Last week, New York City unveiled the first of twenty futuristic new public toilets intended to give desperate citizens a choice beyond waddling to the nearest Starbucks or crouching behind the nearest trashcan. The city is relying on state-of-the-art technology to avoid the crack addicts, prostitutes, and green puddles of god-knows-what that have plagued the public toilets of New York City’s past: these toilets are self-cleaning and designed to operate safely and sanitarily without a human attendant.

But while I’m proud of the city for finally considering its citizens’ most basic needs, it looks like their quest for automation has detracted from what should have been their goal: building toilets people would actually want to use.

From the New York Times review of the facility: “When the green light marked ‘vacant’ is lit, 25 cents — coins only, no bills — starts the visit. What follows is possibly the longest and most awkward 20 to 30 seconds of a person’s day. The door slips open like an elevator, but then it stays open, to accommodate those who need extra time getting in. Meanwhile, men and women in suits walk past. It is very difficult to look inconspicuous in a bathroom on a sidewalk in New York with the door open. There is just nothing to do but stand there.”

Let’s consider the user of a New York City street toilet. A street toilet is by definition a toilet of last resort, used only by users who don’t have time to make it anywhere nicer. And as we all know, bowels in a state of panic are notorious for discharging when the eyes spot a toilet — not necessarily when the butt actually sits on it. Imagine the desperate user who digs out his quarter, opens the door, dashes inside, and then has to make eye-contact with passers-by for thirty seconds before he can even loosen his belt.

“The toilet itself {is} an imposing, metal, cold-looking receptacle in the corner … There is no seat to raise or lower, just the wide rim of the bowl, with covers made of tissue available in a dispenser to the side.”

A cold toilet seat? A squared toilet seat? A seatless toilet seat??? No one will want to sit on this thing. American butts prefer porcelain horseshoes. This unfriendly, unfamiliar, sure-to-be-uncomfortable steel apparatus will drive people to hover instead of sit — which will lead to a lot of spray-painting.

“{The black button} dispenses toilet paper. One will quickly familiarize oneself with that button, because the designers have deigned a little 16-inch strip the standard helping of paper. A word to the wise: There is a maximum of just three helpings.”

Sixteen inches = four squares. Again, consider the user. He’s only using this toilet because he’s minutes from eruption. Eruption implies diarrhea. And diarrhea implies the need for a whole lot more than twelve squares of toilet paper.

“The floor is rubber and, more strikingly, very wet … {the seat} too, is quite damp, for perfectly good reasons: when the visitor steps out, the door shuts again, but the “occupied” light stays lit. Strange hisses and spraying sounds come from within — did someone slip past? No, actually, the room is cleaning itself. A robotic arm swings out over the toilet bowl and hits it with disinfectant, while similar jets spray across the sink and the floor. Then, dryers fan hot air over everything.”

It’s great that it’s cleaned after every use. But you don’t assume a wet floor or wet seat is due to cleaning — you assume it’s due to urine, and you guard your pants cuffs and butt cheeks accordingly.

“After 90 seconds of cleaning, the green light outside comes back on.”

Let’s again consider the users of this toilet. While our first hypothetical user has been resolving his situation, imagine a second who has been outside doing the waiting dance. The door finally opens and the second user’s sphincter slackens in anticipation; but when the door slams shut, will the second user’s sphincter do the same?

I believe that public conveniences are the mark of a civilized society, which makes me feel guilty to criticize New York’s long-overdue effort to this ideal. But this toilet was not designed with users in mind. Instead, with its metal seat, its twelve-square paper limit, its thirty-second open-door policy, it was designed primarily to maximize the time between maintenance visits. Which results in a facility that actually works against the very people who need it most.

The primary goal should have been to give users a place they’d want to poop; the form of the facility should have followed this function. Based on the Times’ review, if I’m stuck short anywhere near Madison and 23rd, even if I’ve got a quarter in my pocket, I’m going to duckwalk it to the Starbucks a few blocks away.

(What is the World Toilet Summit? Find out here.)

Today I’m going to talk about how the flush toilet negatively shapes attitudes towards sanitation. And I’m going to tell you what you need to know in order to counteract the ideological influence of the flush toilet.

But first, a bit about me. In 2003, I started writing what I expected to be a humorous look at the world of toilets. But the more research I did, the more serious the book grew.

As you can see by its title, my book still has humor — but the humor is for a purpose: I use humor to diffuse the taboo so that people feel comfortable enough to take the subject seriously.

In my research, I’ve discovered something about the toilet that everyone attending the World Toilet Summit needs to know: the toilet was NOT invented for sanitation. It was invented for ideology.

Here’s the brief history. The toilet was invented in the 18th and 19th century to help rich Victorians in England differentiate themselves from the lower classes.

This was during the industrial revolution, when wealth began to spread beyond the most elite members of society.

The most elite Victorians didn’t like it that so many people were becoming rich like them, and so they adopted elaborate customs and morality to differentiate themselves in ways mere money couldn’t.

So to them, sweating, burping, having sun-darkened skin, showing sexual desire or strong emotion — all these were taboo to the elite Victorians, because they identified all these with the lower classes.

But the problem was, whenever they felt the need to evacuate, they left behind in their chamber pot a disgusting reminder that they were no different than anyone else.

Even if no one heard or smelled what they were doing in their private bathroom, there was still this disgusting THING left in the chamber pot, and the servants would know who put it there.

The toilet appealed to their ideology because it enabled fecal invisibility. The water would contain the smell, and then with a press of a button, every reminder of their shared humanity would disappear down the drain.

The toilet is a tool of ideology. It only became a tool of sanitation after science linked cholera with fecal contamination of water. THAT’S when people decided the toilet had a sanitary purpose.

This isn’t to say the toilet is a bad thing. Of course it isn’t. It’s one of the most lifesaving inventions in the history of man. But if we’re going to attend the World Toilet Summit, it’s important to know where the toilet came from. This knowledge will help your work.

Because clearly this ideological influence is at work today.

Surely you’ve met people who refuse to even talk about the toilet, to even think about it, whether it’s as a joke or in discussing the importance of sanitation in the developing world.

Like it or not, when you talk about toilets, many people think you’re talking about making feces invisible. We know that our goals are sanitation, but there is an ideology that comes with it.

But here’s the good news: by recognizing this ideology, we can use it to our advantage!

I gave a lecture at the University of Iowa about the way the news media covers bathroom-related subjects. In it, I examined some of the headlines that ran worldwide about this very event: the World Toilet Summit. Here are some of the headlines that ran:

- World Toilet Summit lifts lid on public hygiene (Reuters)

- World Toilet Summit more than a wee bit important (Irish Examiner)

- Summit flushes out smelly toilets (AP)

Obviously the World Toilet Summit does not “flush out smelly toilets.” Why does the media feel the need to use puns, or place stories about the World Toilet Summit in the “news of the weird” column?

It’s because in American culture, at least, and I suspect in many other cultures, human waste is taboo.

And when you treat human waste in any other way than the taboo dictates, many people will be horrified — horrified by the subject, and horrified by you for bringing it up. It’s contamination by association.

If the media thinks some of its readers will think the World Toilet Summit is disgusting, then the media will do what it takes to distance itself from the subject. Hence, headlines like those.

There are also people who will think that someone who takes toilets seriously is contaminated.

That is the ideological barrier to sanitation.

It’s imperative to break down this barrier. And it can be as simple as acknowledging the absurdity of the subject, making a joke to break the taboo– as Jack Sim does when he introduces himself as Toiletman.

It’s important to recognize that you see the taboo and show that you’ve moved past it, if you’re going to get people receiving your message to do the same.

Sanitation is critical for both the developing world and the developed world. I don’t need to tell that to the people in this room.

But it does need to be communicated to the people outside of this room, and to the media.

So whether you’re on the floor of the UN talking about the Year of Sanitation, or introducing people to their very first toilet, you need to keep this in mind: the toilet has an ideology, and this ideology speaks as loudly as the facts and statistics that we’re working so hard to change.

If you have any questions, my email address is in the book. Thank you very much.

On the morning of August 8, three inches of rain fell on Brooklyn. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 260 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing only 60 million gallons per day.

When flow exceeds capacity by that much, the only choice is to channel it all, untreated, into the waterways. And so emergency outflow points in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal and across Upper New York Bay began to ejaculate diluted sewage.

But aside from homeowners whose basements were flooded by Gowanus sewage and beachgoers who swam in feces the next day, few people paid attention to the sewer overflows. After all, New York City averages 53 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) a year, and 772 American communities have combined wastewater and rainwater sewers that overflow during heavy rains. But since CSOs rarely make the news and few politicians want to stake political capital on sewers, the political will to fix them probably won’t appear until the problem becomes a catastrophe.

This is the story of one such catastrophe: a stench so vile that it changed the course of human sanitation.

London in 1858 was not a pleasant place for people who enjoyed breathing through their nose. The Industrial Revolution had attracted three million fortune-seekers to the big city, turning housing into a two-pronged competition: landlords tried to see how many times they could subdivide a flat and tenants tried to see how many people they could pack into each one. Every inch of real estate not reserved for someone sleeping was appropriated by the machinery of capitalism — neighborhoods teemed with tanneries, breweries, soap factories, glue works, slaughterhouses, laundries, and bone boilers, and pollution spewed into the skies and streets and sewers from each one.

Spewing waste: that’s an excellent metaphor for London in 1858. Waste spewed from buildings and waste spewed from the people. And it was this inexorable brown flow that, in the summer of 1858, brought the city to its knees.

As described in Poop Culture, the flush toilet had by 1858 become a social necessity. The elite Victorians’ late 18th Century embrace of the apparatus had trickled down to their social inferiors; mid-19th Century bourgeoisie agreed that anything flushless was uncivilized. But until 1847, law and custom both held that sewers were for drainage and not for human waste — anything bearing urine or feces was legally and morally obliged to be emptied only in the nearest cesspool. So the majority of flush toilets were plumbed to outflow not into sewers, but into pits in people’s backyards.

Cesspools could contain the quantity of waste deposited via chamber pots and privies, but the gallons of water accompanying every flush of the toilet proved too much to bear. As more and more toilets were installed in the city, more and more cesspools began to overflow. Liquid sewage would leach into basements and drinking wells until reaching the nearest sewer — which, designed for drainage, would channel the muck into the nearest waterway. And so as the summer of 1858 began, the biological and commercial feculence of London was flushed in ever-increasing volumes into the Thames.

June of 1858 was dry. Damned dry. So dry that the current of the Thames slowed almost to a stop.

June of 1858 was hot. Damned hot. So hot that the biological stew floating atop the still waters of the Thames began to putrefy.

And so began the Great Stink.

“A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror,” Prime Minister described it. Human and animal feces, dead dogs and cats, entrails from the slaughterhouses, rotten food, and the mechanized vomit of countless factories bobbed and bubbled while the people of London invested heavily in scented handkerchiefs. But as bad as it must have stunk, smell is something people can get used to. (And it’s not like previous summers had been remembered for smelling of roses. Michael Faraday’s 1855 description of the Thames: “The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid.”) No, the stench of the Thames terrified London because most Londoners genuinely believed the odor would kill them.

In 1858, both science and laymen alike subscribed to the miasma theory of disease: that cholera, malaria, and the common cold were all caused by inhaling air infected through exposure to putrefying matter. Although Dr. John Snow had demonstrated in 1854 that cholera was caused not by miasma but by fecal contamination of water, his theories had few believers at the time of his death on June 16, 1858 — right at the height of the Great Stink. So while John Snow was being laid to rest at Brompton Cemetery, Londoners feared for their lives of the smells arising from the Thames’ clotted waters.

With Parliament right on the banks of the river, the politicians’ first act was, of course, to save themselves: they ordered curtains soaked in chloride of lime to be hung in the windows. Presumably the smell of the chemical overpowered the smell of the river and thus, by their science, neutralized whatever foul demons rode the invisible airwaves of odor. For a brief time, Parliament smelled less like putrefying shit and more like the 1858 equivalent of Formula 409, and the business of running the country continued.

But when the stench proved too resilient, Parliament realized more needed to be done to ensure their own well-being. Welsh MP Owen Stanley repeated to the great body Dr. John Bredall’s testimony at the Court of the Queen’s Bench: “It would be dangerous to the lives of the jurymen, counsel, and witnesses to remain. It would produce malaria and perhaps typhus fever.”

So, for the good of the nation, Parliament abandoned the portions of the building overlooking the river.

Well-to-do Londoners fled for the summer retreats. But working-class London stayed put, holding their breath, avoiding the river, and hoping not to die as the stench smothered the city (and, according to one source, spawned an epidemic of giant flies). A few brave sanitary engineers attempted to solve the problem by dumping tons of chemicals into the Thames. Chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid went in by the ton, but whatever effects these chemicals may have had were negated by the ceaseless sludge spewing from the buildings and the people. While the Great Stink was created by man, only nature could end it.

Fortunately for London, nature intervened: after a fortnight of misery and terror, the heat finally broke and the rain finally came. The Thames began to flow. The stink began to dissipate. And the politicians began to do their jobs.

Just like our government today is well aware of the problems of combined sewers, so too were London officials fully cognizant of their sewer problems in the years before the Great Stink. By 1847, sanitation had gotten so bad that a consolidated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was formed to begin surveying and mapping the existing problem. (From an 1849 report: “The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility.”) In the eleven years prior to the Great Stink, six separate commissions evaluated 137 proposed solutions without making any tangible progress.

But in the weeks immediately following the Great Stink, Parliament rapidly authorized three million pounds for the Metropolitan Board of Works’ famed engineer Joseph Bazalgette to build a massive sewer system. Bazalgette then spent the next seven years building 82 miles of intercepting sewers, 250 miles of main sewers, and 13,000 miles of local sewers to channel London’s entire sewage output downstream to Barking and Crossness, where it could be released into the Thames, untreated, during periods of favorable current — sparing London the dangers of miasmatic sewage, but leaving the question of treatment for a future generation.

Bazalgette’s sewers, which became a model for combined sewers in New York City and across the west, experienced their first major overflow event on July 26, 1867, when 3.25 inches of rain fell on London. As per Bazalgette’s design, emergency outflow points opened and diluted sewage and water spewed directly into the Thames.

140 years later, on October 11, 2007, 1.48 inches of rain fell on New York City, and the exact same thing happened. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 128 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing just 60 million gallons per day. Emergency outflow points across the Gowanus Canal and Upper New York Bay opened up, and diluted sewage once again spewed into the water.

In London, CSOs spew 5.2 billion gallons of sewage into the Thames each year; New York City’s waterways choke on 27 billion gallons of sewage for the same reason. In both cities, and in 772 communities across America, the problem is known but not considered urgent. London’s CSOs will cost £2 billion to fix; America is looking at $4 billion for New England’s problems alone. But with no movement towards resolution, the sewage will just continue to spill until another catastrophe finally occurs.

It’s every author’s dream that there exists some secret pocket of the world in which his work is fully appreciated. Realizing that dream is even more unlikely when the author’s work has the word “poop” in its title. So it’s a strange journey indeed that begins with founding a bathroom humor website and leads to a ceremonial honor by one of India’s most important sanitary advocates.

Only 18% of Indians use toilets, according to the country’s 2001 census. The 19th century wave of sanitary reform that formalized the west’s bathroom habits didn’t wash over India; today 13.6% of its urban population and 78.4% of its rural population still practice open defecation.

Change is coming, though — on high from organizations like UNICEF and the UN, which declares 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation; and locally from advocates like Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose Sulabh International has, since 1973, built 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people.

Dr. Pathak is often cited alongside Ghandi for his work to liberate India’s untouchable caste. And yet there he was, a sanitary visionary, laying a flower garland on a guy who wrote a book about poop.

New Delhi guidebooks recognize Sulabh only for its toilet museum. But its broader mission is far more serious: liberating India’s lowest caste from “the demeaning practice of physically cleaning and carrying human excreta.” The staggering number of toilets it has built are the sole source of funding for its related ventures: free schools to teach trades to former scavengers, research into human waste as energy and fertilizer, and more.

Having found myself in Delhi on (non bathroom-related) business last month, I’d emailed Sulabh an introduction of myself and my book, hoping for little more than a tour of the museum and perhaps a few minutes of Dr. Pathak’s time. Sanitary advocacy and bathroom humor may not mix, but perhaps they could intersect for a time.

But the welcome I received…! A short audience upon my arrival, first with Anita Jha, Sulabh’s Managing Director, and then with Dr. Pathak. A formal welcome before an assembled crowd in Sulabh’s conference center. A classroom-by-classroom tour of the school. An exhibit-by-exhibit tour of the museum. A model-by-model tour of the Sulabh’s household toilets, with staff scientist Dr. P.K. Jha (no relation) explaining how their dual-pit pour-flush system allows waste to compost in one pit while the other is slowly filled. Over the three years the first pit lays untouched, bacteria transform the waste into compost — turning waste into a resource while eliminating the need for human scavengers.

Dr. Jha led me to a nearby fertilizer bin. The photographer who had been trailing me since I arrived leapt to immortalize this moment: me lifting a sample to my nose, inhaling the sweet smell of pure earth.

From there, it was on to Dr. Pathak’s office for a long conversation about his work. It began in 1968 when he moved in with a community of untouchables — an unthinkable breach of taboo for a Brahmin. But Dr. Pathak saw human waste as Ghandi did: not a symbol of filth but a fundamental baseline that links all humanity.

Dr. Pathak, Ms. Jha, and I were joined for lunch by a man introduced as “one of the most famous astrologers in India.”

My journey sees me returning to Delhi for a year beginning in November, in part to research a book about the future of toilets and sewers. Upon learning this, Dr. Pathak invited me to attend and speak at the 2007 World Toilet Summit, hosted this year in Delhi. The Summit will kick-start the Year of Sanitation’s efforts to reduce by half the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation; my experience translating bathroom humor into sanitary awareness, it seems, is directly relevant to the Summit’s goals. Jack Sim, president of the World Toilet Organization, often introduces himself as “Toiletman” — intentionally eliciting an initial giggle to diffuse the taboo.

Human waste is a fundamental baseline; bathroom humor is a fundamental reaction to it.

But I didn’t know this was Dr. Pathak’s perspective when, standing with him on the dais in front of his assembled staff, the garland fresh on my shoulders, he frowned at the typed speech he was about to deliver. He turned to me, gestured to the title of my book on his paper, and asked, “What is ‘poop’?”

Before I could consider an answer, Ms. Jha leaned forward. “It’s shit, sir,” she informed him.

“Ah,” he said. And then he proceeded to the lectern and gave this author the greatest honor of his career thus far.

You can see photos of Sulabh, Dr. Pathak, and more on my Flickr page.

Last week, the New York Times announced it was making all the content on its website free. Whereas once you had to pay to access articles dating back to the paper’s founding in 1851, now this trove of history and knowledge is accessible to anyone with a login and password.

Login: poopreport. Password: poopreport. You can use that ID to follow in my steps, because the first thing I did when I heard their announcement was to search for the Times’ first use of the word “poop.”

The results weren’t as fulfilling as my research into the first appearance of the word “poop” on the Internet, which led me to identify (and interview!) the Internet’s first PoopReporter: Tom Reingold, who described his changing needs for bathroom privacy on the misc.kids newsgroup. But most early references to poop on the Times (like this one, for instance) refer to “poop decks” (which, in spite of what we may think, are actually standard features in naval architecture). This appears to be the case on September 24, 1851, in an article entitled “MARINE INTELLIGENCE.; PORT OF NEW-YORK. Cleared. Arrived. Telegraph Domestic Ports. Spoken, &c.”

“Marine intelligence”, I take it, refers to the comings and goings of various boats into and out of New York Harbor; this passage reports that the Argo, from Liverpool, arrived on the 20th of August, 1851, carrying 81 people in the poop deck.

I assume that most of the appearances of “poop” in the years that followed are similar. But the Times only allows you to download a PDF scan of the article, instead of letting you browse the digitize text rather than browsing the digitized text; so with no find function, it would take forever to go through each article to find out when “poop” is first discussed in a non-sailing context.

Outside of sailing, the only major appearances I could find were due to scanning errors. For instance, here is an article that appeared on February 4, 1923:

Nothing bathroom-related about that. But in the search results, that headline is rendered thusly:

“Poop Ice Stops Army Hockey Games”

Similar scanning errors give us similar results.

“Inventor Dies in the Poop House”

“20,000 Toy Ones to be Bestowed on Poop Children by Mrs. M.L. Towns”

“Priest Criticizes Idealists Who Try to Teach the Poop How to Live”

This article, from April 10, 1879, came across as “poop” in the search results; I can’t tell if it’s a scanning error or not.

Some other notable New York Times milestones.

• July 13, 1969: the first appearance of “feces”, in a book review. (”If you value your digestion and peace of mind, read no further. We’re going to be talking about fleas and feces.”)

• October 29, 1851: the first appearance of “toilet”, in a list of award winners at the Industrial Exhibition of 1851. (”Hauel, J…… toilet soaps.”)

• Dec 12, 1851: the first appearance of the phrase “water closet”, in testimony offered by Pugh Smith during the trial of Lawrence Reily for the murder of his wife and his wife’s mother. (”When the dinner was ready, I found Reily in the water closet, asleep; the door was fastened on the inside.”)

• September 20, 1851: the first appearance of the word “diarrhea”, in a report on the health of President Millard Fillmore. (”I have just left the President. He has suffered considerably during the night and morning from an attack of diarrhea and stomach derangement, similar to his attack, recently, at White Sulphur Springs, and brought on by change of water, cold and fatigue.”)

• July 15, 1888: the first appearance of the phrase “toilet paper”, in a trial following a hazing scandal at the Annapolis Naval Academy. (”He is charged with requiring Cadets Davidson and Stockford to chew their toilet paper.”)

• December 3, 1856: the first appearance of the word “excreta”, in a report on findings presented at the Horticultural Society. (”In passing through animal bodies, as part of themselves and not as excreta, mineral materials acquire a modification which renders them better fitted for similar and further uses.”)

• December 25, 1852: the first appearance of the word “bathroom”. (It’s somewhere in a 5,000 word article; with a lack of a search function, I’m sure as hell not going to go searching for it.)

• January 10, 1910: the first appearance of the phrase “dangling ass grapes”. (OK, that phrase hasn’t ever been in the New York Times. But I DID search for it, just in case.)
  

Google News appears to have indexed the Times archive; searching there is more fruitful because they, at least, show the keyword as it appears in context. It’s not a bad interface, so maybe one of you will have more luck finding “poop” as we now know it.

Two hours before last May’s The Tao of Poo, I walked into the Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia for the first time and beheld a sculpted Jesus hanging from a cross twelve feet above the stage, his face twisted in the eternal agony that can only be understood by someone nailed to a crucifix and forced to listen to two hours of people talking about poop. This holy setting (the Fleisher is actually a converted church) inspired me to include in my remarks an excerpt from Poop Culture cataloging the appearances of poop in the Bible. Among the passages I discussed was Malachi 2:3: “Behold, I will rebuke your seed, and will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your feasts.”

The Book of Malachi is the last of the Old Testament. In it, God, speaking through His prophet Malachi, chastises the people of Judea who have turned away from Him. While He’s angry at pretty much everyone, He’s particularly upset at the priests who aren’t properly glorifying His name. His warning of feces face painting is aimed directly at these priests:

“And now this commandment is for you, O priests. If you do not listen, and if you do not take it to heart to give honor to my name,” says the lord of hosts, “then I … will spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your feasts.”
– Malachi 2:1-3

Reading the passage that night in Philadelphia, I thought I’d spotted a typo. Surely God was referring to the dung of their beasts, right? But a post-event glance at an online Bible showed I got it right the first time: “dung of your feasts.” God is not just brandishing a celestial fistful of random gutter poop — no, He has some very specific poop in mind.

Dung of your “feasts”? Wondering if there was another meaning to the word “feast”, I compared the passage reprinted in Poop Culture (the American Standard Version of the Bible) with some other translations. In the New American Standard Bible version, it’s also “feasts.” In the King James Version, it’s “solemn feasts.” In the God’s Word Translation, it’s “festival sacrifices.” Further cross-referencing brought me to Ezekiel 45:17, in which the word ASV translates as “feasts” is rendered by GWT and others as “annual festivals.” So there’s little ambiguity to God’s threat: God will reach His divine hand out of the heavens, gather the priest’s morning-after pile into His divine palm, and shove it down the priest’s blasphemous gullet.

Which begs the next question: why is this poop different from all other poops?

The answer can be found in a fast-growing diet fad that lies at the intersection of America’s spreading evangelism and America’s spreading waistlines: bible diets. You can lose weight, these diets claim, by eating what Jesus would eat: natural and unprocessed foods like vegetables and whole grains. (The historical claims of these diets appear to be supported by biblical record.) From a weight-loss standpoint, these diets seem promising — they’re light, wholesome, and free of the corn syrup that’s fattening Americans like geese bound for foie gras. These diets are full of fiber and complex carbohydrates — which means that from a pooping standpoint, they’d be fairly unstinky and relatively easy to pass.

In Malachi 2:3, God very deliberately contrasts a priest’s everyday poop with the “dung of your feast”, implying that festival poop is a whole lot different. I know from the few fragments of Bible still floating around my head that feasts were an occasion for a lamb to be slaughtered and roasted up for the whole village to enjoy. If the typical diet was high in fiber and complex carbs, this sudden infusion of fat and protein must have been like our experiences during the Summer Stoolstice. For some priests, the “dung of your feasts” produced massive sixteen-inch scepters with which God could smack them upside the head; for others, it produced squirts and splatters that God could apply to their face with a paintbrush.

What’s most interesting about this passage to me is not God’s dung cannon loaded with festival bullets; rather, it’s the symbolic implications of His statement. To contemporary readers, having poop smeared on your face is bad because poop is gross and because poop has extreme symbolic negativity. Malachi 2:3 implies that poop inspired the same physical and symbolic reactions 2,500 years ago as it does today.

What’s more, Malachi 2:3 implies that people were probably joking about their poop back then, just like we do today. When God said “dung of your feasts,” the priests He was yelling at probably didn’t turn to one another and wonder what the hell He’s talking about. No, God’s threat had to be one with immediate comprehension — which means “dung of your feasts” was a concept with which they were intimately familiar. The ancient Israelites probably laughed and bragged about their post-Hanukkah poops the way we laugh and joke about the aftermath of Thanksgiving.

From Malachi 2:3, we can infer that the people of Bible times believed that poop is gross, and that poop is funny, and that having poop smeared on your face is a very bad thing. Twenty-five hundred years later, we believe the exact same things. When I go to museums, I have a trouble identifying with living, breathing humans who painted the pottery upon which I dumbly gaze; but through this passage I can immediately connect with my ancient ancestors. It’s through poop that I can understand others — across language, across religion, and across time.

I’m not one of those writers who will tell you that I nervously sniffed the glass of former toilet water.

Not me. I put my nose to the surface of the water and inhaled with gusto, with vigor, with complete faith in the technology that scrubbed out all the bodily fluids suspended in it only hours before.

And I smelled nothing.

Around me, members of the US Society of Ecological Economists grinned. A few took pictures. And a man named Ed Clerico beamed — as well he should. It is his company, after all, that designed, built, and operates the system that purified this water: the US’s first onsite water reclamation system in a multi-family residential building, here in the basement of the Solaire.

Today the Solaire is one of only five buildings in New York City that are reclaiming their wastewater. But the city is considering a capital incentive for water savings — which means many new buildings may soon join the Solaire in consuming less, discharging less, and reducing pressure on the city’s infrastructure and resources.

As long as political and environmental groups help make it happen.

Buildings are like the people that inhabit them: they eat, they drink, they breathe, and they produce waste. In most buildings, the 1.6 gallons of pure drinking water you contaminate every time you use the toilet are excreted into the municipal sewage system. But in the Solaire, a 27-story, 293-unit building designed in 2000 and completed in 2003, that waste isn’t wasted. Located in Battery Park City, the Solaire is the first green residential building in the country; and one of its most exciting features is that the showers, sinks, dishwashers, washing machines, and all 750 of the building’s toilets flush up to 25,000 gallons of sewage each day down into a 1,500 square foot concrete room carved out of the parking garage. In a city where parking fetches up to $225,000 a spot, this valuable real estate houses a membrane bioreactor that turns sewage into clean water for non-potable uses throughout the building.

Ever since Poop Culture has come out, I’ve been meeting fascinating people who, like me, spend time thinking about what happens after you press the handle to flush. Ed Clerico, former president of Applied Water Management and current head of New Jersey’s Alliance Environmental, is one of them. On a sunny day in June, Ed invited my wife and I to join the US Society of Ecological Economists on a tour of the Solaire, convening under the photovoltaic cells climbing up the Solaire’s west-facing wall before proceeding directly to its basement — a spotless, shining cacophony of tanks, pipes, and valves, roaring with machine noise, overwhelming in its complexity and yet sporting neat labels on each component for the benefit of what must be frequent tour groups.

Pressing a button, Clerico dulled the noise to a hum and explained exactly how a membrane bioreactor works.

Picture thousands of hollow spaghetti-like strands hanging down into a pulsating stew of sewage and bacteria. The Solaire’s sewage, after settling in a tank to remove the largest solids, enters the membrane bioreactor, where bacteria digest the organic matter suspended in it. This kind of organic digestion takes place in most standard wastewater treatment facilities; what makes membrane treatment unique is that rather than separating the contaminants from the water, it separates the water from the contaminants — sucking at the stew through billions of pores in the membranes so tiny that only water molecules can pass through.

Once through the membranes, the water is treated for color and odor by an ozone generator, further disinfected by UV light, and then pumped back into the building to help fill the cooling tower, irrigate the adjacent park, and, appropriately, refill each of the Solaire’s 750 toilets.

Stepping to a faucet on the outflow side of the UV disinfection system, Clerico triumphantly filled a clear plastic glass. Early adapters though the Ecological Economists are, a few still gave the water distrusting looks as it passed from person to person on its way to me, now surely immortalized in some Flickr album as “the guy who smelled the toilet water.”

It had no odor and no color. It was water, plain and simple. “Nearly potable,” Clerico told me, “but a little too salty.” Membrane pore size descends from microfiltration to ultrafiltration to nanofiltration to reverse osmosis; the Solaire uses ultrafiltration, which allows some salts to pass through. This is fine for non-potable uses; if the Solaire wanted drinking water, Clerico would rely on no less than reverse osmosis.

The tour took us up to the Solaire’s 19th floor roof deck (a lovely view of Teardrop Park, made green by the Solaire’s reclaimed water) and then down into a model apartment, where, standing on floors made from wood chips and coated with non-toxic varnish, talk turned from ecology to economics. The Solaire has reduced water consumption and discharge by 48% and 56% respectively while adding about 0.5% to the cost of the building. At current sewer and water rates, the Solaire’s water reuse system will take up to twelve years to pay itself off. (Clerico says that a system would need to process 500,000 gallons a day — a scope on par with the World Trade Center — to make water reclamation profitable from day one.)

But that twelve-year estimate is based on 2003’s municipal incentives, 2000’s technology, and today’s water and sewer rates. The New York City Water Board plans rate increases of at least 11% a year each year until 2010, instantly making water reclamation cost effective for a much wider range of projects. What’s more, green technology has evolved in the seven years since the Solaire was designed, dropping costs and improving efficiency.

It is a proposed capital incentive, however, that could make the most dramatic difference for water reuse. New York City is considering offering developers a reimbursement on every gallon of water they save above a yearly average of a thousand gallons a day. Developers’ proposals will be evaluated based on a number of factors, with preference going to projects with the highest water savings and the lowest cost per gallon per day (GPD).

Why does the city want to offer a capital incentive? Because finding new water is expensive, and right now there’s no incentive for developers to help take the pressure off the supply. “The supply options that DEP is likely to consider are under $20/GPD, although some of those have added operation costs,” says the city in their proposed framework for this incentive. If a developer can save the city a thousand gallons of water a day at $15/GPD, it makes perfect economical sense for the city to pay for the developer to do so, even before the ecological benefits are factored in.

Membrane bioreactors aren’t the only water-saving systems that would be incentivized under the city’s proposed framework. But Clerico believes this capital incentive, combined with the water and sewer rate increases, will drastically increase the attractiveness of water reuse by dropping the payback period to two or three years for a building the size of the Solaire. The city is soliciting commentary on the proposed framework by October 1 (see the bottom of the framework proposal for contact info); if all goes well, the framework will go into practice in 2008 or 2009.

The capital incentive will benefit the city, the environment, and the infrastructure; but it will also benefit companies like Applied Water Management and Alliance Environmental. This isn’t a problem — the new green movement is, after all, about finding profit in reducing waste — but it does mean that pressure to implement this program has to come from political organizations with no financial stake in the measure. The capital incentive marries ecology with economy; and while the business community will quickly recognize this, it’s critical for environmental and political groups to line up their support as well.

Our tour of the Solaire ended in Teardrop Park. I’m not one of those writers who will tell you that I got all maudlin as I heard children laughing in the shade of trees irrigated by former toilet water. Not me. After the tour I just went home, where I shortly contaminated 1.6 gallons of pure drinking water and then hosed a few more gallons of pure drinking water on my tomato plants.

Last month, the entire human race changed adjectives. No longer are we a rural species; as of May 23, 2007, humanity is urban.

This news comes to us from the United Nations Populations Fund: for the first time in our history, the majority of our species lives in towns and cities. In fact, researchers at two American universities claim that May 23 was the tipping point — the very day the 3,300,000,001th person left his or her farm for life in the big city.

But when people crowd into cities, problems of sanitation follow. I describe the relationship in my book: “As a population’s density grows, so too grows the threat from its accumulated poop. {A population’s} safety depends on being able to destroy poop faster than it can produce it.” With that in mind, the UN’s report should bode ill for the sanitary health of our species.

But according to UNICEF, the trend is the opposite: as worldwide population density has increased, we humans have actually gotten better at managing human waste.

In their assessment of world sanitation and drinking water, UNICEF reported that 58% of the world has adequate sanitation as of 2002. That’s up from 49% in 1990.

As horrified as I am that 42% of the world — 2.6 billion people — don’t have access to decent sanitation, I still see in those numbers a staggeringly positive trend. One would think that the world’s population growing by 950 million people in a twelve year period would overwhelm whatever sanitary solutions civilization had thus far devised. But the results have contradicted expectations: fewer people go without sanitation today than did in 1990, despite the fact that almost a billion more people were added to the mix.

What does it mean to have sanitary coverage? It doesn’t mean that you have a toilet that flushes into the sewers. While globalization is spreading the Western-style toilet to the far reaches of the Earth (a trend I hope to examine in my next book; and as the Western-style sitter replaces the Eastern-style squatter, will Western-style rates of hemorrhoids and colon cancer be far behind?), toilets and sewers aren’t the only receptacles UNICEF deems appropriate for humanity’s business. According to UNICEF , “access to sanitary means of excreta disposal is estimated by the percentage of the population using improved sanitation facilities. Improved sanitation facilities are those more likely to ensure privacy and hygienic use.” The facilities UNICEF looks upon with approval include:

• A connection to a public sewer
• A connection to a septic system
• A pour-flush latrine
• A simple pit latrine
• A ventilated improved pit latrine

Unimproved sanitation facilities are technologies like public or shared latrines, open pit latrines, and bucket latrines.

Human beings, at least those on a Western diet, produce an average of a half-pound of poop and two quarts of urine a day. A latrine servicing a hundred people thus accumulate fifty pounds of poop and fifty gallons of urine every twenty-four hours; at this rate, unimproved sanitary facilities can easily lapse into a health threat. Poop is a vector for viruses, parasites, and bacteria, and poop attracts insects and vermin who carry more of the same. Before toilets and sewers grew widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, poor sanitation killed millions. Modern cities don’t much suffer typhoid or cholera anymore, but in many less developed places, outbreaks still occur.

In my nascent career as sewage eco-warrior, I’ve given a lot of criticism to toilets. “They waste water,” I’ve said. “They demand an expensive sewage infrastructure,” I’ve said. “They don’t allow us to safely reclaim our waste as fertilizer,” I’ve said. I’ve imagined a bathroom utopia based on a yet-to-be-invented technology in which our waste is kept out of the sewers to avoid contamination and perhaps even harnessed to generate electricity. But with every criticism I deliver I try to give toilets their due: they represent a tremendous step for humanity. This year’s shift from rural to urban would not be possible had we not shifted from cesspool to toilet one hundred years ago. The externalities the toilet has created are worth the lives it has saved. Our next step is to reduce these externalities without sacrificing the gains we’ve achieved in sanitation, convenience, and ease-of-use.

The UN’s population report expects another 1.7 billion people to make the urban shift by 2030, warning of increases in poverty, violence, and pollution as they do. UNICEF underscores these warnings with their analysis of the world’s access to clean water and sanitation. But UNICEF’s report provides much hope to the exploding masses of humanity: despite all the problems facing our species, we’re finally starting to get better at the basics.

For the first humans who gave up the nomadic life and settled into towns and villages, the problems quickly piled up. Quite literally, I mean: stinking, fly-covered piles of you-know-what. Sedentary humans rapidly learned that civilization and sanitation are inseparable — without laws and taboos regulating the disposal of human waste, stench and disease overwhelm civility and decorum.

Today we rely on toilets, sewers, and sewage treatment plants to keep us safe from our waste. But despite millions of lives saved, this sanitary model is not the paragon of human achievement. Rather, it’s a jury-rigged series of fixes applied to salvage an infrastructure designed in accordance with flawed science. It’s far from the ideal sanitary model. But in the short term, we’re stuck with it.

Which means that while civilization’s last great sanitary leaps came from London and Washington, the next is more likely to come from Lagos.

The economic concept of path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant. Sewers, for instance, rely on a certain amount of water being flushed down toilets to push the waste through the network of pipes. Though the technology exists to drastically lower the 1.6 gallons per flush our toilets currently use, we’re locked into using that ridiculous amount of water for fear that our sewers might grind to a stagnant halt without it.

Path dependence also explains why it wasn’t until 1972 when Washington finally decided it was time for America’s sewers to end their then century-long practice of channeling raw poop straight into America’s waterways.

Until the late 19th Century, most Westerners deposited their poop into backyard cesspools. This sanitary model was completely overwhelmed by growing population densities during the Industrial Revolution, subjecting civilization to seven great cholera pandemics and millions of deaths as a result. In the mid-1850s, a London doctor named John Snow discovered that cholera was spread by fecal contamination of water. Cities across the world slowly turned to sewers as the best means to remove waste from the population that creates it, led by London in 1859.

But to the scientists and engineers of the time, it was enough to simply direct a city’s sewers to outflow directly into running water. This seems stupid today, but it was in perfect accordance with the science of the time, which held that “the solution to pollution is dilution.” By the time Germ Theory rolled around and science realized that raw waste, diluted or not, was a vector for pathogens, we were way too invested in sewers to give up on them.

So America turned then to purification plants to sanitize municipal drinking water, enabling upstream cities to continue dumping sewage while helping downstream cities avoid that pesky dysentery. Not only was this system unable to scale to every single point of inflow, it did nothing to alleviate the environmental havoc being wreaked on the waterways. But the country was unwilling to give up on sewers, which meant the only choice was to jury-rig a treatment system: sticking multimillion dollar scrubbing plants at sewage outflow points to sequester organic matter from the 32 billion gallons of water we flush every day. There are over 16,000 such plants today; and since 1972, the government has invested a further $250 billion dollars in this sanitary model.

When the weather is nice, this model seems to work. (A steady rain in cities with combined wastewater/stormwater sewers overwhelms treatment plants, forcing them to discharge their untreated flow straight into the water.) Still, in spite of its general adequacy, this sanitary model is hugely expensive, wasteful, and energy intensive. It’s far from ideal. Rather, given our situation, it’s the best we can hope for.

“The best we can hope for.” Such a phrase is the hallmark of path dependence.

Do I have something better in mind? In my book, I speculate on the future of what, to me, is the most promising alternative: fuel cells that turn poop into power. Though it’s admittedly decades away, this is my vision of utopia: your poop is collected in your basement and harnessed to power your household.

And if you went “ewwww!” at the thought of collecting poop as a resource, then you’re suffering ideological path dependence. The flush toilet has locked you into an ideology in which poop should only flush down a black hole and disappear forever. That’s not to say I envision a future in which you shovel poop into your fuel cell like coal into a furnace, of course; but, as I wrote in the New York Times, civilization needs to learn to view poop not as waste but as a resource.

This is the one sanitary advantage held by a city like Lagos. Lagos is, in places, a failed city with a failed sanitary infrastructure. While this means Lagos suffers from terrifying sanitary conditions and periodic cholera outbreaks, it also gives them an opportunity. Just like many developing countries have leapfrogged expensive land-based telephone infrastructures straight to the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of mobile phones, so too can cities like Lagos benefit from *not* being locked into sewers and sewage treatment plants.

Because, unlike us, change won’t have to be justified against abandoning the billions already invested and the ideology already assimilated. Instead, when their turn finally comes, they’ll be able to learn from our century-plus of trial, error, capital outlay, resource drain, and energy consumption, and leapfrog that path altogether.

While the Supreme Court has spent this term worrying about silly things like abortion, the death penalty, and workplace discrimination, this country just saw one of the most important poop-related court decisions since 2002, when a deputy sheriff was charged with felony vandalism after leaving fake poop in a judge’s chambers. Because last week the Weld County District Court in Greeley, Colorado ruled that poop is protected by the First Amendment.

Here are the facts of the case. On May 31, 2006, Kathleen Ensz of Greeley decided that she was sick and tired of receiving campaign literature from U.S. Representative Marilyn Musgrave. So she took a three-inch-long lawn ornament from her German Shepherd, stuck it inside one of Musgrave’s pamphlets, and dropped the pamphlet outside of the Greeley building in which Musgrave’s office was located.

Overreaction being the better part of valor, Musgrave’s people called the cops. And in accordance with the post-9/11 Pansying of America, the cops immediately assumed it was Bowel Qaeda, labeling the turd-o-gram “suspicious” and possibly even “explosive.” Tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars were immediately committed to the investigation, which began and ended with reading the address label still pasted to the campaign brochure.

But taxpayer expenditure didn’t stop there. The DA decided to charge Ensz with “depositing a noxious substance with the intention of interfering with the use and enjoyment of a building,” ensuring the full resources of the state of Colorado would be employed on this quest for justice. After all, this wasn’t just a bag of doodie thrown on some nerd’s porch in a teenage prank — this was a direct attack on a member of Congress.

Nor was Ensz just some teenage prankster. She’s vice chairman of the Colorado Senate District 13 Democratic Central Committee. And, as the Denver Post points out, both Musgrave and Ken Buck, the district attorney who brought the charge, are Republicans.

In his closing statement at the trial, Chief Deputy District Attorney Christian Schulte said jurors should convict Ensz of “criminal use of a noxious substance” because she “intended to deprive Musgrave or other people of the use and enjoyment of their property”. Ensz’s defense argued that this case was an attempt to chill free speech, and that it was only being brought for political reasons.

“It was, very simply, my personal protest of Marilyn Musgrave’s representation,” said Ensz. “It was a political statement.”

Jurors agreed with the defense. Ensz was acquitted, and the precedent was set: poop enjoys the protection of free speech.

This is a very thorny issue. On the one hand, mine is a book that clearly relies on free speech protections for its survival. A less permissive society would block it in a heartbeat. (Did you know that PoopReport.com is banned in Saudi Arabia?) So I’m against any implication that poop is not subject to the same protections as, say, puppy dogs or flowers.

But at the same time, my platform against turd terrorism is unequivocal: I are staunchly opposed to it. From an upper-decker to an all-out bathroom bombing, there is absolutely no justification for intentionally using poop to render a restroom or any other room unfit for human use. Poop should flow from your butt to your toilet. That is my party line. Even something as minor as placing a turd in campaign literature: I cannot condone it.

But what if Ensz had been found guilty? What if it was suddenly *illegal* to leave poop anywhere but in a toilet? What would that mean for the poor, incontinent poopers whose stories of woe provide so much entertainment? Nearly all of us have had an unfortunate McAccident. Imagine how much worse things would be if, in addition to the social stigma that accompanies Underwear McSlurry, one also faced legal repercussions if it dripped onto the floor?

So while I cannot condone Ensz’s use of poop, I applaud the court’s decision not to punish it. Because otherwise the experience of facing a ticking chyme bomb would be fraught with even more horror. (And, possibly, our nations roads would be even more dangerous.) I’m proud that America retains the freedom to eat at Taco Bell without worrying about legal consequences.

What is required, then, is some sort of legal framework distinguishing poop-as-speech from poop-as-terror. Because poop cannot be wholly subject to the protections of free speech, lest the turd terrorists in the world think themselves free to commit their unspeakable acts. And don’t be complacent about this: there are evildoers in this world. There are men and women who find joy in brown spackle, and fruition in your horrified response to it. Deviant miscreants with excrement: they’re out there, and the rule of law and order is necessary to protect us from them.

Thus, in respect to the wisdom of the Weld County court, I propose this benchmark to differentiate between free speech and fecal jihad: ease of cleaning.

If one can simply remove the offending matter with no more protection than a rubber glove, then it’s free speech. This standard protects Ensz’s method of political discourse: by ensconcing poop in a campaign brochure, her point was made but a skidmark was not. Her message was communicated, and then easily removed.

But as soon as cleaning is required, then the perpetrator has gone too far. If your act necessitates a scrubbing with bleach, then you have violated another human being’s inalienable right not to have to clean up poop that doesn’t belong to them. If the recipient of the message has to break out a squeegee or a paint scraper, then the line demarking turd terrorism has been crossed.

In the wake of Ensz vs. Weld County, I believe the courts need to clarify this point. It’s free speech if it sends a message. It’s turd terrorism if it requires a mop. This distinction will help us resolve the next iteration of Brown vs. the Board of Education — that is, the next time some jerk tosses a bucketful of humanure in the direction of a PTA meeting.