The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure is a simply delightful read about the taboo subject of composting human manure. Even though human waste has been composted for centuries, many western countries prefer to pour their waste into landfills, septic fields or even local landfills. Or as author Joseph Jenkins puts it “the world is divided into two categories of people: those who shit in their drinking water supplies and those who don’t”.

In The Humanure Handbook, Jenkins makes a compelling argument about the need to compost human waste. There is significant resistance, or fecophobia, against composting (or even talking about…) humanure, but the two central arguments in the book about the need to reduce water use and stop dumping heavily treated, chemically cleaned waste into our oceans, waterways and land, are undeniable in their logic.

The Humanure Handbook is not advocating for the use of raw excrement or “night soil” to be used on food crops as is done in many Asian countries, but rather Jenkins sees composting humanure as a necessary form of recycling waste and an important contribution to cutting down on fresh water wastage. When we consider that it takes an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 tons of water to flush away one ton of humanure, and that there are six billion people on the planet producing 1.2 metric tons of human excrement daily, we do not have adequate water resources to “process” the world’s humanure the way we do in many developed nations. A simple composting toilet can reduce household water consumption by 40,000 gallons (151,423 liters) per year, per household.

Parts of the book seem a bit wacky with titles like Gomer The Pile, Tommy The Turd, Crap Happens and Close Encounters of the Turd Kind, however at the heart of this book is a compelling argument, backed up with sound research and science, about reducing our impact on the earth through the simple act of composting humanure. In fact, everything you ever wanted to know about composting humanure can be found in this dense tome.

The Humanure Handbook is a brave book indeed, probably still a bit before its time but definitely a body of work that will only increase in relevance and importance as the negative effects of climate change accelerate and we continue to look for ways to reduce our impact on the earth.

Order this book on Amazon.com  The Humanure Handbook

Visit: http://www.humanurehandbook.com
Publisher: Joseph Jenkins, Inc.
255 Pages

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