The Origin of Feces

What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and A Sustainable Society

By David Waltner-Toews

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2013 David Waltner-Toews
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-116-6
CHAPTER 1

WHAT FROM THE TONGUE FALLS

Fictional character Tante Tina Wiebe, in a dramatic monologue recounting family stories about Christmas, says that, whatever else has changed about Mennonite culture, the men still walk as if they are “bringing in the cows,” but then laments that

“… maybe too much sometimes what was once on the boots clinging now from the tongue falls …”

Before one can tell a story, one must have words. With words come culture, and with culture come taboos and conflicts, things we don’t talk about, and don’t talk about not talking about, even if we are sitting in a pile of it. If we cannot name “what from the tongue falls,” how can we possibly, seriously, address all the other dimensions of excrement? How can we unleash the incredible power of excrement if we don’t know shit?

Shit is what sociologists and scientists call a wicked problem.

The social planners who introduced the idea of wicked problems in the 1970s differentiated them from what were considered to be the “tame” problems addressed by conventional science. Wicked problems, they asserted, are poorly bounded and contradictory. They are difficult to solve because information is incomplete, or the requirements of those who want the problem solved keep changing. They can be defined from a variety of apparently incompatible perspectives, so that there is neither a definitive problem formulation nor an optimal solution. Worst of all, the solutions to some aspects of the problem may create or reveal other problems.

Many public health and environmental researchers and managers are faced with such wicked problems. For instance, we can get rid of malaria by spraying insecticides and filling in wetlands, and stop the spread of some serious viruses by destroying farm animals and wildlife. The unintended, long-term consequences of these solutions for ecological sustainability, human health, and the livelihood of farmers, however, are worrisome and huge. Another example: let us say — as did Henry IV of seventeenth-century France and the American Republicans of the 1920s — that we aspire to get a “chicken in every pot” at least once a week, with the good intention of improving people’s nutrition. By the 1960s, we discovered that we could do this by creating intensive farms housing millions of animals and by promoting free global trade. But this same strategy also enables the global spread of disease-causing bacteria like Salmonella, and puts millions of small farmers out of business. More data, better tests, more refined laboratory techniques, or more sophisticated modeling will do little to resolve such wicked problems.

What places shit among the wickedest of wicked problems is that, with all the ecological and public health impacts it carries, we don’t even have a good, common language to talk about it. We can use precise technical terms when we want the engineers to devise a solution to a specific organic agricultural and urban waste problem (processing this agglomeration of shit and other waste into what they call biosolids, for instance). In so doing, however, we alienate the public, who are suspicious of words like biosolids. This public will need to pay for the filtration and treatment plants. They suspect that the solution to chicken shit in the water might not be a better filtration plant, but they don’t have the language to imagine and discuss what the alternatives might be. Through the language we use, we sep