The Wastewater Gardener

Charmingly subtitled 'preserving the planet one flush at a time', this book recounts the author's work in this area over the last 30 years. As agriculturalists like Sir Albert Howard have remarked, not recycling human waste is itself a terrible waste, since nature works in cycles, as composting so readily demonstrates. The author has created wastewater gardens around the world, catalysed by his experience of being enclosed in Biosphere 2 in the late 1980s. Here he proposes many ways of managing the 'Fecesphere' and invites readers to consider the travel itinerary of their own waste as they flush the loo. In our case, this means a septic tank in a nearby field. He makes a number of recommendations for both individuals and society, for instance separating shit from the water cycle wherever possible, perhaps by means of composting toilets; also using wastewater to create green belts around cities and reusing shit locally wherever possible, sending it back to the land in an economical way.