What if we were to embrace failure as a radical approach to beauty? A beauty that deracinates assimilationist hygiene and its profoundly body-phobic, ecocidal disinformation? A beauty that integrates ancestral technologies to confront contemporary crises? A beauty that inspires and incites justice?
And so, we must ask:
Why are prefab houses more visually and economically acceptable than a tiny home built with the utmost care and diligence? A neighbor who is contaminating our neighborhood with Monsanto’s glyphosate Round-Up[1] is acceptable while my family is under the Land-Use Code microscope? Attempting to move back to my native Colorado has been an extraordinary lesson in classism, xenophobia, and the absurdity of the American Dream. To our naive surprise, “repurposed” is too often taken as a dirty word. We mistakenly thought most people would associate repurposing with resourcefulness, economic equity, creativity, beauty, environmental consciousness, and social justice. Instead, we have found that people assume our choices reflect neglect, ugliness, carelessness, broken-down junk, and derelict behavior. Repurposing, in fact, is the opposite. It is a commitment to the sacred, to interspecies intimacies, to requiring respect for objects: where they came from, how they are used, where there are going.
Building our LoveBus before & after, exterior. Click on the image to enlarge.
And, requiring respect for people—workers whose livelihoods are responsible for us having access to those very objects. This daily practice includes a radical awareness of and commitment to shift the everyday violence of consumer convenience culture and embodied energy within local and global industrial and digital production (extractive mining, agribusiness, industrial dams, physical and economic wage slavery, data mining), consumption (advertising and capitalism’s complicitous construction of desire), and negligent disposal (greenhouse gases, toxicity in our water and soil, and electronic waste).
County regulations throughout the US prohibit multiple kinds of off-grid[4] , tiny-home living while almost everyone in these neighborhoods can own and park their own conventional, store-bought RV next to their often huge, energy-guzzling, and often unoccupied vacation home—as long as their permanent residence is not their RV. In the name of safety, we create an artificial need for more energy use. Using fire codes as a safety rationale, homes are required to have outlets installed throughout one’s living space.[5] In the name of “hygiene” (sewer and septic systems and institutions founded on malfeasant disinformation,[6] property value (hypernormative notions of beauty), taxes (i.e., being a good citizen), commodity capitalism reigns: owning exclusionary land means living in an ecologically-destructive structure on that land that has been exploited. The issue of hygiene actually underlies the manipulation of beauty norms inherent in property values and taxes. For example, we are so distracted by techno-fixes, we have forgotten one essential gift to both our economy and our environment: poop. In contrast with septic tank politics and infrastructure that have vast ecocidal implications, self-contained waste disposal systems such as humanure are fundamental to the vitality of our human ecosystem.
In his The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Joseph Jenkins shares four general ways of dealing with human excrement. First: dispose of it as a waste material (such as defecating in drinking water supplies like we do in “civilized” nations); second: apply it raw to agricultural land—such as Chinese ‘night soil’ (creating a vector for disease organisms); third: slowly compost it over an extended period of time; fourth: use thermophilic composting (cultivate heat-loving microorganisms in the composting process). Thermophilic composting of humanure is key to harnessing energy of microscopic organisms. In contrast, each time we flush a toilet, we not only waste soil nutrients, increasing our dependency on quick fix synthetic chemical fertilizers, we add to the sewage monstrosity growing each day in the US: “Every day, America must find a place to park five billion gallons of human waste, and our country appears increasingly unable to find the space. …A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve. Perhaps we could bridge the chasm, heal the rift, transform the untouchable into something rich and strange and marketable.”[7]
In their lifetime, the average person’s excrement weighs about eight tons—this is eight tons of ‘waste’ that could produce 20 kg of organic fertilizer.[8] Scientifically, we know the final product is pathogen-free: no traces of meningitis, hepatitis, malignant protozoa, no tapeworms, no whipworms, no oocysts, no streptococci. Poop is not the problem; effluvial consequences are. These include: dioxins, furans, coplanar polychlorinated biphenyls, pneumonia germs, encephalitis, arsenic, lead, and mercury. Hospital waste is some of the most dangerous and irreparable.[9] But, a lot of toxins can and are removed from our cities’ sludge: “Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the [lab] could recover ibuprofen acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix.”
We must collectively and actively question the range of impact of agribusiness, pharmaceutical businesses, or power-grid businesses using such bacteriological processes as thermophilic (heat loving) composting of humanure. In the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “began a campaign to acclimate U.S. consumers to the commercial use of human waste…superior to cow manure and commercial fertilizers…. ton after ton of EPA-subsidized sludge and cake arrived in low-income rural areas, distributed free of charge to cash-strapped farmers.” However, poop (ranging from the sewage
mafia to official sludge processors) is big business. Investors and companies (including Dow, Honeywell, Monsanto, Siemens, Toshiba) sell products such as Granulite, Milorganite, Soil Rich, and Vital Cycle—all “Wonder Soils”—sold at Agway, Home Depot, Kmart, Target, and Wal-Mart. In 2009, Synagro Technologies, a Residual Management Company, was the largest recycler of biosolids in the US—making over eight billion annually.”[10]
However:
Ecological living is illegal. Housing inequity is implicit. Racism is implicit. Environmental devastation is implicit. No-mortgage tiny homes apparently means you are not contributing to the economy—you are a bad investment, a bad citizen, an unproductive non-contributing American. If you are not flushing a toilet, plugging in an electronic device, producing mass quantities of landfill, you are also a bad citizen, an unproductive American. Refusal to participate in our throw-away culture, to creatively and collaboratively shift disposable-oriented infrastructures means you, quite simply, are not normal, and must be pathologized and punished as such.
Numerous “junk vehicles” in Delta County, Colorado. Click on the image to enlarge.
Thus, my family’s lived ecological ethics are conflated with “junk vehicle” visibility. We are told people are afraid that we are imposing ugliness onto the neighborhood. This form of beauty (i.e., hyper consumption, continually acquiring more than we need) is entrenched in the corporatist paradigm of you have a need or want? Buy it online or jump in your car and buy it at Wal-Mart, Home Depot, or Lowe’s defined through conventional structures, convenience-consumerism, and the familiar (fear of difference and the unknown). We experienced extreme fear of our neighbors’ impressions of us. It was painfully ironic that so many of them were violently concerned about their neighbors' negative responses to our LoveBus on neighboring “property” when every element of the structure of our home and “lifestyle” is rooted in local and global community respect, artisanal human-made/nature-reflecting beauty, integrity, and mutual response-ability.
We have been compared to “Preppers” who, we are told for example, are unprepared for the cold weather: when winter hits, they abandon their used, found, slopped-together junk. And when we share that we have lived quite cozily in our converted school bus (equipped with wood-burning Jotul stove, propane heater, and fully insulated—all used materials) for six bitter, icy winters, it doesn't seem to impact people's opinion that we are not suited for this environment” “Your type is not welcome here.”
Even though I was born and had grown up in these mountains.
In spite of our refusal to conform to standardized hyper capitalist-oriented beauty, it isn’t easy or simple to hide a 33 foot school bus with five (used!) solar panels on the roof deck (made of repurposed barn wood found from our previous home) , painted with audacious multiple overlapping ecosystems: including bursting peonies (perhaps foreshadowing our future home in Paonia), poppies, Luna moths, hibiscus, and Henri Rousseau’s lush forests of mythical, animal (human & more-than-human) encounters.
And so, our intention to grow roots failed; we were forced to leave. Our exile continued, searching for the ever-elusive home…
[2] Through malfeasant, colonialist practices, extractive economies are rooted in an annihilation of bioregional symbiotic relationships. In contrast to fast fashion, industrial agriculture, and the international clothing industry, like watersheds and foodsheds, truly sustainable communities echo the mutually beneficial conviviality of a fibershed. Fibersheds are grounded in beauty and place-based community organizing that connect consumers with local fiber farmers, their animals/ecosystems (yak, llama, sheep, food forest), processors, artisans, knitters, spinners, weavers, processors, manufactures, pattern makers, cut and sewers, up-cyclers, and others along the supply chain. A fibershed is a commitment to practicing embodied energy. It is the quintessential technology—techne, meaning "to fabricate," "to weave." Fibersheds literally weave together our global economy, nourishing what is left in its wake. Rooted in community sovereignty and land-use ethics, they connect all parts of fiber and dye systems into one collective and cohesive unit—creating communities, markets, and pathways for natural fibers produced within a specific biosphere. A fibershed consciousness educates local communities on how to establish a collective voice that advocates for bioregional systems—bridging the gap between raw materials produced locally and global consumer implications. Many fibersheds start by identifying and mapping their local fiber system—natural fiber producers, mills, dyers, artisans/ designers—to better understand the landscape in which they are working, living, and ultimately thriving. Resulting in regional empowerment, this includes public education, awareness, and skill-building (wool processing, natural dye, hide tanning, flax, milkweed, sorghum processing, garment design, etc.).
[3] Almost twelve percent of this “waste” is food-based; food rotting in landfills accounts for 25% of US methane emissions.
[4] Like “clean,” “green” (economies/technologies), and “safe,” “smart” (technologies), the term “off-grid” is yet again an extremely dangerous greenwashing-entrenched misnomer. The majority of off-grid systems are currently carbon-intensive and perpetuate hyperconsumerism. See my previous Mother Pelican articles.
[6] Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure. Grove City: Jenkins Publishing, 1999: 45-6.
[7] Frederick Kaufman, “Wasteland,” ed. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 135-155: 135, 136.
[8] Oliviero Toscani, The Encyclopedia of Poo: Cacas, Cologne: Taschen, 2000: 37, 46.
[10] Ibid., 140, 146, 147. See also: Sludgewatch and the National Resource Council’s Biosolids Applied to Land.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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