Think Green!

Or so we are all urged to do for the sake of the planet.

But what does that really mean for all of us? Is it really just another way of saying give everything up or can it be something altogether different?

Confused? Frustrated?

Green guru Steve Jones shows you how to get your head straight.

Kitsch. The definition of kitsch, according to Hungarian author and literary colossus Milan Kundera is 'the philosophical denial of the existence of sh*t'. (Or whatever polite word you want to call it). Ha, ha polite! There you go... that's the whole point. We are not supposed to really talk about it, as it is sort of, well, nasty, rude.

An interesting aspect of the Dumped experience, living on the landfill site with no toilets was that the volunteers had to work out what to do with their poo. The answer. Compost it. The law of nature is quite simple: nutrients cycle and when recycled properly they get used again and again. So poo is not actually offensive or something you want to throw away at all. It's a resource, as long as you handle it in the right way and mix it with the right things it quickly breaks down into fertile soil.

Part of the irony is that as soon as you mix poo with water, like in a everyday toilet, it becomes a biological hazard, smelly and able to spread germs. If, instead, you mix it with a generous amount of sawdust or straw, it composts away nicely into something sweet smelling, hazard free and really useful.

Green Key

The key to being green is realising that everything is potentially a resource and that to increase productivity you don’t need more ingredients as it were, you just need to cycle them faster. So if my food is made of carbon, nitrogen and water molecules then so is my poo, therefore the faster we return them to the farmlands, the faster they can be turned back into food again. If you think about it, this is the basic cycle of production, the very basis of what natural systems are all about – it's the key to sustainability: everything cycles.

Along comes man, so smart we are that to increase productivity from our fields we extract nitrates in the form of ammonia from natural gas and make fertiliser which we put on the land to make the crops grow. Because we are adding our nutrients from an external source we no longer value our poo and feel happy to throw it away, pump it out to sea or send it to a huge sewage farm somewhere - anywhere actually where we don't have to think about it any more.

However, the natural gas supply that we make our fertilisers from, like oil, is peaking right about now, the world can’t produce enough of it, fast enough to meet demand and soon total production of it will also fall, leaving us with nothing to put on our fields to keep them fertile. My prediction is that very soon we are going to have to rethink the whole poo situation.

Composting Rules OK

In fact in nature, most creatures are invisible; microbes and bacteria and worms and all those nasty creepy crawly things we would rather not think about. 99% of life is actually the size of a tiny insect or much less, also well over 90% of living things are concerned with composting in some form or other; breaking down big complicated organic molecules back into the basic elements so they can be re-absorbed by plants to start the life cycle again. Everything is busy eating everything else, and breaking it all down back into a basic form that plants can use to grow.

Nature campaigns always focus on the fluffy, cute animals like polar bears or pandas or even dolphins and whales but never microbes and bacteria, where, in fact, they make up most living things and without them there would certainly be no polar bears or any other higher mammal.

So, we could, perhaps, be forgiven for thinking that our own human waste is waste and needs to be thrown away, something to be to be ashamed of and embarrassed about. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a precious resource and one without which we simply cannot survive. Life it seems is, after all, all about poo.

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