National Water Center, Eureka Springs, Arkansas
National Water Center, Eureka Springs, AR
Updated: April 2014 Contact: Contact: NWC
Contents ©1999-2014 by National Water Center. All rights reserved worldwide.
Compost Toilets
Ecological dry toilets are among the most effective and appropriate internationally known techniques for protecting water. The technique is simple, affordable and can be initiated by individuals to improve health and the quality of life in both rural and urban communities.
Clean Water Begins at Home
For the first time in history, water has become the sanitary convenience of an entire civilization. Using water as a personal waste vehicle - the repository for everyone's feces' and urine - is a very recent cultural phenomenon. Only a few generations have been toilet trained to water, but his experience has profoundly distorted our collective sense of reality.
Water toilets reinforce one of our mightiest taboos, the social prohibitions that surround our body products. They let us forget that feces and urine are a natural part of the food chain - repayment to the soil for the nutrients supplied in our food. Water toilets foster the illusion that these or any other products can be flushed away without consequences.
In our culture, our most frequent and most commonly shared experience with water is with the water in a toilet bowl. This daily, lifelong practice fosters the illusion that water is little more than a handy receptacle and vehicle for unwanted products.
Today's water crisis is the logical consequence of this twofold "waste/water" illusion. where water is a waste vehicle and anything can be a waste, no water resource is safe. Our culture is permeated with this "waste/water" illusion. It is instilled in one of the earliest and strongest lessons of childhood - toilet training. It is reflected in the design and operation of every conventional home, city, business, factory and farm.
Water resources will be clean when our culture gives full value to water and wastes. Values that reflect our absolute dependence on water for life and the reality that there are no wastes, only misplaced resources. Like all cultural values, these must be acquired in the home. The water crisis ends and clean water begins at home.
From "We All Live Downstream A Guide That Stops Water Pollution" - see link below.
Composting Toilets articles - click on the hyperlink of your choice.
We All Live Downstream A Guide to Waste Treatment That Stops Water Pollution
Cuernavaca - "City of Eternal Spring" . . . and Sewage, George Anna Clark
The National Water Center recommends these sites:
Center for Ecological Pollution Prevention (CEPP)
POB 1330, Concord, MA 01742-1330 USA
978-369-3951 Email: EcoP2@hotmail.com
