Had enough of the sewer culture?

We’ve all heard of the Safety Nazis, and I’ve complained about an emerging group some people are calling the Gonad Nazis.
And I’m fond of complaining that I hate to violate Godwin’s Law — usually just before I violate it. So this time — just for now — I have decided that I will not refer to the building and plumbing code enforcement bureaucrats as “Sewer Nazis.” (Does my warm and fuzzy kindness know no bounds?)
The hard-working Code People are after all only trying to do their job of making sure that each and every dwelling in the United States is hooked up to a city sewer, and has indoor plumbing, with approved plumbing fixtures, lest we revert to the Dark Ages and civilization collapse. That would seem a worthy goal.
There’s a certain irony though. For what we take for granted as the absolute minimum (almost a sine qua non) standard of civilized living is very recent, and a book I’ve been reading — The Vanishing American Outhouse — drives the point home. The outhouse — part of the American way of life from the inception of this country — has nearly vanished, and the book attempts to document them before they disappear altogether.
The great disappearance began with the advent of indoor plumbing, and by the outbreak of World War II, plumbing had been installed in nearly 60% of American dwellings. During that period, installing running water and toilets had become a huge national fad. My father (whose career had taken him from humble rural roots to the big city of Philadelphia) felt morally obligated to hire a contractor and install a sink and a toilet in his parents’ farm house. “You didn’t need to do that!” was my grandfather’s response. I can’t imagine having to go outside in the winter cold simply to do my business. But of course, people used chamber pots, which were simply emptied into the outhouse each morning. Another chore I could do without.
Considering the health risks, it’s a wonder that the people in those days survived. Now we freak out because a baby might theoretically eat underlying lead paint off the side of an older house. (Why a mommy would let her baby do that has always escaped me.) Yet not only did the people in those days survive, they went on to conquer Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. We call them “the Greatest Generation.”
They may well have also been the last outhouse generation. This is not to say that outhouses build character, or that assigning the kids the unpleasant chore of venturing out into blizzards carrying buckets of excrement (probably child abuse today) builds virtue. But it is undeniable that on average, they were tougher people than we are today, and outhouses were an undeniable part of their cultural existence. These buildings were even part of urban living; I remember seeing outhouses still standing behind Philadelphia row houses when I was a kid.
Here’s a World War II photograph of an outhouse in a New York war bond drive event — marked “Hitler’s Headquarters”:

The crowd obviously thought that was hilarious; a lot of high school kids today wouldn’t even get it.
Times change, and from a modern public health standpoint, this is all to the good.
Right?
Well, what if you are a crank who just doesn’t feel like using water every time you take a leak? Or suppose you don’t think that the government has a right to compel you to share your excrement, urine, and wash water with everyone else in a vast communal treatment facility. If you own your property, is it not your business how you deal with your waste, so long as you’re not harming other people in the process?
This is not to say that anyone has a right to contaminate the groundwater, and I am not advocating a return to outhouses. But I have some experience with living in rural areas, and I know that sewer hookup rules can make it extremely difficult to legally live on land you own. You’d almost think people were using sewer hookup rules as an anti-development (or even pro-plumbers union) racket. It is not as if there are not safe alternatives.
There are, for example, waterless urinals, but even in environmentally green cities (such as Philadelphia would consider itself to be), they run into trouble with the unions. Oh yes they did; the union via the plumbing department managed to force the new “green” building to have water pipes going all the way to each waterless fixtures, only to be capped off. That way, plumbers lost no work. At the time (in view of my longstanding complaint about disappearing urinals) I issued a satire-based reminder of the “potty parity” issue:

…here’s what I’d do were I running the plumber’s union. I’d contact the local chapter of NOW, remind them of the union’s “commitment” to “gender equality,” and ask their opinion of the Liberty’s building’s stated plan to “install no-flush, water-saving urinals in the men’s rooms at the Comcast Center.”
I’d ask the feminists, why only the men’s rooms?
Potty parity is not a new idea of course, and I’ve discussed it repeatedly. But this is a bit different, and from a feminist perspective, I think it’s far worse.
Does this not send a clear message to society that men are more environmentally friendly than women? Doesn’t that create and enable a brand new and totally unfair stereotype? Isn’t it bad enough that women face discrimination everywhere without granting men another patriarchal advantage to hold over women? Rather than be seen as lagging behind New York, shouldn’t Philadelphia be seen as leading the way towards environmental gender equality?
Those who think this is an exercise in frivolity should bear in mind that some of the most invidious forms of sexist discrimination arise from unnoticed subtleties of precisely this sort. Every time men take a leak in the environmentally friendly urinals, they’ll be likely to harbor hidden thoughts that they’ve done a better job of saving the environment than women. Pretty soon, they’ll be emerging from the men’s rooms with barely perceptible, knowing sneers. A nod here, a wink there.
The old boys network is at it again.
(They always find a way to get a leg up on women.)

Of course, the entire issue of gender environmental potty disparity could be avoided entirely with dry composting toilets.
They are safe, relatively maintenance free, and what I like about them is that they allow people to live independently, without another damned government foot in the door. No sewer line repair issues, no bureaucrats demanding increased monthly fees and assessments, no “crises” caused by broken sewer lines, and one less excuse for the government to declare it has a right to “help” you by “emergency evacuations” for “public health reasons.” Perhaps the idea of individual autonomy is intolerable to some, but I like it. Additionally, there’s the water saving aspect of dry toilets; some people might enjoy the feeling that by never wasting water in their elimination process, they’re helping to save the environment. Personally, I think the water I “waste” that way is insignificant, but OTOH if I had some land which relied on water from a well of borderline capabilities, I might have a legitimate interest in not flushing it away.
But like the decision to use CFL light bulbs or neuter your pet, these things ought to be individual choices. The crazy thing about codes and rules is that bureaucrats and environmentalists are not the type of people who like to offer alternatives; they want to tell you what to do, by means of government edicts and rules. To their way of thinking, it’s either one or the other. So, if composting toilets or waterless urinals are a good option for some people, instead of being allowed, they become something to mandate.
Where it comes to progress, change and choice are seen as mutually incompatible.
An interesting piece with the ironic title of “Composting toilets bring the outhouse indoors” takes a close look at these devices, notably the Clivus Multrum. People like them, and they don’t realize the obvious advantages until they see them:

“A lot of young students are thrilled about the composting toilets,” said Ileana Costrut, a student who conducts tours of the building. “And when I take them downstairs and open the tanks, they are all shocked that it doesn’t smell at all. They wonder why composting toilets aren’t in other buildings.”
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Philip Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, Md., also uses composting toilets to symbolize their commitment to water conservation. The building, which the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment labeled a “Top Ten Green Project” in 2001, also reuses rainwater for its sinks and consumes 90 percent less water than a conventional office building.
In suburban markets from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, private-use toilets are now being installed in the cabanas of backyard swimming pools. “All of the sudden, people can quickly install a toilet that produces something they can actually use,” said Chris Muir, an international accounts manager at Sun-Mar composting toilet systems. “It keeps accidents out of the pool and wet feet out of the house.”

Sounds OK to me. But beware the mighty bureaucrats!

One challenge to placing the toilets in urban venues is height; so far composting toilets have worked in buildings no higher than three stories. But perhaps the greatest barrier composting toilets face in suburban and urban areas is strict regulations. Most municipalities require green buildings to have a conventional sewage hookup even if they use a composting system.
“The irony is the health department requires you to be able to pollute before they’ll allow you not to pollute,” said John Hanson, owner of NutriCycle Systems, who installed Judith Lennox’s toilet in Baltimore.
(Emphasis supplied.)

This is not by any means a neat and tidy left versus right issue (any more than issue of collective guilt). Lest anyone think all opposition to composting toilets is coming from the left, think again. Conservative activist Marc Morano (“previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington‘”), whose anti-AGW activity I admire, seems outspokenly opposed to composting toilets, and is quoted here making what I think is a very misleading argument against them:

According to Marc Morano, of CNSNews.com, taking us back to the outhouse is precisely where the environmentalists are leading us.
“A growing number of environmentalists are now advocating the expanded use of compost or dry toilets worldwide to combat what they see as an international water crisis,” says Morano.
As far as H20 is concerned, the flush toilet cannot even be blamed for significant water usage, and factually accounts for only five to 10 percent of total usage. Agricultural use of water accounts for about 70 percent of worldwide water usage, while industry accounts for about 23 percent.
But you can’t expect today’s environmentalists to go after agricultural use. Water is needed there to irrigate their lucrative organic gardens and fields.

Do organic gardens and fields use more water than conventionally fertilized fields? The implication is that they do; otherwise why throw it in? Is the goal is to gratuitously stoke culture war fires? This might be a little nitpicky point, and I don’t eat organic foods. But I’d almost swear I detect an antipathy towards those who do. Some of my best friends eat organic foods, and if they are to be ridiculed, I’d like it to be for a valid reason.
A questionable analogy follows:

The struggling poor in developing nations look to the flush toilet in much the way some North Americans look through telescopes at the stars.

Is there any evidence to support that assertion? I’ve known plenty of stargazers, and that type of person is usually of a scientific bent, if not a little nerdy in a pleasant way. Stargazing tends to capture their imagination, often in a profound way. Is the implication that “the struggling poor” are in awe of flush toilets, and see them as profound? My grandparents didn’t; why would they?
Morano is right, though, to attack scary environmentalist hyperbole:

“Proponents of dry toilets, set to convene at the first annual international Dry Toilet 2003 conference in Tampere, Finland, August 20-23, warn of “environmental disaster” if developing nations aspire to flush toilets so prevalent in the industrialized world,” Morano warns us.
Notice how environmentalists with big issues never meet in the Bronx? Travelling from village to village is beyond the means of many in developing nations. The price of an airline ticket and jetting off on environmental-friendly jumbo jets is well within the means of latter-day save-the-world environmentalists.
Oh well, when United Nations delegates traveled to last summer’s Johannesburg summit, they dined on pails of caviar, lobster, and sirloin steak smack in the middle of starving Africa.

Shame on them for doing that. I hate the UN, and I hate busybodies. But the issue here is composting toilets, and I’d rather enjoy having one. What does their hypocritical conspicuous consumption have to do with it?
As I wondered about that, the next thing I knew, I was suddenly accused of celebrating “primitivism”:

Says Morano: “Critics of the upcoming conference say the widespread use of dry toilets in the developing world is nothing more than a “celebration of primitivism,” and call the flush toilet the “greatest public health advance in the modern era.”

Frankly, I resent the hell out of the charge of celebrating primitivism. I have been an outspoken opponent of primitivism in a number of posts like this, and I called it “anticivilizationism.”
How does the development of safe and efficient technology represent primitivism? Here we come to the disingenuous argument that it’s dangerous:

A waterless dry toilet, which generally costs about $2,000, collects human urine and feces and requires emptying by humans on a regular basis. Advocates claim the resulting matter can then be composted and used as fertilizer for food crops.
Last winter, some 75,000 tonnes of sewer solids from the Greater Toronto Area were trucked to a landfill in Michigan. With the winter freeze long over, spraying of the sewage on farm fields in the Province of Ontario has begun.
The practice of fertilizing farmers’ fields with “biosolids” (human sludge) is legal and has been going on in Ontario and elsewhere for a number of years.
Last summer, a medical officer of health signed papers indicating that the illness of a baby he was treating was due to living within close range of a field that had been fertilized with biosolids.
That was before the outbreak of SARS.

The clear implication there is that composting toilets were the culprit. But “biosolids” do not come from composting toilets; they’re the byproduct from conventional sewage treatment:

Biosolids is a term used by the water treatment industry that refers to treated sludge. Sludge, or “biosolids,” are the byproduct of the treatment of domestic wastewater in a wastewater treatment plant. To create biosolids, these residuals are further treated to reduce pathogens and vector attraction by any of a number of approved methods. Nevertheless, toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, dioxin, and brominated flame retardants, remain in the “treated” sludge, as there is no technology available to remove these and tens of thousands of other chemicals from sewage sludge, the byproduct of wastewater treatment. Depending on their level of treatment and resultant pollutant content, biosolids can be used in regulated applications ranging from soil conditioning to fertilizer for food or non-food agriculture to distribution for unlimited use.

So what’s with the resort to insults and scare tactics? The danger posed by “biosolids” does not lie with the composting toilets, but with “traditional” communitarian sewage treatment facilities. Which means that the composting toilets would be decreasing, not increasing, the problem of biosolids. But most readers would not know it from reading the piece. (Well, at least he doesn’t call the Greatest Generation the “Primitivist Generation.”)
Why these things have to be ideological and political, I don’t know.
Does the culture war have to intrude into my bathroom?
Wasn’t the bedroom enough?