How to change the course of human history

For centuries, we have been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality. For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property, and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy, patriarchy, slavery…) but also made possible written literature, science, philosophy, and most other great human achievements.

Almost everyone knows this story in its broadest outlines. Since at least the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it has framed what we think the overall shape and direction of human history to be. This is important because the narrative also defines our sense of political possibility. Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the basic structure of the story.

There is a fundamental problem with this narrative.

It isn’t true.

First published in Eurozine

© David Graeber, David Wengrow / Eurozine

https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/

NA Fund Academy 2016: "We need places where we can fall in love"

In his 1977 lectures "How to live together," Roland Barthes addressed the philosophical problem of the coexistence of individuals through the lens of the everyday: food, things, places… Achieving the utopia of a collective, "idiorhythmic" subject, requires us to overcome arbitrary division as much as to open spaces of shared interests. How can relations of commons be translated into cultural methods to build a convivial society? Can the sense of emplacement give new meaning to our engagement with the global issues of the world? In times of acceleration and separation, intuitive practices of the local and slow life constitute a precious knowledge. A growing number of citizens are becoming involved in a horizontal process of ecological and social "transition" that takes its roots in simple gestures of everyday life: growing food, preserving seeds, bartering knowledge, and building tools of resilience to prepare for the multiple crises that lie at the horizon of our complex, yet fragile systems of organization: debt, peak-oil, anthropogenic climate change, crop yields and a general decline of efficiency rates.

From June 20 to 24, Nature Addicts! Fund will host its fourth mobile academy in the city of Basel, where the fund has a 3-year partnership with Institut Kunst to bring international artists to the new exhibition space Der Tank located within the School of Fine Arts, FHNW Academy of Art and Design .

Curated by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, the academy "We need places where we can fall in love" invites 12 emerging European artists to debate on the cultural implications of the shift to relationships of places and commons, interact with local "transitioners" who are developing practical alternatives from urban agriculture to local currencies, and look at how issues of rhythm, space, living and working together, are addressed by a number of artistic initiatives in and around the city.

Participants: Inge Ceustermans, Etienne Chambaud, Sjim Hendrix, Valentina Karga, Sophie Krier, Tiphanie Mall, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, Paul Smyth, Julia Stern, Hanes Sturzenegger, Yesenia Thibault-Picazo

Contributors: Ugo Bardi, Béla Bartha, Bastiaan Fricht, Chus Martínez, Mathilde Rosier, Pierre Tandille, Isidor Wallimann, Marilola Wili 

Nature Addicts! Fund was founded in 2011 by Bertrand Jacoberger with the objective of supporting artists and arts organizations concerned with environmental and sustainability issues. The mobile academies hosted by NA Fund aim to bring together emerging artists and researchers from all forms of expression to debate, learn from each other and allow new creative impetus to emerge. The traveling format serves as a source of inspiration as each country, each artistic community has its own unique outlook on the world, influenced by its geographic, political, economic and social situation. In 2012, NA Fund was partner of the commission and conference program "On Seeds and Multi-species Intra-Action" at dOCUMENTA (13). In 2013 and 2014, Le Centquatre Paris was funded in a partnership that saw five artists benefit from residencies, productions and exhibitions. In 2015, NA Fund gathered ten critics, curators and scholars in Venice to discuss perspectives and needs of artistic research in the anthropocene.

June 20–24, 2016

Basel

Switzerland

http://na-natureaddictsfund.org/

Melt with us

“The refuse between mind and matter is a mine of information” Robert Smithson

duskin drum, "Exotic fluids for everyday desires," 2013

One of the key concepts conveyed by permacultural practice is the reimagining of that which is in-between the barriers of a human built world: roads, fences, buildings. In permaculture, borders and edges are encounter sites where translation and adaptation between species encourages diversity and resiliency.

We humans also have edges. (1) We participate in multiple encounters and translations with the edges of other bodies within context-suffused mediums called “environments.”

The seed bomb is a permacultural meme that intensifies awareness of this participation. Popularized by microbiologist and farmer Yasunobu Fukuoka (2) and the New York’s Urban Guerrillas circa 1973, seed bombs, a mix of seeds and compost rolled into damp mud balls, were also used by prehistoric farmers. Because seeds are lightweight, their mix facilitates distribution and germination by providing weight and protective cover; tossed over a border or fence, the ball, grenade, or bomb waits until rain melts it into the ground. As the seeds swell and cotyledons emerge, seedlings are supported by microbes and the chemistry of root and soil. (3) An amalgam of seeds, fungi, microbe and ground becomes a manifesto for the fullness of in-between.

read more at http://joaap.org/issue9/drumlewison.htm

text by duskin drum and Sarah Lewison

The staple crops in El Cerrito

El Cerrito, San Miguel County, New Mexico. The staple crops in El Cerrito are corn, beans and alfalfa, 1941.

A farmer's house locked between three major highways

 A farmer's house locked between three major highways, China, 2009.

http://news.sina.com.cn/s/2009-02-24/040017274052.shtml   

Department of Islands

Drawing on his studies of art, sociology and agroecology, García-Dory rethinks the role of the artist as cultural producer addressing the intersection of culture and nature within related contexts: landscape, the rural, identity, crisis and utopia. In AGORA, Fernando García-Dory presents recent progress in the Department of Islands, a project which he began working in 2009 in an ongoing collaboration with members of A Whale’s Architects and Valentina Karga. This ongoing intervention project focuses on Pacific, Carribean and Mediterranean islands as semi-enclosed ecosystems that become the setting of the classic neo-liberal drama in which local economies succumb to the promissory spectacle of a worldly paradise.

Panel Participants:

Tania Bruguera (Artist)

Efstratios Charchalakis (President of the Domestic Property Committee of the Greek islands Kythera and Antikythera)

Valentina Karga (Architect and Artist, fellow of the Graduate School of the Univesity of the Arts, Berlin)

Iris Lykourioti (Co-founder of A Whale’s architects Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly)

Tzanos Mavrikos (Student of the Department of Physics, University of Athens, Owner of a livestock unit of Agrotourism in Skyros Island)

Thanos Michalis (Student of the Department of Architecture, University of
Athens)

Sept.29, 2013 @ 3:30 – 5:00

Agora,4^th Athens Biennale

http://fernandogarciadory.com

http://www.a-whale-s-architects.net

Mother Earth Magazine

The first issue of the “Mother Earth News”, USA, 1970.

Nothing biblical in factory farming

Something has gone badly wrong in relations between human beings and other animals, and it is not just animal welfare and animal rights organisations that say so. Large swathes of the public are troubled too.

Even people who take their lead from Genesis, from its assurance that God has granted us dominion over the beasts in order to feed ourselves, suffer nagging doubts whether factory farming and a food industry operating on an industrial scale to turn living animals into what are euphemistically called ''animal products'', are quite what God had in mind.



So it is not unreasonable that animal rights organisations are increasingly seeking to give voice to the (by definition) voiceless victims of the food industry, targeting factory farming, while not ignoring other practices - the use of animals in laboratory experiments, for example, or the trade in wild animals, or the fur trade - that might equally be condemned as cruel and inhuman.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century.

Since that time we have already had one warning, loud and clear, that there is something deeply, even cosmically wrong, about using industrial methods to kill fellow creatures on an industrial scale.

In the middle of the 20th century a group of Germans had the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the processing - of human beings.

When, belatedly, we found out what the Nazis had been up to, we cried out in horror. ''What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle.'' we cried out. ''If we had only known beforehand.''

But our cry should more accurately have been: ''What a terrible crime, to treat living human beings like units in an industrial process.''

And our cry might have had a postscript: ''What a terrible crime, come to think of it, to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.''

Animal protection groups work for the amelioration of the conditions under which animals spend their lives. In a longer time frame, some work towards the elimination of factory farming.

In the case of Voiceless, the animal protection group founded by the Sherman family in 2004, this is done not by direct action but by persuasion. Its persuasive efforts are directed at the vast majority of the public who know and don't know that there is something bad going on, something that stinks to high heaven. It offers such people practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they die.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon, very new indeed in the history of animal husbandry. The good news is that, after decades of untrammelled expansion, the industry has been forced on to the defensive. The activities of organisations such as Voiceless have shifted the onus on to the industry to justify its practices; and because its practices are indefensible and unjustifiable except on narrow economic grounds, the industry is battening down its hatches and hoping the storm will blow itself out. Thus, in so far as there was a public relations war, the industry has already lost the war.

The task of animal rights organisations is to show ordinary people that there are alternatives to the animal-products industry, that these alternatives need not involve sacrifices in health and nutrition, that there is no reason why these alternatives need be costly, and furthermore that the sacrifices they are being called on to make are not really sacrifices at all - that the only sacrifices in the whole scenario are being made by non-human animals.

In this regard, children provide the brightest hope. Given half a chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard them (the happy chooks that are magically transformed into succulent nuggets). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child into a lifelong vegetarian.

Text by J. M. Coetzee, The Sydney Morning Herland, 5 dec.2011
Source:www.smh.com.au

The 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature J. M. Coetzee is patron of Voiceless and chairman of the judging panel of the Voiceless Writing Prize sponsored by Australian Ethical Investment. The Herald is media partner of the prize, which seeks to advance public understanding of the relationship between humans and animals.
voiceless.org.au

Wonderland

Balam Bartolomé, Wonderland I 10 x 15 in.

Focus on Hunger: Interview with Vandana Shiva

Everything about world hunger is unfair. The fact that there are nearly 1 billion people starving in the world right now speaks to the vast amounts of injustice that our global system is built on. That 1 out of 6 human beings goes to bed hungry every night while there is more than enough food to feed everyone generously, seems to me the very definition of unfair. When I began my first exploration of world hunger last May, the endless stream of inequality and injustice was enough to make me want to scream. But out of all of the rage inducing facts and statistics, the one that haunts me the most, that makes me lose sleep at night, that I still find hard to believe, is that the people who grow the world’s food, our farmers, are some of the most likely to experience hunger.

In our world, farmer means woman. 80% of the developing world’s food supply, and 60% of the world’s food in total, is grown by women’s hands. Women plant, nurture, and harvest the food we all need to survive, yet they own less than 1% of all farmland, and are generally the last to eat. 70% of those suffering from chronic poverty and hunger are women and girls. They feed us, and while we eat they starve. The industrialization of our food system has led us to a place where we are now so removed from the food we eat that most of us barely know what’s in it, let alone where it came from or who grew it. What kind of life did she live? Was she well fed, able to enjoy the literal fruits of her labor? Or was she drowning in debt, a slave to the chemical and agricultural companies that have quickly devoured our world? Was she able to protect her land and grow her food in the way her mother and grandmothers did for centuries before her? Or has she been forced to pollute her land and her body with the genetically engineered seeds that promise so much, while yielding so very, very little? How much do we know about our food and the people who grow it? Why are they always the last to eat?

In India, 75% of people make their living by farming, and 60% of those farmers are women. These women plow the fields and raise our food, and yet their harvest is being stolen. In 1994, the completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) legitimized corporate growth based on harvests stolen from nature and people. The WTO’s agricultural agreements and ‘free’ trade policies allow transnational corporations that do not grow the food or work the land to make super profits off of the small farmers and their back breaking labor. The WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement made seed-saving and seed-sharing a criminal act, disrupting millennia old traditions practiced in agricultural communities throughout the world. Corporations are now allowed to monopolize the right to a seed, the basic building block of our food security, by claiming it as their exclusive private property. The Agreement on Agriculture legalized the dumping of genetically engineered foods on countries, and criminalized actions taken to protect the biological and cultural diversity on which indigenous food systems are based.

Under World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment mandated reforms, India was forced to radically alter the way food had been grown in the country for centuries. Flashy advertising campaigns assaulted the country and images of gods, goddesses, and saints were used to sell new, hybrid seeds directly to small farmers, even as their land was being devalued, redrawn, and sold out from under them. Once the farmers began to purchase these new corporately ‘owned’ seeds they discovered they were highly vulnerable to pests, fungi, and weeds. Encouraged by their government and the corporations, the farmers bought the necessary corporate owned pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides on credit, comforted with the knowledge that these new seeds would produce yields so large they could repay their debts and have money to spare. Unfortunately, the new seeds were a dismal, drastic failure and crops failed throughout the country. Farmers were left with barren fields, polluted waterways, sky high debts, and empty bellies. Since 1997 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves, many by drinking the toxic pesticides that were supposed to save their crops. This cycle of debt and loss and more debt and more loss has been termed the ‘suicide economy’ and has created millions of chronically hungry and debt enslaved people throughout India.



Not only does this suicide economy lead to debt and impoverishment created hunger, it also destroys a region’s ancient biodiversity by creating huge swathes of lifeless monocrops in its place. The promises of ‘life science’ corporations like Monsanto are that they will feed the world through their genetically engineered seeds and the resulting higher crop yields. However, the opposite has been true. They have, in fact, created hunger on an unimaginable scale. Whatever higher yields they have been able to display are offset by the fact that they require massively higher inputs. Traditional farming practices have always been highly productive as they utilize a close looped cycle of animal integrated perennial and annual polycultures. When resource use is taken into account, the ‘advancements’ of the Green Revolution is obviously counterproductive and grossly inefficient. More and more land is needed to create adequate harvests under the new methods, along with more water, more money, more time, more effort, all of it for slightly more food, and far more hunger.

“However, this phenomenon of the stolen harvest is not unique to India. It is being experienced in every society, as small farms and small farmers are pushed to extinction, as monocultures replace biodiverse crops, as farming is transformed from the production of nourishing and diverse foods into the creation of markets for genetically engineered seeds, herbicides, and pesticides. As farmers are transformed from producers into consumers of corporate-patented agricultural products, as markets are destroyed locally and nationally but expanded globally, the myth of ‘free-trade’ and the global economy becomes a means for the rich to rob the poor of their right to food and even their right to life.” Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest

It was in this environment, to fight these wrongs, that world renowned global south activist, physicist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva created Navdanya. Founded in 1984, Navdanya is providing an alternative to the modern global food system by promoting biodiversity conservation, farmer’s rights, and organic farming methods, with an emphasis on seed saving. Navdanya means nine crops, in reference to the nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security, and it is this self-sufficient food security that it hopes to preserve. Over the past 26 years, Navdanya has created an ever expanding alternative to the culture of death and debt pushed by the transnational corporations. Dedicated to the preservation of nature and the people’s right to knowledge, water, and food, Navdanya promotes global peace and justice through the conservation, renewal, and rejuvenation of the gifts of biodiversity. Navdanya has helped to create 54 community seed banks throughout India with the intent to rescue and conserve crops that are being pushed to extinction by monoculture farming practices. 3,000 varieties of native rice, 12 genera of cereals and millets, 16 genera of legumes, and 50 genera of vegetables have so far been saved due to their efforts. More than 500,000 farmers have been trained in organic and sustainable farming methods and more than 50 international courses have been offered on biodiversity, food, biopiracy, water, globalization, business ethics and more. Navdanya focuses on empowering local farmers to resist patents on seeds, and struggles to keep India free from GMO crops by recognizing humanity’s inherent right to food, water, and seed sovereignty.

One of Navdanya’s specific goals is to empower women and to keep food security in their hands through a network of women’s producer groups (Mahila Anna Swaraj). Navdanya views women as the caretakers of biodiversity, the providers of food security, and the conservationists of the cultural diversity of food traditions. By keeping women’s food knowledge and expertise alive they hope to guarantee food security for generations to come. Navdanya’s gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, works on a local, national, and international level as a global campaign for women to resist monoculture monopolies and celebrate food security and biodiversity. Leaders in the food justice movement around the world recognize that it is women who hold the key to fighting the global hunger crisis, and it is this topic that I wanted to focus on in my interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Burge: In 1998, India was forced to open up its seed and farming sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta by the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies. Can you explain how it is not natural disasters like drought and famine that cause the majority of hunger, but man-made economic policies like these? Why must a resistance to globalization form such a necessary part of food security and bio-diversity?

Shiva: The main causes for hunger are industrial agriculture and globalised trade in food. Industrial agriculture creates hunger both by destroying the natural capital for producing food and locking farmers into debt because of its high cost of production. Globalised trade creates hunger by diverting fertile land for exports, promoting dumping and unleashing speculative forces. In industrial agriculture and globalisation also contribute 40% to green house gas emissions that are leading to climate change which in turn is destroying agriculture and food security. The rules of globalisation both in the structural adjustment programmes of the world bank and the free trade rules of WTO promote industrialisation and trade liberalisation. Resisting such corporate globalisation is necessary for food security and biodiversity.

Burge: Since 1997, 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide after being forced into inescapable debt by pesticide and seed companies, in what has been termed a ‘suicide economy’. Do you think this kind of unending debt is a political tool consciously designed to keep the people powerless and desperate, or is it simply an unintended tragic consequence of misguided economic policies?

Shiva: The corporations and governments that are designing high costs agriculture systems to maximise corporate profits are simultaneously designing the debt trap for small farmers. This debt trap is what is leading to farmers suicides. Pushing small farmers to extinction is very much part of the corporate design of industrial farmer. It is not merely an unintended consequence. As a US agriculture policy person said: “farmers must be squeezed of the land like the last bit of toothpaste is squeezed out of the toothpaste tube”.

Burge: What do you say to critics who claim that with the global population nearing 7 billion people we need industrial agriculture and genetically modified foods to feed everyone?

Shiva: Industrial agriculture actually reduces nutrition per acre since it destroys the biodiversity which maximises nutrition per acre. Industrial agriculture is artificially projected as being productive through the monoculture of the mind and a focus on the monoculture yield of handful of globally traded commodities. That is why hunger and malnutrition has grown in direct proportion to the spread of industrial agriculture. As far as genetic engineering is concerned, it is a not a yield increasing technology. It has only put Bt. toxin genes into plant or genes for resisting toxic herbicide. This has increased the yield of toxins not of food. The Union of Concerned Scientist report “Failure to Yield” and Navdanya’s reports “Seeds of Suicide” and “Biodiversity Based Productivity : A New Paradigm for Food Security” have the data that shows that genetic engineering has not contributed to increase in production.

Burge: Women grow the majority of the world’s food and 60% of India’s farmers are women. Women also make up 70% of the world’s chronically hungry people. Why is it that women, the people who grow the majority of the world’s food, are the last to eat?

Shiva: Just as farmers who grow the food are the largest number of hungry people in the world, women who produce and process food constitute the majority of malnourished people. The denial of food to the producers of food is a result of the injustice built into industrial food systems and social discrimination.

Burge: Navdanya calls itself a ‘women centered movement’, holds female heritage learning and preservation classes known as Grandmothers’ University, and has a gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, that is a global campaign of women advocating for bio-diversity and food security. Could you tell us why it was so important for Navdanya to focus on the empowerment of women? Why do you consider the partnership of ecology and feminism to be a partnership of liberation?

Shiva: The dominant model of agriculture has come out of capitalist patriarchy and is based on war. These wars begin as wars in the mind, become wars against the earth, and result in wars against our body. Women need to lead the movement for a non-violent food system because they have not been part of the war economy. Grandmothers hold the heritage of non-violent knowledge which protects the earth and our health.

Burge: In your book Stolen Harvest you describe a ‘hijacking of the global food supply’, as corporations that do not grow the food or work the land reap the obscene profits of the farmers’ labor. When people are kept so poor they can barely feed themselves, and the multinational corporations are unimaginably powerful and wealthy, how can the common people find the resources to stand up to this injustice?

Shiva: Since each of us eats everyday food can become the site of a revolution for justice. If we say no to GM foods, if we commit ourselves to eating organic, we build another food system which is controlled by people and not by giant corporations.

Burge: In describing the implementation of ‘free-trade’ policies upon an unwilling population, you have said that the moment the will of the people is ignored it becomes a dictatorship. In light of the unfathomable levels of violence being perpetrated against an almost powerless population (and at a time when an agricultural company like Monsanto hires the services of the private army Blackwater), why do you and Navdanya remain committed to a non-violent resistance strategy?

Shiva: We in Navdanya stay committed to non-violent resistance strategy because it has more power and more resilience.

Burge: The women you work with through Navdanya’s various programs and Diverse Women for Diversity often have their lives profoundly changed when they are given the tools and resources for self-empowerment. Can you tell us of an instance when you saw a woman, a family, or a community transformed?

Shiva: Twenty years ago, a women called Bija came to me to find work as domestic help. Bija means the seed and I asked her if she would help me in Seed Saving and she immediately agreed. For two decades Bija has worked as Navdanya seed keeper. She holds classes for scientists on the conservation of biodiversity, she received the Slow Food Biodiversity Award on behalf of Navdanya in Porto Portugal in 2001. The potential Bija achieved is the potential in every peasant woman and it is this potential Navdanya seeks to unleash.

Burge: What kind of future is envisioned by the women of Diverse Women for Diversity? How will a world premised on food security, bio-diversity, and sustainability look?

Shiva: The future envisioned by Diverse Women for Diversity is a future in which every species and every person has space to evolve to their highest potential, live in mutuality with each other and create a world of peace, justice, and sustainability.

Burge: How can we in developed Western nations stand in solidarity with the women in India and throughout the world who are facing chronic hunger and poverty, and assist them in their struggle?

Shiva: There are three ways in which you can support our work. You can support our programs by making donations to Navdanya. You can attend our courses at Bija Vidyapeeth – The School of the Seed and visit our programs on seed saving and organic farming as solutions to hunger. You can spread the principles on which our work is based.

“Women were, really, in my view, the ones who domesticated plants, created agriculture. And as long as women were controlling agriculture, agriculture produced real food. Agriculture was based on [women's learned and passed on] knowledge. A Women’s centered agriculture never created scarcity. As long as women controlled the food system you did not have a billion people going without food and you didn’t have 2 billion going obese and w/diabetes. This is the magic of patriarchy having taken over the food system. Earlier, patriarchy left food to women, modern patriarchy wants to control food . . . women’s knowledge has been removed from agriculture . . .we can only have a secure food culture if women come back into agriculture.” Vandana Shiva

Text by Natasha Burge
Written on October 12, 2010
Source: cchronicle.com, foodfreedom.wordpress.com

Farming the kibbutz land

Kibbutz workers (Caption: Farming the kibbutz land / Credit: Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem

My parents 'made aliya' soon after World War I. They were to be chalutzim – builders of the land. Wherever work was needed, they would be there. Whatever the work would be, they would do it. They would help create in the Land of Israel a new type of society – one based on equality, cooperation and justice. They joined up with other similarly motivated young Jews. Calling themselves 'G'dudei Ha'Avoda' (Workers' Brigades) they paved roads, drained swamps and undertook other strenuous work. When construction workers were needed in Jerusalem their group moved there and set up camp in an empty lot. My father quickly learned to quarry stone and my mother became a plasterer.

Not long after I was born, the group erected a kibbutz on a lonely hill south of Jerusalem. The kibbutz was called Ramat Rachel because it overlooks the grave of the biblical Rachel.

Tamar Caspi, Kibbutznik

Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming

Flushing the water closet is handy, but it wreaks ecological havoc, deprives agricultural soils of essential nutrients and makes food production dependent on fossil fuels.

For 4,000 years, human excrements and urine were considered extremely valuable trade products in China, Korea and Japan. Human dung was transported over specially designed canal networks by boats.

Thanks to the application of human "waste" products as fertilizers to agricultural fields, the East managed to feed a large population without polluting their drinking water. Meanwhile, cities in medieval Europe turned into open sewers. The concept was modernized in late 19th century Holland, with Charles Liernur's sophisticated vacuum sewer system.

The innocent looking water closet breaks up a natural cycle in our food supply. Basically, it turns extremely valuable resources into waste products. When we grow crops, we withdraw essential nutrients from the soil: potassium, nitrogen and phosphate, to name but the most important. During the greater part of human history, we recycled these nutrients through our bodies and returned them to the soil, via excreta, food trimmings and the burial of dead. Today, we flush them mostly into the sea



This is problematic and unsustainable, for three main reasons.

To start, dumping sewage in rivers, lakes and seas kills fish and makes fresh water undrinkable. This can only be avoided by extending the water closet and the already very costly sewerage network with an equally expensive infrastructure of sewage stations (which does not completely eliminate the detrimental effect on water life).

Secondly, we need artificial fertilizers to keep our soil fertile. In 2008, almost 160 million tonnes of inorganic fertilizers were used worldwide (1 & 2). Without these, our agricultural soils would lose their fertility in just a few years time, followed by an inevitable collapse of food production and human population. A third problem is that the water closet logically consumes large quantities of fresh water to flush everything "away".

Water closets are energy-intensive

Fresh water production, the construction and maintenance of sewers, the treatment of sewage (and sewage sludge), and the production of inorganic fertilizers are all energy-intensive processes. Nitrogen (which makes up more than half of total fertilizer consumption) is abundantly available in air, but to convert it to a useful form the gas has to be heated and pressurized. The energy for this (polluting) process is delivered by natural gas or (in China) by coal plants.

Potassium and phosphate have to be mined (up to depths of several thousands of feet) and transported. It takes more than 150 million tonnes of phosphate rock to produce our current yearly supply of 37 million tonnes of phosphate fertilizer, and 45 million tonnes of potash ore to produce 25 million tonnes of potassium fertilizer. Both operations are energy intensive and pollute the environment.




Moreover, while potassium is widely distributed and abundantly available (we have enough economically obtainable reserves to last 700 years at our current consumption rate), phosphorus is not. Ninety percent of global phosphate reserves are only found in a handful of countries, and economically recoverable reserves large enough to meet agricultural demand are estimated to last for only 30 to 100 years. Reserves are much larger if mining phosphates from the seabed is included, but this would be extremely energy-intensive, further deterioriating the sustainability of the food and sanitation system.

The only way to get nutrients from sea to land is via marine bird droppings - which is of course in very short supply - or by eating fish or seafood. However, once we have digested our fish and chips, the nutrients filter down to the sea via the sewer network.


A sign of civilization

The existence of the water closet and the accompanying sewer system is seldom questioned. It is viewed as an obvious technology and generally regarded as a sign of civilization - countries that do not have such a system today are considered retarded or backward. The reason for this is because we have been conditioned to believe that the water closet and the sewer system are the only alternatives to stench and disease.

Following the demise of the Roman Empire (with its early sewers and water closets) and right up to the end of the nineteenth century, the concentrated and unorganised distribution of human excrements in groundwater, city canals and rivers brought recurrent deadly epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever throughout the western world. These were caused by drinking water contaminated with faeces. People answered nature's call on the streets or emptied their honey buckets in backyards, open courtyards, badly sealed cesspools or surface waters - methods that were not conducive to healthy living in densely populated cities. Water closet and sewer system have solved this, at least in the rich world, and nobody wants to go back to the miserable hygienic conditions of those times.


Chinese agriculture

However, as obvious as it seems to us today, the water closet is not the only possible answer to the problem of sanitation. There are other, much more sustainable methods to separate human waste from drink water supplies. To start with, the grim sanitary conditions of the Middle Ages and the early Industrial Revolution were a purely western phenomenon. At the turn of the twentieth century in the East, the water in Chinese rivers was safe to drink.




The Chinese were as numerous as the Americans and Europeans at the time, and they had large, densely populated cities, too. The difference was that they maintained an agricultural system that was based on human "waste" as a fertilizer. Stools and urine were collected with care and discipline, and transported over sometimes considerable distances. They were mixed with other organic waste, composted and then spread across the fields (illustration on the right).

That's killing two birds with one stone: no pollution of drinking water, and an agricultural system that could have lasted forever. In fact, it did last 4,000 years, which is considerably longer than even our most abundant resource - potassium, with 700 years of reserves - will allow.

The Chinese agricultural system, which was also applied in Korea and Japan, is extensively described in "Farmers of Forty Centuries", a report of a study trip by the American soil scientist F.H. King. The book was published in 1911, around the time of the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process that would lead to the breakthrough of cheap artificial nitrogen fertilizer. King devoted an entire chapter to the collection and use of human fertilizer by the Asians. Joseph Needham also gives an account of the method, in volume VI:2 of "Science and civilization in China", citing various earlier sources. More recently, Duncan Brown talks about the Chinese system in his book "Feed or Feedback: Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet".

Dung traders

When King visited China, the population was estimated at about 400 million adult inhabitants, compared to some 400 million inhabitants in Europe and 100 million inhabitants in the US. The stools and urine of those 400 million people were collected in terracotta jars, with air-tight seals. The matter was gathered from every home, from the tiny country villages to the great cities. In some cities, special canal networks and boats were constructed for this purpose (picture below). This was the case in Hankow-Wuchang-Hanyang, for example, a city with almost 1.8 million inhabitants living in an area of only 6.5 square kilometres. You could thus argue that the Chinese did have a water carriage sewer network, though the difference to ours is stark.



Around the time of King's visit, every year in China more than 182,000,000 tonnes of human manure was collected in cities and villages - 450 kilogram (900 pounds) per person per year. This was good for a total of 1,160,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 376,000 tonnes of potassium and 150,000 tonnes of phosphate which was returned to the soil. In 1908 Japan, 23,850,295 tonnes of "humanure" was collected and given back to the soil.



Shanghai traded and distributed the yield of its inhabitants over a specially designed canal network using hundreds of boats (see map on the left, click to enlarge), a trade that brought in 100,000s of dollars every year. Human manure was considered a valuable commodity. In 1908, a Chinese business man paid the city 31,000 dollar (this would be more than 700,000 dollars today) to obtain the right to remove 78,000 tonnes of humanure per year from a region of the city to sell it to the farmers on the countryside.

In Japan, which was much more urbanized than China, people paid less rent when they left their landlord better quality excrements. King describes loads of human dung taken from Tokyo and Yokahama "carried on the shoulders of men and on the backs of animals, but most commonly on strong carts drawn by men, bearing six to ten tightly covered wooden containers holding forty, sixty or more pounds each". On the Japanese countryside, it was not unusual to see signs that invited passers-by to please answer nature's call on site. The farmers used the product to manure their fields.

The practice of recycling human dung in Asian countries repelled some foreign visitors. The Portuguese explorer Fernam Mendez Pinto wrote in 1583:

"You must know that in this country there are many of such as make a trade of buying and selling mens Excrements, which is not so mean a commerce among them, but that there are many of them grow rich by it, and are held in good account. They which make a trade of buying it go up and down the streets with certain Clappers, like our Spittle men, whereby they give to understand what they desire without publishing of it otherwise to people, in regard the thing is filthy of itself; whereunto I will adde thus much, that this commodity is so much esteemed among them, and so great a trade driven of it, that into one sea port, sometimes there comes in one tyde two or three hundred Sayls laden with it." (sic)

The 4,000 year old closed-loop system vanished with the arrival of artificial fertilizers, which were imported from the West during the first decades of the twentieth century. Today, China is the largest consumer of inorganic fertilizers with 28 percent of total world consumption. Asia as a whole now uses more than half of the world's artificial fertilizer.

Night soil collection in Europe

The collection of human "waste" also occured in Europe, be it for a much shorter time and on a much smaller scale. The second half of the nineteenth century marked the end of a predominantly agricultural period in Europe; migration to the cities accelerated and the problem of sewage disposal got much worse.

At the same time, health experts started to realize that cholera and typhoid fever were the consequences of drinking contaminated water. Since agriculture was increasingly short of animal manure, it appeared that both problems could be solved at the same time. The first system, which was set up in several countries and cities, is generally known as "night soil" collection and reminds of the Asian method.

Dung and urine were accumulated in movable wooden receptacles beneath the privy seat and mixed with earth, ashes or charcoal to prevent offensive odours. Night soil collectors came by at more or less regular intervals (mostly at night, hence the name) to pick up the merchandise. See picture above (source) and below (source).




This happened either by emptying the full tubs into a cart and giving them back immediately (which meant the cleansing had to be done by the users), or by placing the full tubs in a wagon, switching them for fresh ones (which meant the cleansing had to be done by the scavengers). The empty tubs were replaced under the privy seat, and the cargo was transported via horse and cart to a collection point outside the city. There it was converted into compost for use in agriculture.


Unfortunately, the collection and transport of the waste was not as reliable, efficient and sanitary as was the case in China, Korea or Japan. All was good when air-tight containers were used, but this was not always done. When open carts were applied, the transport caused waste and foul smell (see the 19th century cartoon below, source). Sewage was spilled while carrying the tubs down the stairs and while emptying them into the carts. Moreover, the collection did not always happen that frequently, especially in poorer neighbourhoods.

Nevertheless, the wooden tub system was an improvement over the comparitive disorder of nightsoil collection in Europe. Throughout the Middle Ages, so-called dung farmers gathered human and animal excrements from streets, backyards and cesspools and sold these to farmers who applied them to their fields. The problem was that these scavengers needed to collect enough dung before they could sell a cartload. Duncan Brown cites Cipolla, who describes the situation concisely:

"The most pathetically tragic aspect of this business was that of the people, whose poverty was so abject that they collected the manure they found in the streets where they kept it [at their homes] until they had accumulated a sufficient quantity to sell."



There were exceptions, notably in Flanders, where an organized nightsoil collecting system that reminds of the Chinese method was set up as early as the Middle Ages. Around the town of Antwerp, the management of organic wastes (human excrements, dung of city horses, pigeon dung, canal mud and food scraps) had become a significant industry by the 16th century. By the 18th century there were great stores along the river the Schelde where the excrements from Dutch towns were transported by barge.

The vacuum sewers of Charles Liernur

A second collection method was pioneered by Dutch engineer Charles Liernur in 1866 (patent - pdf). His vacuum sewer system combined the comfort of today's water carriage sewer network with the ecological and manurial advantages of the earlier scavenging methods. A closet inside every home was connected to an underground small diameter pipeline infrastructure, and the stools and urine immediately left the house following deposition.

The crucial difference with today's technology, however, was that the Liernur system did not use water but atmospheric pressure as a transport medium. This meant that it avoided the dilution of the manure by the admixture of water, thus preserving its value as a fertilizer - which was Liernur's explicit intention. On the other hand, the vacuum sewer system did away with the need for scavengers to visit every house, lugging around buckets of poo and pee, and disturbing everyone's sleep. It was a clear improvement on the night soil systems, including the one used in Asia.



Several Dutch cities were equipped with the Liernur system: Leiden in 1871, Amsterdam in 1872 and Dordrecht in 1874. Initially, only a couple of thousand homes were connected to the vacuum sewer network, but in Amsterdam the system was expanded substantially. At the end of the nineteenth century, about 90,000 Amsterdam inhabitants were linked to the Liernur sewer network, some 20 percent of the population. In Amsterdam and Leiden, the system remained in operation for almost 40 years. The Liernur system was also introduced on a smaller scale in Prague (Czech republic), Trouville sur Mer (France), Hanau (Germany) and Stansed (England). The system in Trouville, installed in 1892, was operated until 1987 (source, pdf). Today, the method is still being used in ships, trains and airplanes.

The French designed their own version of the Liernur system - the Berlier system. It was introduced in 1880 for a trial period in Lyon, where it successfully removed sewage over a distance of four kilometres (2.5 miles). In 1881, a five kilometre network was introduced for trial in a Paris neighbourhood. The French took the trials very seriously: the sewage was observed by placing glass pipes at various points. The Berlier system, which was technically superior to the Liernur system, worked flawlessly: the thousand soldiers in the barracks of Pépinière, where it was in operation, were the only troops in Paris that were not affected by a serious typhoid epidemic.

The arrival of the water closet

In spite of the technical success, the Berlier system never ascended beyond the experimental stage. The Dutch Health Advisory Board advised a general, national introduction of the Liernur system in 1873, following the successful operation in Amsterdam, but this did not happen either. Liernur designed plans for other cities in Europe (Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Munchen, Stuttgart and Zurich) and in the US (Baltimore), but these were never realised.

There were several reasons why the pneumatic systems did not became the standard sewerage systems of today. Firstly, there was the arrival of the water closet and the waterworks. In the Netherlands, a growing number of people connected a water closet to the Liernur system, diluting the stools and urine in such a matter that their agricultural value declined considerably.

Even before this happened, the sale of the sewage for use as manure did not give the profits that were expected. Health experts advanced that profits should not be the first aim of a sanitary system, but the problem was that Liernur himself had stressed financial profits as an important advantage of his system. This had attracted investors, and they promptly left the technology behind when they started to lose money.

An important problem, not only in the Netherlands but throughout the western world, was the growing size of cities. Both the night soil system and the more sophisticated methods were eventually beaten by the logistics of maintaining the practice in huge cities supported by far away farms. The last blow for the vacuum sewer system was the appearance of inorganic fertilizers after a cheap production method was found in 1910. The shortage of fertilizers in agriculture was "solved".

Because cities had started building water carriage systems for the discharge of storm drain water, the next logical step was to allow the discharge of sewage via the same network. Basically, this was a step backwards: excrements were again drained on surface waters, not necessarily in the immediate surroundings but a few miles further downstream. It took another 70 years before sewage stations became (relatively) common in the rich world.
Only three future possibilities

If we want to restore the natural cycle of our food supply, there are only three technological possibilities. We could develop a modern variant of the scavenging method using composting toilets, in which the stools are collected from individual homes together with other organic waste products. Urine could go to a separate tank that is emptied once a year by a tanker (this method exists in some Dutch and Swedish residential areas where people use so-called urine separation closets). Or, we could develop a modern variant of the Liernur or Berlier system, in which the sewage is collected automatically, but without the use of water.

Vacuum sewer systems have found a limited application in some new housing estates since the 1960s and 1970s. A few hundred systems are in operation in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, the Maledives, Southern Africa and the Middle East (overview). The installation of a vacuum sewer system is twice as cheap as the construction of a traditional sewer system. A vacuum system is also faster to construct and easier to maintain: it consists of much smaller diameter tubes that have to be laid less deep into the ground - a narrow trench in the road-surface suffices.

There is a third techno-fix, but it is many times more expensive than the other two: using the diluted sewage from our water carriage system as a fertilizer. Basically, this adds another layer of costly infrastructure and complexity on top of an already very costly and complex system. Diluted sewage not only has to be dried, but also purified. This is because sewage sludge does not only contain human waste but also many other (including toxic) waste resources, both from households and factories.

Interestingly, when we remove urine and excrements from the sewer system, we might as well eliminate the water carriage sewer system altogether, further obtaining substantial cost and energy savings. There are workable alternatives for the removal of storm water (basically reducing paved surface) and for the local treatment and re-use of grey water.

Composting

Human faeces and urine can only be used as a fertilizer following further treatment. This was an already known fact by early Chinese agricultural writers, who warned that untreated humanure could "burn and kill plants, rot the shoots and harm human hands and feet". Today we know it also carries more severe health risks. F.H. King and Joseph Needham praise the composting efforts of the early Chinese, who often combined their privy with the family pigsty (see illustration below). However, Duncan Brown is more critical of their composting techniques. The health advantages that the Chinese gained by keeping their drinking water supplies clean, were partly offset by the transmission of diseases via food crops:




"Gastro-intestinal diseases were endemic throughout the region. In Korea and Japan, fluke diseases were common because of the practice of eating raw fish grown in ponds fertilized with human excrement. But those diseases could have been largely avoided with a better understanding of their nature and modes of transmission. If properly used, devices like the relatively modern sceptic tank, the more modern oxidation tank or the so-called composting toilet can avoid the danger of gastro-intestinal diseases previously associated with the use of human excrement as manure."



A process of composting should always come first, and this can happen in two ways. The first - slow composting - is a do-it-yourself technique that is explained in the "Humanure Handbook", an online practical guide by Joseph Jenkins (who coined the term 'humanure'). Slow composting happens at low temperatures and takes about one year in a moderate climate. To be secure, most say the resulting (odourless) compost should only be used for growing crops where there is no direct contact between food and fertilizer (like fruit trees) and for inedible plants (flowers, houseplants).




The second method is composting at high temperatures, which goes much faster and results in a fertilizer that can be applied to any kind of food crop. It is an industrial process, which is being applied successfully in several countries for a number of years. Interestingly, the first step of this process also generates electricity, further improving the sustainability of the whole system. Since 2005, a factory of the Dutch company Orgaworld composts diapers (from babies and elderly) together with many other kinds of organic waste. It is a high-tech process that takes about 6 weeks and results in a high-quality compost, free from pathogens, medicines and hormones. The company has also built two factories in Canada and is building plants in the UK.

Can we feed the world using humanure?

Can we produce enough natural fertilizer to substitute for synthetic nitrogen and mined potassium and phosphates? According to the figures collected by F.H. King, an adult person produces on average 1,135 grams of dung and urine each day. How much nitrogen, potassium and phosphates does this contain? That all depends on the diet.

From the China of 100 years ago, King cites different research results, ranging from 2.9 to 6 kilogram (5.8 to 12 pounds) of nitrogen per person per year, 0.9 to 2 kilogram (1.8 to 4 pounds) of potassium per person per year, and 0.4 to 1.5 kilogram (0.8 to 3 pounds) of phosphates per person per year.

At present, the world population is estimated at 6,800,000,000 people. Let's assume they all have a similar diet as the early 20th century Chinese and that the highest figures given by King more closely resemble today's diets (reliable present-day figures are hard to find). This would mean that the total world population could produce 40.8 million tonnes of nitrogen, 14 million tonnes of potassium and 10.4 million of phosphates. Is that enough to eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers? At first sight, no. Today's artificial fertilizer production is:

* 99.9 million tonnes of nitrogen, or more than double the amount that all people could possibly produce (40.8 million tonnes)
* 37 million tonnes of phosphates, almost 4 times the amount that all people could produce (14 million tonnes)
* 25.8 million tonnes of potassium, or more than 1.8 times the amount that all people could produce (10.4 million tonnes)

Livestock

However, we humans have "outsourced" a considerable amount of dung production to farm animals. A large amount of artificial fertilizer is used to produce livestock feed. These animals produce much more manure than all the people on the planet. Livestock excreta in 2004 were estimated to contain 125 million tonnes of nitrogen and 58 million tonnes of phosphates (there are no figures for potassium, which we will further ignore). That's 3 times more nitrogen and 6 times more phosphates than can be found in humanure.

Animals played a minor role in the Chinese humanure-based agricultural economy, but the European farmers in the Middle Ages relied heavily upon livestock for manure, which was their main fertilizer. Animal manure was never wasted. Joseph Needham cites Fussell:

"European farmers of the 15th to 17th centuries, both high and low, had one main worry, manure. They dared not neglect any source of supply, however minute, for the success of every crop they grew depended largely on the amount they could accumulate for use. They were willing to undertake the labours of Hercules to build a sufficient dunghill".



There are many good reasons to cut back on meat consumption, both for our health and for the environment - livestock production is also the main driver of deforestation (in its turn a major driver of soil degradation).

However, if we don't want to give up our high meat consumption, the least we should do is "to undertake the labours of Hercules to build a sufficient dunghill".

It would not only save us the effort to produce an ever increasing amount of artificial fertilizers, but it would also stop the devastating ecological consequences of dumping 91 million tonnes of nitrogen and 49 million tonnes of phosphates into the environment every year. Most of this is discharged without any treatment, illegally, or legally by overdosing it on fields near cities as a cost-effective waste management practice.

Food scraps & management techniques

There is another source of natural fertilizer material that is being wasted - food scraps. In this case, too, we turn a valuable resource into a waste product. Food scraps could be fed to animals like pigs, greatly improving the sustainability of meat production. But, instead, we feed them grain. Of all the food scraps produced in the US, only 3 percent is currently being recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, producing large amounts of greenhouse gases.

There is also a large potential to lower demand - one of the main problems with today's fertilizer use is overconsumption. Artificial fertilizers are cheap and as a result farmers prefer to dose their crops with too much fertilizer, instead of risking not using enough and lowering their yields. This means that more nutrients are lost through soil erosion, runoff and leaching - which also pollutes groundwater, rivers and seas, because these nutrients do not pass through sewage stations.

Things were very different in the early Chinese agricultural system and during the European Middle Ages. There was never a surplus of fertilizer, so farmers applied it thoughtfully. With more careful techniques, today's farmers could get the same yields with the use of much less fertilizer. The use of crop rotation, intercropping and green manure, all historically important techniques which are still being applied in today's organic agriculture, could further reduce the demand for fertilizers.

Nutrient balance

Pareja Let's digest all this information for a second. On the one hand, we have livestock and people, who together produce 166 million tonnes of nitrogen and 72 million tonnes of phosphates. Almost all of this is wasted, wreaking ecological havoc.

At the same time, our factories produce 99.9 million tonnes of artificial nitrogen fertilizer and 37 million tonnes of phosphates. A completely superfluous operation that further increases pollution and consumes vast amounts of energy. With the expected human (and livestock) population growth, not to mention the rise of energy crops to make biofuels, both biological and artificial production will rise even further, making everything only worse.

We have more than likely already passed the stage where humanity could be sustained without inorganic fertilizers. It is, after all, artificial fertilizers that caused the population boom of the 20th century. However, this should not be a problem. The large amounts of human and animal dung include nutrients which originate from inorganic fertilizers, since we all eat food that is largely grown by means of inorganic fertilizers. It is estimated that humans have already doubled the amount of nutrients in the global ecosystem. Thus, the main problem is not that we produce inorganic fertilizers it's that we don't recycle them.




Logistic challenge

Even if we only consider livestock manure, there is enough natural fertilizer available to sustain almost 7 billion people. There is also no taboo when it comes to utilising animal manure, so why don't we use it? Nutrients recovered as animal manure and applied to agricultural lands were estimated globally at a mere 34 million tonnes of nitrogen (28 percent of total) and 8.8 million tonnes of phosphates (15 percent) in 1996. The amount wasted thus equals (for nitrogen) or surpasses (for phosphates) artificial fertilizer production.

This is the consequence of an industrial and intensive meat and dairy production system that is operating on a global scale. In many countries cattle eats fodder that is produced on the other side of the world. So, in order to close the loop, we would have to ship the manure back to where the fodder comes from. The FAO writes (pdf):

"Even if livestock is raised on the same continent as where its feed is grown, the scale and geographical concentration of industrial feedstock production causes gross imbalances that hamper manure recycling options. High labour and transport costs often limit the use of manure as organic fertilizer to the direct vicinity of the production facilities."


Of course, the same can be said of human manure. Just like livstock, humans are geographically concentrated in large cities with no farmland in sight. Just like livestock, we eat food that is often produced far away from where we live. This means that if we choose to collect humanure, we have to ship it back from the place of food consumption to the place of food production. Consequently, recycling nutrient elements would bring along a massive logistic system consisting of trucks, trains and ships transporting dung (or pipelines transporting sewage) all over the world.




We are not saying that every ounce of dung should be sent back to the place where the food was grown - this is impossible and ridiculous. What counts is that there is a balance between import and export of nutrients. Countries that export food should also choose to import (other) food, instead of dung, yielding the same result and increasing the dietary variety. All we would essentially need is a sophisticated nutrient accounting system.

Decentralisation of the human population

The fundamental solution, of course, is to produce food more locally. This would not only do away with the shipping of manure, but also with the shipping of food. If livestock production would be geographically more diversified and mixed with cropland, all the animal manure could be used and artificial fertilizers would not be needed.

If cities were smaller and distributed more uniformly throughout farming country, the logistics of returning humanure to farmland would be greatly simplified. Of course, this 'decentralisation' of the human population goes against the notion that densely populated cities are more sustainable than a more uniformly distributed population. The challenge may not be to abandon Suburbia, but to make it more self-sufficient.

© Kris De Decker (edited by Shameez Joubert)

© Illustrations in red & black: ddidak for low-tech magazine.

Many Thanks to Sietz Leeflang, inventor of the Nonolet (an urban composting toilet - building plans), who spent two years convincing me to write this epos on shit, and referred me to most documents listed below. Sietz also inspired me to write about oven stoves (which took considerably less effort).

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Sources

* "Farmers of Forty Centuries", F.H. King (1911) -- dung recycling in china, korea and japan
* "Science and civilization in China", Vol VI:2, Joseph Needham (1984) -- idem
* "De geschiedenis van de techniek in Nederland - de wording van een moderne samenleving 1800 - 1890, deel 2", H.W. Lindsen (1993) -- the liernur system (in Dutch)
* "Feed or Feedback: Agriculture, Population Dynamics and the State of the Planet", Duncan Brown, 2003 -- the nutrient cycle and how to restore it (great book!)
* "The history of sanitary sewers" (website) -- the liernur system and other early sewer systems
* "Proposed plan for a sewerage system, and for the disposal of sewage", PDF, Samuel M. Gray (1884) -- the technical options at the end of the 19th century
* "Humanure Handbook", Joseph Jenkins (2005 - third edition) -- diy
* "The nitrogen dilemma: is America fertilizing disaster?", Tom Philpott, Grist (2010) - inorganic fertilizers
* "Livestock's long shadow", PDF, Food and Agriculture Organisation (2006) - figures of livestock dung production
* "Production and use of potassium", PDF (1998)
* "Inorganic phosphorus and potassium production and reserves", PDF, T.L. Roberts and W.M. Stewart, in "Better Crops" (2002)
* "Environmental aspects of phosphate and potash mining", PDF, UNEP (2001)
* "Peak Phosphorus", James Elser & Stuart White, Foreign Policy (2010)
* "Scientists warn of lack of vita phosphorus as biofuels raise demand", Times Online, June 23, 2008
* "The voyages and adventures of Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, a Portugal, during his travels for the space of one and 20 years in the kingdom of Ethiopia, China, Tartaria, etcetera", Ferdinand Mendez Pinto (1583).


Source : Low-tech Magazine, 15 september 2010.