My twelve-year-old son, Zazu, writing/drawing on our first day of cross-over education. Following “cold in the morning,” Zazu later added: “even though the wood-burning stove keeps our LoveBus warm all night long.”
Click on the image to enlarge
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out. — Václav Havel[1]
Today is the first day of my next parental experiment: homeschool-crossover-with-public school.
My own educational adventure as an undergraduate student was rooted in such promiscuous crossings. I transferred from Sarah Lawrence College to Penn State University as an undergrad when my mother who taught at PSU was diagnosed with leukemia and given six months to two years to live.[3] As a summa cum laude Science, Technology, and Society/ Photography/ Women's Studies, Schreyer's Honors undergrad, I worked with sixteen different departments to fund my international lecture tour on multiculturalism. I was the first undergrad to take only graduate courses, earning a Bachelor of Philosophy interdisciplinary degree which I titled Corporeal Politics. Ten years later, I returned to PSU as a visiting artist and guest professor. This included a month-long series of lectures, studio critiques, body-consciousness/ eco-sexuality workshops.
Instead of inhibiting me, “that has never been done before,” repeated throughout my adulthood, has further motivated me to produce the work I do; to live the life I embody; to parent as I am. I have been equally rewarded and censored for my practices that move beyond precedents as I bridge private and public worlds. Every aspect of my life, as a mother, university professor, author, frontline community activist, and visual artist, has always intertwined the personal with the political, the individual with the collective. Living my parental environmental ethics as an antidote to petroleum parenting involves not only my practice of decolonizing economies, it is at the core of the private-public, personal-political interface.
And, these life-passion commitments are bulldozing my relationship with my son, Zazu.
Perhaps.
In order for Zazu to agree to binary-crossing the morass of rapacious, dumbing-down of compulsory education to our homeschool practice rooted in cross-cultural, interspecies, lived-and-shared ecological ethics, he insists we move to town. Brutally torn between my conflicting values and realities of being a mother of a pre-teen boy in 2024, I agree to (temporarily!) leave our beautiful home, our Love Bus cradled in a valley at the edge of the Colorado Rockies so Zazu can revel in thermostats, electrical outlets, walls that abruptly and predictably jut up against ceilings with corners, Wi-Fi, (not to mention EMFs, radon, fluoride), and, as with every seductive materialism preceding in this list—flush toilets.
It’s not that Zazu has internalized the dystopic, desperately misinformed tyranny of hygiene that runs rampant in our country. It’s that he would prefer to sit on a “real” toilet enclosed by four connected walls, topped off with a roof. I realize none of us can make anyone fall in love with going to the bathroom in the Great Outdoors—squatting, facing the sun rising over the Eastern slope, swooping nighthawks, deer meandering by, coyotes howling in the distance—especially not your own child. However, I find this experience absolutely exhilarating (yes, even if it is freezing—or hovering around zero degrees).
Going to the bathroom as my family and I normally do on our humanure toilet (see below) built from local trees and including a reclaimed toilet seat[4] is a daily commitment to being fully alive—reminiscent of Rabbi Heschel’s clarion call to live in “radical amazement.” It is a sacred practice of spiritual intelligence in which our mind and body are not violently severed by the illusory medical expert and internalized industrial mechanisms of alienation from our own bodies and the earth body. “When we envision the transition to a post-capitalist, post-work society, we must have a plan in mind for redirecting the productive and creative energies of humanity as a whole.”[5] Pooping and peeing in this way is integral to our “plan.” It honors our bodies and the earth’s body. It invokes the sense of the sacred implied in the Berakhot Brachot blessing in Jewish traditions. Brachot blessings are portals to the infinite, conduits for spiritual and physical potential. When we recite blessings, we unlock and distribute their energy. Berakhot expresses gratitude for our bodily functions. These blessings recited while going to the bathroom are rooted in intimately bound relationships that give thanks to organic movement, the promiscuous crossings relieving our ruptures and blockages, emancipating our orifices and cavities.
My pleasure-parenting practice asks how can we live a life immersed in blessing and gratitude, a life that recognizes the beauty of transformation,[6] when the very foundation of life (poop) is perceived as filth—requiring concealment and disposal? When we live without blessings, we deny the potency of transformation and adhere to the transactional. In our modern-industrial body-hating society in which we are reduced to consumers-of-convenience, going poop and pee is reduced to a transaction.[7] Lest we forget that during the explosive fires that devoured much of California and Oregon in 2021, consumers in box stores became violent fearing they would not have access to toilet paper.[8]
“Throughout its long history of denial, waste has lurked behind countless appellations: egesta, dejecta, sharn, stale, skite, dynga, ordure, oriental sulfur, occidental sulfur, and carbon humanum, to name but a few. Witches’ potions called for eiths; alchemists’ elixirs required botryon, aureum, oletum, or zibethum. …What could be more magical, more godlike, than the metamorphosis of that which we abhor and expel into that which we desire, embrace, and ingest?” (Hence the subtitle of my book—Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle)…
Human excrement is one of our most critical organic rich-waste resources. When it goes through the necessary process of bacterial digestion (composting), human feces become an ideal fertilizer—hygienically safe soil-building material. This information may help us understand how to use our bodies’ waste products more effectively for our environment’s benefit. “Compost is more than a fertilizer or a healing agent for the soil’s wounds. It is a symbol of continuing life. One organism’s excretions are another organism’s food… there is no waste in nature” (Jenkins 27).[9] In The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Joseph Jenkins[10] shares four general ways of dealing with human excrement. These include first: dispose of it as a waste material (such as defecating in drinking water supplies), 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, and fourth: use thermophilic composting (cultivate heat-loving microorganisms in the composting process).[11]
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.”[12] For example, the average person’s excrement weighs about eight tons—this is eight tons of ‘waste’ that could produce twenty kg of organic fertilizer (Toscani 37).[13]
Scientifically, we know the final product is pathogen-free: no traces of meningitis, hepatitis, malignant protozoa, no tapeworms, no whipworms, no oocysts, no streptococci (Kaufman 149). Poop is not the problem! (Ibid., 151); 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. 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 plant could recover ibuprofen acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix” (Ibid., 140).
My family and I have been systematically discriminated against (unable to acquire land or receive bank loans) because we refuse to participate in such septic-waste madness. Ironically, 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” (Ibid.,147).
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 $8 billion annually (Ibid.).[14]
This brings us back to the imperative of reframing the question “Where Are You From? ” That question of imperialist hierarchy can become a question of interspecies intimacy when we incorporate an implicit “Where Are You Going?” My family knows exactly where our water comes from (our rain-water catchment structure). And we don’t poop or pee in water of any kind. We know that excrement in water is sacrilegious toward water (across cultures, spiritual practices/religions, ecological ethics); and that excrement itself is sacred.
However, poop-pleasure parenting is not popular. I realize I live in a constant state of fear of disappointing Zazu. He constantly feels deprived of some kind of normalcy against which I strive—desperately. From the moment of his conception, through our gestation, and his unassisted home birth on my 40th birthday, I have intuitively not followed the rules—in many cases, I didn't even realize my choices were going totally against the grain. Inadvertently, Zazu’s entire life has become an eco-ethical manifesto.
The 2006 NOVA documentary “Ghost in Your Genes” demonstrates that “at the heart of the new field of epigenetics is that genes have a memory, the lives of your grandparents, the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw can directly affect you decades later despite your never having experienced these things for yourself.” Inhabiting this epigenetic potential means we commit to collective creative risk taking. We imagine the impossible.
I believe these words as blessings. I breathe these words as blessings. Even though they may sound like platitudes. Even though I have written them, implored them, wept them a thousand times. And each time the words cross another border, do I lose my child in defense of these blessings? Do these blessings become curses?
As the reader, you who may also be attempting to reconcile contradictory worlds, please zoom in and read the images above—Zazu’s A Foot in Two Worlds…
And we haven’t yet even arrived at the periphery of Object-Oriented Ontologies implicit in “Where Are You From?…”
[1] Havel’s call-for-action is reminiscent of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We/they use(d) our imaginations because we/they have to, because we/they have to live with integrity, not because we will win: “This affirmation of life by way of a sacrifice and combat with no prospect of victory is a tragic paradox that can only be understood as an act of faith in history.” Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism.
[2] This includes in every aspect of our lives creatively challenging the epidemic of individualism and the “dominant consumer aesthetics of ‘newness” (Kate Soper).
[6] The somatic-spiritual reality of transformation permeates why I named my son “Zazu”—referring to the Aramaic word, “to move:” a reflection of social movements, the Law of Impermanence in relation to cycles of life, and as a photographer and video artist, the precarious dialogue between movement and stillness.
[9] The following citations come from page 76, 77, 100, 101 in Zazu Dreams.
[10] Jenkins, along with Noam Chomsky, Eve Ensler, James E. Hansen, David Orr, Arun Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi's grandson), Shock G Humpty Hump, Rabbi Lerner, Paul Hawken, and Bill McKibben are among the activists, artists, and scientists who endorsed Zazu Dreams.
[11] All italics are Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure. Grove City: Jenkins Publishing, 1999: 45-6.
[12] Frederick Kaufman, “Wasteland,” ed. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 135-155: 135, 136.
[13] Oliviero Toscani, The Encyclopedia of Poo: Cacas, Cologne: Taschen, 2000.
[14] See Sludgewatch email listserv 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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