Wow, what a wonderful feedback in the voting yesterday for our new planned waterless worm-based public toilet set-up.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and look at yesterday's post before reading this one.

             So I got blown away by my grandson's creativity:  CAN OF WORMS won hands down over my WORMY THE POOH.  Okay, I can take it.  But I do want to address some threads that took issue with our plans.

             The first has to do with medications in human waste.  Students of the alimentary canal in worms discover daily new beauties in that worm digestive system.  It takes low-mineral inputs and raises them, almost like alchemy.  It metabolizes and detoxifies a host of substances, not the least of which is antibiotics.  While compost renders most things harmless, worm castings are on another level.

             This indicates the earth's capacity to rectify (pun intended) all the assaults humans are capable of slinging at nature.  Perhaps the most profound truth in ecology is its capacity to remediate bad stuff.  It can build soil over rocks, clear out overgrown biomass with fire, burst pine cones with that fire to germinate a new forest.  Oxygen in babbling brooks cleans the water.  Nature has more cleansing and abundance techniques than we can imagine.  We truly live in a nest of grace and provision designed with infinite wisdom to care for us. 

             We trust these cleansing techniques, including the worm's alimentary canal.  That is moving forward in faith, not fear.

             Now to the other main complaint:  that this is a Taj Mahal installation uncharacteristic of Polyface mobile shoestring infrastructure.  For sure if it were up to me I'd do the traditional hole in the ground in a minute and let the worms come in and do their purifying.  But no health department bureaucrat would agree that such a system is acceptable.  Not anymore.

             We can dump millions of pounds of glyphosate on our landscape with the full blessing of government regulators, but let one human pee or poo glob fall on the ground and we have a human safety crisis. We had the same issue with our offal compost from the chickens.  We had a couple of EPA folks here who said we were polluting the ground water.  We got wind that neighbors who don't like us turned us into the Va. Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ).   At the same time, visiting permaculture gurus laughed at these allegations, pointing out that for rainfall to go through the pile and push composting guts into the soil would require 20 inches of rain at one time. 

             What did we do?  We quickly constructed a covered, concrete-floored composting facility so we could take any bureaucrat to it with the challenge:  "see if you an find any leaching."  This was pro-active to avoid a confrontation that we probably could not win and even if we did, would bankrupt us.  That's what we're dealing with here.  Even though reasonable people know how a worm nest in the ground can metabolize human excrement, it's hard to prove without becoming a superfund site. 

             One of our most important considerations in this project was to have a model in which no one could accuse us of dumping raw manure into the ecosystem.  Completely surrounding it in concrete does the trick; the worms do the rest.  We will not use these casting in the garden; we'll use them around fruit trees or out in the fields where more separation occurs between application and the dinner plate.

             We also need something that is enticing to enter, not crude.  The floor will be tiled, as well as the wall up about 3 feet so we can scrub it down.  We have several features planned to keep it delightful to use and on our end, delightful to empty and maintain.  We will not save any money over the Porta-potties with this system, but it will be roomier, more enjoyable, and certainly more in keeping with a closed-loop carbon cycle.  Did you know that roughly half the water used in a U.S. residence goes down the toilet?

             Does this project make you want to visit our farm or stay away?