Permaculture Will Not Save Us: Part 1
I paid $3,000 to learn how to build an eco-friendly, affordable, food-producing backyard with minimal effort. What I got was a pyramid scheme.
Out of all the indignities, it was the composting toilets that really pissed me off.
Let me be super clear: I actually like compost toilets. I’ve used them in many different contexts — a lakeside eco-resort in Guatemala, an upscale bed and breakfast in Estonia, and deep in the desert at Burning Man. When done right, they are far, far superior to port-o-loos. They don’t smell, don’t require pumping, and, more importantly, are easy to use, even when you’re sleepy, drunk, high, or suffering from a nasty case of food poisoning.
But these composting toilets at a farm in northern, rural Vermont are far inferior. I’ve paid $3,000 for the privilege of spending nine days absorbing the wisdom of two longtime permaculture practitioners. And the composting toilets seemed designed to break my fragile, female spirit.
The two enclosed wooden bathrooms look like typical outhouses, with toilet seats affixed over a hole, but they sit atop what are essentially raised garden beds built from logs stacked two feet tall. You poop in the hole and dump a cup of sawdust on top. Air and microbes freely move over and through the poo compost pile, breaking it down like any other food waste into rich manure. Eventually, the idea is that you can use what you’ve created in your fields, or even take away the outhouses and plant a garden right there. (What about pharmaceuticals in that humanure? Well, you shouldn’t be taking any drugs anyway. )
This is a core tenant of permaculture: mimic the structures of nature. Minimize the amount of outside input –– in this case synthetic fertilizer. And maximise the output –– in this case veggies from the garden. You don’t waste good fertilizer, even if it comes from humans. And you also don’t create toxic waste that needs disposing of. Composting toilets are a win-win-win.
The key to composting toilets is keeping the pee and the poo separate. “Do not pee in the humanure,” the permaculture luminary sternly tells us on the first day, in the first lecture of the week. “Liquid is what turns sewage into smelly toxic waste.”
So, how to keep them separate? The permaculture luminary, who henceforth I will call the Founder, tells us that we should pee in the 5-gallon plastic buckets that are set underneath the second hole inside the privy.
The work-trade attendees are in charge of pulling the pee buckets out and emptying them in the woods or fields, where the nitrogen-rich pee will augment the soil. For this menial labor, along with setting up and breaking down the dish-cleaning station, fetching items for the instructors, and cleaning the barn where forty of us gather to eat and learn, these attendees get a $300 discount. That is $30 a day. For hand-emptying pee.
I can’t stop thinking about this fact as I’m moving my rear end back and forth from bucket to hole. I’ve never thought about this before, but for me, a woman, it’s actually quite hard to not pee while I poop. I’m trying not to pee in the humanure pile, that was a clear rule. But pooping in the half-full pee bucket would be a disaster, so I err on the side of peeing in the poop pile, feeling guilty the whole time. I feel like an aristocrat who knows their servant will take care of my chamber pot, and also a peasant.
There are flush toilets in the farmhouse, but those are only for the people paying an extra $40 a night for beds. All the campers, over 30 of us, have to hike about seven minutes uphill from the camping area to access these toilets. Thankfully, my bowel movements are regular and predictable. But another female camper tells me that one night, she decided to poop in a bag because she didn’t think she would make it. Another with mobility issues struggles up the hill every day, blaming herself for choosing to camp when she’s not capable.
There’s not even a privacy stall in the camping field, which is ringed by electrified cattle fencing that prevents us from going behind a tree. In the early mornings, I unzip my tent, take a look around to see if any of my fellow male campers are outside and can see me, and then drop my pants to squat and pee in the grass a few feet away. I’m pretty sure this is a health code violation, but nitrogen is good for the grass, I’m told.
On that very first day, after that very first lecture on composting toilets and the stupidity of septic systems, I quizzically said to the Founder that there are compost toilets that are designed to automatically separate the pee from the poop. Why this system?
“Those compost toilets cost money. Buckets are free,” he says.
Later, I will do a quick search online, and find pee diverters that go right underneath the toilet seat for $100.
How on earth did I get sucked into such an overpriced, shitty situation?
It started, as many things did, during the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, my cousin called me up. She and her husband were living at her pregnant sister’s in-laws farm in central North Carolina. She couldn’t travel back and forth and risk getting her sister sick, so she was wondering if we wanted to rent out their house in Asheville, North Carolina.
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