voluminous output of babies and dogs, and sent touching “Thinking of you” messages that have included links to strange stories about poop. Thank you—you know me well.
My husband has been my human thesaurus, part-time editor, fellow gardener, and beloved chef and travel companion who patiently allowed me to pop into wastewater treatment plants or water reclamation facilities while on vacation and let me discuss the finer points of biosolids over dinner. Geoff instilled in me a love of bird-watching and befriended our pandemic crow companions. He has been there every step of the way and given me the space and support to take on a project like this in an unsettled and uncertain time. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to Russ and Susan Goedde, our dear friends and neighbors who have been enthusiastic cheerleaders from the start. They gamely read early versions of multiple chapters, helped me taste-test beer made from recycled water, and tried out composted biosolids in their own lovely gardens at my request.
The ecosystem that made this all possible extends to my many science and English teachers and professors, who saw my intense curiosity as a feature instead of a bug and who encouraged me to continue exploring both the natural world and the written word. It includes my supportive thesis adviser at the University of Washington, Beth Traxler, who gave me the freedom to be an unconventional graduate student and who rightly understood that I wasn’t throwing my career into the crapper by wanting to be a writer instead of a researcher. At Newsday, my editors and colleagues mentored and nurtured me and gave me incredible opportunities to develop my skills at what was a dream job for a green journalist. Chrissie Giles, my friend and editor at Mosaic, inspired my deep dive into this world of poo with my very first feature story for her, on the rise of fecal transplants.
The science writing community has been another glorious source of encouragement ever since my days at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and I feel immensely lucky to be surrounded by such generous, gifted, and inspiring colleagues. Support groups like SciLance have sustained me over more than a few spells of darkness and self-doubt. A special thanks goes out to Virginia Gewin and Liza Gross, friends and talented writers who offered astute suggestions and advice on key chapters. And here in Seattle, I am deeply indebted to my friend and fellow science writer Michael Bradbury, who went above and beyond with his help on this project. For more than three years, we met regularly as accountability buddies and worked on every step, from finding an agent and publisher to outlining chapters and honing tricky passages.
Flush never would have seen the light of day, of course, had it not been for Anna Sproul-Latimer at Neon Literary, my hilarious and whip-smart agent, who saw something that others didn’t and who helped me shape a half-formed idea into a coherent whole. And I will be forever thankful for Maddie Caldwell, my wonderful editor at Grand Central Publishing, who consistently made everything better with her funny and perceptive guidance and her remarkable ability to be simultaneously kind and razor sharp with needed edits. Jacqueline Young helped me navigate the many twists and turns of the publishing process, and Sarah Congdon designed a gorgeous book cover that perfectly captures the beauty of a swirl of hope and transformation. My top-notch fact-checkers, Lowri Daniels, Hannah Furfaro, and Yvonne McGreevy, were as gracious as they were thorough in questioning every fact and assertion and in pushing me to be as accurate as possible (though I alone am responsible for any remaining errors).
Finally, I want to acknowledge the writers who have helped bring so many stories to light, and the scientists, doctors, engineers, patients, advocates, and others who so generously shared their own stories with me. I couldn’t include them all in this book, but their words and wisdom were crucial in allowing me to weave together a coherent narrative. The many revelations about our inner treasure and collective output have come about only because curious and determined people never stopped looking or asking questions, even when others thought it was gross or pointless or useless. This book is a tribute to all of them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRYN NELSON, PHD, IS AN AWARD-WINNING SCIENCE WRITER and former microbiologist who decided he’d much rather write about microbes than do research on them. Since receiving his doctoral degree from the University of Washington and completing a graduate program in science writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he has accumulated more than two decades of journalism experience. As a staff writer on the Newsday science desk, he covered genetics, stem cell research, evolution, ecology, and conservation, among other fields.
Nelson has written for dozens of other news outlets as well, including the New York Times, NBCNews.com, the Daily Beast, Nature, Mosaic, the BMJ, and Science News for Students. He was a contributing editor for two chapters on microbiology and food safety in the best-selling Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Deadline Club of New York, among other honors. In his spare time, he enjoys photography, singing, travel, and gardening in Seattle, where he lives with his husband, Geoff, and their energetic boxador, Piper.
CREDITS
Parts of chapters 2 and 3 were adapted from “Medicine’s Dirty Secret,” first published April 28, 2014, by Wellcome on mosaicscience.com and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.
Parts of chapter 2 were adapted from “Desperate Love in a Time of Cholera,” first published April 28, 2014, by Wellcome on mosaicscience.com and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.
Parts of chapter 11 were adapted from “Farm to Reef,” first published May 8, 2018, in bioGraphic (biographic.com).
Parts of chapter 12 were adapted from “Inside the Green Schools Revolution,” first published November 4, 2014, by Wellcome on mosaicscience.com and reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.
FURTHER READING
My book has been but a drop in the bucket of scatological studies. Happily, those who want to take a deeper dive can read other works that have examined complementary themes of sanitation, sustainability, and shame-free poop production. Here are a few that deserve attention.
George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. New York: Picador, 2008.
Shafner, Shawn. Know Your Shit: What Your Crap Is Telling You. New York: Cider Mill Press, 2022.
Wald, Chelsea. Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet. New York: Avid Reader, 2021.
Zeldovich, Lina. The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction
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Berendes, David M., Patricia J. Yang, Amanda Lai, David Hu, and Joe Brown. “Estimation of Global Recoverable Human and Animal Faecal Biomass.” Nature Sustainability 1, no. 11 (2018): 679–685.
Chaisson, Clara. “When It Rains, It Pours Raw Sewage into New York City’s Waterways.” National Resources Defense Council. December 12, 2017.
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Chapter One
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