It began by staring at a heap of compost.
Tucked away at the back of our garden in a cage of pallet wood, a year earlier it had been bread crusts, yellowing cabbage leaves, grass clippings, rabbit droppings, torn-up Amazon boxes. Slowly, silently, it was colonised by blooms of fur, like the back of a rarely-inspected fridge. We’d almost forgotten it.
And now, curious, lifting a forkful – sweet, dark, crumbling, nutrient-dense soil. Basking in its warmth, contented tiger worms, millipedes curled like ammonites. While our backs were turned, the imperceptible magic of fungi and fermentation transfigured this rotten mass of waste and death into something fizzing with promise.
It was a kind of rebirth. For us too.
That heap of dead vegetables and worm dung held a startling message – that the two things that estranged us most deeply from the Earth were How We Deal With Our Shit, and What We Do With Our Dead.
We flushed our bodily waste with drinkable water down pipes, into sewers, treatment works, spilling into rivers, oceans. We tried to stave off death for as long as possible with anti-ageing cosmetics and anxiety and a litany of pharmaceuticals – as if to die were some kind of inherent design flaw in the nature of things; burying our dead embalmed with chemicals, sealed inside varnished boxes and plunged deep underground, protected from the transfiguring worms. We’d learned a deep fear and disgust of both, and we’d done all we could to push them as far away as possible. The resulting toxified rivers and soil, the fuels burned, the diminishing species, the sheer scale of the system, felt abstract, distant.
But the Earth was waiting – longing even – for us to remember. Our shit and our dead were meant to be a gift.
It’s how humus forms, how the forest floor enables the growth of new trees, how the world feeds itself, how everything regenerates. Fallen leaves, fallen trees, animal faeces, the bodies of millions of bugs, birds and mammals. We’d broken that circle, afraid of the smell and of our own impermanence. Crows and squirrels and birch trees have no need for sewage works or stone memorials. Their memories live on in the continually burgeoning biosphere, their bodies and their dung welcomed back into the earth – new life in the making. Instead, we made something sacred into something toxic.
February 2024 was the last month we used drinking water to flush our shit away.
The failure of water companies to deal with sewage was all over the news – raw human waste was regularly being released into waterways. Unswimmable rivers, biodiversity loss, polluted beaches. Shareholders were still reaping financial rewards, but the Earth was suffering.
With a group of friends and a handbook to guide us, we built a compost toilet in our back garden – an improvised and rustically beautified shed, made with wit and imagination for next to nothing with reclaimed wood. We threw a modest party to celebrate and made a blessing of our faeces, transforming what had become unclean and unholy into an act of restoration. Compost toilets appeared in all our gardens soon after, built together. It turned out it wasn’t just us. Within a year, dozens and dozens of families in our community were no longer using tap water to wash their waste away, and instead, the humans and the humus were reuniting. For those who didn’t want to shit in a garden shed, there were more elegant options for domestic bathrooms. Businesses began appointing compost guardians, who oversaw their company’s waste, using the humanure to fertilise the food forests that began to replace barren verges, cosmetic lawns and wasteland that edged the economic landscape. The land welcomed all that fertility, and our fruit trees were blooming.
And we made plans for dying, so that the Earth would be blessed by our bodies. The worms could have us, so that trees could grow, and a thousand species could be fed. We’d live on in maturing woodlands, honouring our ancestors, helping to make the next generations possible. Green burials had been gathering momentum for some time, and human composting was gaining traction too, but the growing sense of interconnection with the wild created a huge groundswell.
As increasing numbers of people began to see themselves in a kind of sacred cycle, habits and systems that jeopardised its integrity felt less and less acceptable. Faced with the rapid degradation of ecosystems and the cumulative climatic impact of our insatiable species, we needed to make EVERYTHING we did a gift back to the Earth.
Over the coming decade or two, there was a subtle but extraordinary shift – each visit to the toilet became a holy sacrament; each death became an offering to the Earth, back into the circle of things – a pledge for a thriving future. In the quiet way of nature, it recalibrated our perspective on the value and connections of all living beings – worms, bacteria, invertebrates, fungi – that had often been overlooked or even despised. It taught us about ourselves, and each other; about valuing every member of a community that stretched far beyond the only-human.
26 years on, those worms, and their tiny kin – pollinators, phytoplankton – have catalysed businesses to reimagine themselves embedded in a community of mutual support. Workplaces have become hubs of biodiversity, transforming their grounds into wildlife sanctuaries – and the mental and physical health of the working population has improved beyond recognition. The question – can it be composted? – is central to a new kind of business model where nothing is produced that isn’t repairable, recyclable or won’t fully mulch down into the soil.
Rivers, a barometer for Life’s flourishing, have begun to breathe again. The thought of our lifeblood being toxified is so potent that everything was done to remove the plastic choking waterways, and to prevent it ever happening again. They are recovering. No more human waste flooding into the sea. The sanctity of life took hold in the hearts of communities and cultures, the sanctity that indigenous communities had been showing us all this time.
Municipal dumps and landfills have closed – there is no longer anything that needs to be thrown away. Low-impact human composting is now the norm and all our bodies go back into the Earth, our bodies reborn in fertile soil. Small scale local economies have grown and flourished, moving away from exponential growth and towards simplicity. Food systems have swung in favour of polycultural systems that have soil health at their heart, and as the reliance on local, largely plant-based diets has skyrocketed, huge swathes of land have been supported to return to pre-industrial habitat, species-rich and sequestering carbon. As the ideology of materialistic wealth has been supplanted by the health of people and planet, the way we educate for the future has changed, underpinned by cooperation; as the awareness of kinship has strengthened, commitment to peaceful relationship has likewise. Munitions factories have closed, fossil fuel extraction dwindling to a tiny fraction of its former rate, and still diminishing; religious traditions have found common ground in the underlying sanctity of nature, uniting diverse perspectives and complex mythologies.
As a species we’ve become much less fixated on leaving a permanent mark, and much more on our life being a gift to be shared, so that all life should thrive. Catalysed by tiny moments where we remembered ourselves as part of a vast, diverse community of life. The damage done by previous generations has not been completely mitigated – we are adapting to the climatic changes we pushed into overdrive, but we have committed ourselves to doing all we can to make our presence here no longer a burden on this beautiful Earth.
The Living Earth was longing for our participation, and now we’re making our lives, our shit and our bodies a gift, a pledge to thrive. We’ve come home.
NOTE
*for sensitive audiences, the word ‘shit’ could be substituted for ‘poo’ or ‘poop’. ‘Shit’ felt as appropriately uneuphemistic, arresting and raw a word as possible.