By the time World War I rolled around, most American cities could boast tremendous sewer networks. Sewage treatment, however, wasn’t part of the picture — most sewers simply outflowed into the nearest waterway. And you can imagine how America’s waterways stank. Congress began seriously funding sewage treatment research in the fifties, but it wasn’t until the seventies when the government finally decided that a civilized society is one that manages its waste.

Since then, America has invested $250 billion into its sewage infrastructure, typically building on centralized plants based around primary and secondary treatments. And while this 1950s and 60s-era process does an adequate job of separating waste from water (and more recent tertiary treatment helps further cleanse it), this process is expensive, land-intensive, energy-hungry, and glisteningly ripe for innovation.

But there hasn’t been any incentive to innovate.

It’s not for lack of new ideas. Take semipermeable membranes, for instance, that use reverse osmosis to separate water from the particulates suspended in it. This system eliminates the need for settling tanks, for one thing — dramatically reducing the land necessary for a treatment plant. But beyond semipermeable membranes are nano-particulate membrane bioreactors that add a layer of bacteria to digest organic material as it passes by. And it’s hard not to get chills while reading about the solar-aquatic sewage plants that rely on bacteria, shrimp, fish, and plants to cleanse wastewater.

And those are just the ideas that make do with our current (and flawed) toilet and sewer infrastructure. The next generation of sanitary management could eliminate this expensive and unsustainable infrastructure altogether, from composting toilets to poop-powered fuel cells. Sewage treatment is indeed poised to leap into the future.

But there’s little incentive for America’s wastewater industry to make it move.

I learned this from Ed Clerico, president of Alliance Environmental, a consulting firm that focuses on water resource management and green building concepts. At a lecture I attended a few weeks ago, Clerico discussed water reuse in New York City. And he fascinated me with his description of an industry that seems almost explicitly designed to resist innovation.

As Ed told me then and in a later conversation, there are 16,000 wastewater entities in the US. Each one is staffed by men and women — some elected, some appointed, some volunteers — tasked to determine which wastewater management technology is most appropriate to staunch the estimated 80-100 gallons of water, two quarts of urine, and half pound of poop flowing inexorably from every single person in their district every single day.

But when it comes to poop, the average American is slightly less neurotic than when it comes to terror. So like a Boston bureaucrat in the face of a Lite Brite set, a wastewater decision maker lives in fear of making the wrong decision. Despite their best intentions to save money, land, and energy, a wastewater decision maker knows that if he or she embraces alternative technology and something goes wrong, it’s his or her ass on the line — and his or her driveway on which the local media will camp out. The public only cares that its poop disappears. Once that toilet flushes, no one wants to think of it ever again — and woe betide the person who forces them to do so.

This public mandate is a tremendous disincentive to try anything new.

And the structure of the industry supports this inertia. Most of the 16,000 wastewater entities in this country are very small, responsible for towns, townships, or even individual housing developments. Because of this fragmentation, the industry relies heavily on engineering consultants. In fact, as Clerico tells me, only the very biggest wastewater entities are actually self-sufficient. Consultants drive the industry.

A cynic would note that the more capital-intensive and equipment-oriented the solution, the more money the consultant makes.

Less cynical, though, is the simple realization that business goes where money is. With demand almost entirely reserved for traditional wastewater infrastructure, there’s little reason for consultants to invest in developing anything else.

Thus, though wastewater entities and wastewater consultants both surely recognize the need for innovation, the former can’t demand it and the latter can’t supply it.

If this were ten years ago, the story would end there. But there’s a ray of sunshine bursting through the cloudy surface of the settling tank: the hope that the green building movement may extend to sewage.

Our culture is finally beginning to reevaluate waste. We’re finally recognizing externalities: energy and resources consumed, and byproducts produced. And this could change the incentives driving wastewater decision makers. Soon their mandate may not be limited to sewage flowing in and water flowing out. Soon, they could be free to consider the most efficient means to that end.

This is what is necessary to break the status quo: a public demanding innovation, giving wastewater decision makers the confidence to embrace it and wastewater consultants the incentive to supply it. Because while a civilized society manages waste, an advanced society does something about it.

My recent lectures in Iowa and Baltimore, and the success of the book release party last weekend here in Brooklyn, have proven to me that people want to appreciate intellectual poop humor in forums other than print and the web. The country just might be ready for a traveling poop show.

First stop: Philadelphia.

It’s called The Tao of Poo: A Night of Poop Humor and Poop Culture. On June 2 at Philadelphia’s Fleisher Art Memorial, I’ll be joining four comedians for an evening of history, culture, and cringe-inducing bathroom stories. Each comedian will tell their tale of woe — be it the unfortunate confluence of rush-hour traffic and IBS, or a sadistic gastroenterologist’s solution to constipation — after which I’ll provide insight and understanding into the ideological history of the toilet or the origin of shameful shitting. It’s yin and yang — equal parts hilarious poop stories and fascinating poop culture.

You can find a lot more info and reserve tickets at The Tao of Poo. Tell everyone you know in the Philly area — if this is a success, then there’s a really good chance it’ll be hitting other cities soon.

In other news, last week’s Poop Culture last week was great. (Here are one blogger’s thoughts.) It featured comedians Bobby Tisdale, Gabe & Jenny, and Gregg Gethard, as well as musicians Stuckey and Murray — a fun and fascinating evening dedicated to poop and Poop Culture.

A friend of mine is working on a video compilation featuring the highlights of the evening. In the meantime, here’s me up on my soapbox for your viewing enjoyment.

Tell your friends in Philly about The Tao of Poo! If it works well, I might be in your city next.

“Primp,” breathes the commercial. “Coif. Gussy up… your insides. With Metamucil!”

Yesterday the readers of PoopReport.com received a rousing endorsement of Metamucil from Oozy Doody. “The bottom of the bowl,” he raved, “no longer had streaks of brown glue that had to be scrubbed.” While I fully expected to see that declaration on a full-page ad in USAToday like Roger Ebert’s stamp of approval (”Three inches in diameter!” –Mrs. Oozy Doozy, PoopReport.com), it seems Madison Avenue had different plans. Metamucil and its ad agency Publicis recently launched a brand new slogan for everyone’s favorite stool bulking agent: “Metamucil: Beautify your inside.”

Huh? Unless it’s beautiful to scrape the desiccated remnants of year-old fruitcake from the dank crannies of your colon, I’m not sure I follow. Is there some new standard of beauty in which blasting a baby’s arm is the new cucumber facial?

According to Metamucil, it is indeed so. Constipation? Not mentioned. Regularity? Not mentioned. Whereas Motherload and Poonurse would both heartily recommend Metamucil to cure what ails you after finishing first place in the Great Oklahoma Cheese Wheel Eating Contest, Metamucil wants you to follow a convoluted logical path as illustrated in this commercial: take fiber supplement >> lower your cholesterol >> “make your heart look ooh la la” >> look as beautiful as all the women in our ad >> finally achieve a genuine sense of happiness and self-worth.

The Cliff’s Notes version? “Hey ladies, big poop = you’re so pretty!”

A number of critics accuse Metamucil and its parent company, Proctor & Gamble, of a further — and much more devious — leap of logic. “It looks like Procter & Gamble is targeting women who have eating disorders or are prone to them because they want to be thinner and prettier,” says The Oregonian. Stay Free Magazine’s Carrie McLaren agrees: “if P&G isn’t targeting anorexics, bulimics, and other weight-obsessed women with this campaign, you can have my house.”

I doubt the eating disorder demographic is big enough to justify retooling an entire brand. The truth is probably much simpler — and much more depressing. After all, men will believe that girls will have sex with them because of the deodorant they wear or the gum that they chew. For women, it looks like pooping is so repressed that it has put Metamucil in category of products for which genuine, tangible, completely substantial and scientific benefits are less compelling than showing a pretty girl and saying the word “beauty”.

So here’s another reason to promote the normalization of America’s attitudes towards bodily functions (OK, I’ll say it — by buying my book): a rational acceptance of our daily dirt will force Metamucil to back down from this unethical and completely untrue ad campaign and go back to being an indispensable tool for achieving the stool of the gods.

This Tuesday night is the big Poop Culture release party at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. Galapagos is a trendy venue set up in an old industrial space; and because their arrival in Williamsburg predated the hipster masses (or, at least, the yuppie masses who followed), Galapagos was able to dedicate a significant amount of real estate to something beyond maximizing their mojito-per-square-foot ratio. They have a big atrium replete with reflecting pool reserved for artistic installations; and in honor of the book release, my friend Joe and his friend Scott decided to create something beautiful.

The theme of their installation, Joe told me a few weeks ago, was inspired by something in my book: the possibility that one day human waste will be used to generate electricity. On the phone, Joe described to me a toilet, a pipe coming out of it, an electrical outlet coming from the pipe, and a lamp plugged into the electrical outlet. I envisioned an abstract little installation, but I did not realize how firmly the ghost of Marcel Duchamp would grab hold of Joe and Scott. With the legacy of R. Mutt burning in their soulds, they created what they have called the Doo Champasaurus.

I helped them set it up today. Reader: my mind is blown. A few pictures and a video are below; click here for the full Flickr set of the construction.

The video below shows the whole thing from mouth to anus — or, from production to transformation to energy consumption. It gets a little dark at the end, so I’ll tell you what you’re seeing: a fancy lamp being powered by the shit of the world.

Tuesday night, with the sun down and the mood lighting turned it, it’ll look absolutely spectacular. A million thanks go to Joe and Scott for their stunning creation.

There’s a reason tough kids smoke in them, bullies run wild in them, and geeks weigh their need to poop against the atomic wedgies that await in them: school bathrooms are no-man’s land. School administrators, balancing students’ privacy against students’ propensity to go all Lord of the Flies when teachers aren’t looking, have to lean towards the former. Rights groups cheer, but chess club weenies quake in their double-knit reversible slacks and hope their sphincters hold out through the bumpy bus ride home.

Says Tim Byles, chief executive of England’s Partnerships for Schools: “Toilets are recognized as a hotspot for bullies to threaten and intimidate others.”

Don’t I know it. But what can be done? The price of bathroom privacy is freedom for Metallica t-shirt-clad louts to patiently lay in wait for the next bespectacled incontinent to stumble into its den.

Unless there’s a third option. Perhaps the solution to bathroom bullying — and vandalism, and smoking, and drinking, and drug use, and sex, and turd terrorism, and whatever else punk kids get up to when grown-ups aren’t looking — lies in approaching swirlies as a design problem. This is what Byles and his associates suggest: the way to combat bathroom delinquency is to design bathrooms that promote safe pooping. Among their suggestions:

• Making hand-washing areas unisex and more visible (”unisex toilets have been shown to improve behavior and deter lingering”)
  
• Locating bathrooms opposite classrooms so they can be more easily supervised
  
• Installing blurred glass walls and eliminating urinals
  
• Employing a full-time toilet attendant. (”A full-time toilet attendant {…} keeps them clean and maintains them to a high standard, and replenishes toilet paper and soap as required. {…} The attendant puts flowers and pictures in the toilets — touches that pupils really appreciate.”)
  
• “Increasing feelings of ownership by involving pupils fully in the monitoring and management of toilets”
  
• “Playing classical music (can calm and deter lingering)”
  
• In extreme cases, utilizing CCTV to monitor students. (”CCTV cameras are best used when other options have failed. The advantage with CCTV cameras is that they may allow toilets to remain open that would otherwise be locked due to fear of vandalism and misbehavior. They may also make pupils feel safer – pupils who would otherwise avoid using the toilets.”)

I applaud the group once for their efforts and again for their bravery. People are virulently reactionary when confronted with change to the bathroom status quo, as the recent Sheryl Crow debacle proves; this group is certainly opening themselves up to late show ridicule in their attempt to build a better bathroom.

Some of their ideas are brilliant. Bathrooms almost always seem an afterthought in architecture, stuffed into corners as if they’re a necessary evil rather than an integral part of one’s experience in a building. Put them in high-traffic areas! The more people who use them, who walk by them, who see who’s going in and out, the less trouble there will be.

Some of their ideas intrigue me. If bathroom terror is caused by a lack of oversight, perhaps there’s merit in mixed-gender lobbies that double the traffic and soften the boundaries beyond which no authority can peer. But then again, it could just give the world’s Scut Farkases a whole new gender to terrorize.

And some of their ideas worry me. Bathroom attendants and CCTV are problematic not less because I’m paranoid of salivating perverts and more because I fear the hyperreactive news media going extreme Dateline should such an outrage occur — one incident of exploitation could set the cause of restroom reform back by decades.

England’s Partnerships for Schools has set up the Bog Standard website to answer this pressing question: how can we create school bathrooms private enough for students to get their asses emptied but public enough to avoid getting their butts kicked?