When life was literally full of crap

The automobile, today the scourge of the environment, heating the earth and blackening the buildings, was once hailed as the saviour of cities by bringing cleanliness and purity to roads and the air.<p>A century from now will our descendants be cursing batteries and silicon PV panels? I suspect so.

I once spent a couple weeks in a village so remote and underdeveloped, it was essentially in the Bronze Age. No electricity, no running water, only one primitive well, no mail service or any government presence at all, beyond the village chief. Poop was everywhere and inescapable, in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

Our current habit of disposing of crap sight unseen in ways that flush all those essential nutrients into the oceans may seem like a great improvement over the stench of the big cities at the end of the 19th century, but it is also entirely unsustainable.<p>Agriculture has gotten by with synthetic fertilizers for a while, but N, P, and K aren&#x27;t everything plants need... they also yearn for the countless micro-nutrients in our bodily wastes which are lost when we flush. And while N (Nitrogen) and K (Potassium) aren&#x27;t likely to run out any time soon, P (Phosphorus) <i>is</i> in limited supply and finding enough of it for our agricultural needs may become a serious problem later this century. Not to mention the fact that producing NPK fertilizer takes a lot of energy.<p>Hopefully most of us won&#x27;t have to give up the flush toilet, but we absolutely will have find better ways of dealing with the &quot;downstream&quot; product and start recovering its significant value. In the not-so-distant future shit <i>will</i> be valuable again.

Even today, animal husbandry is 95% shit management.<p>We&#x27;ve just removed most of the human shit.