Kendal Gast
ENGL 355
1-28-16
Shit
Talking: The Imperative of Poop
I keep going over
and over the list that is next to me, but I know I’m missing a crucial
piece. I forgot to count the times I
went to the bathroom and subsequently the times I washed my hands. The bathroom visits did not always include toilet
paper, but more importantly at least one
and a half gallons of water were used to send the excrement down the
pipes. The average person flushes four
times a day, so it is safe to assume that I flush five to six times a day. But the point to note is that I forgot. Subsequently, the importance of the issue
became my focus. I forgot that flushing
the toilet and washing my hands wastes clean drinking water. Even though people avoid speaking about
bathroom activates, it is here that I’d like to talk about shit.
There
is some irrational human reasoning behind the mum subject of poop. Part of the reason, I believe, is lack of
ownership. Another is lack of knowledge
on how the sanitation process works and where excrement ends up. Not only does this beating around the bush
occur in places that have adequate sanitation, but also it is obviously a
universal, global problem. Happily,
organizations are clear on the goals established by last August’s United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals.
I
definitely have a hard time picturing my friends sitting down at the pot and
squeezing out a fresh one. It just is
not something my friends and I talk about.
It might be for good reason, because poop is pretty gross. And I think that is the reason why people are
so averse to talking about defecation.
The fact that humans daily produce something that is dead, toxic, and
unwanted is weird yet essential.
Practices associated with pooping are weird as well and do not help in
trying to be more open with talking about crapping. We separate ourselves so much from shitting
that we do it in private little rooms in our private little homes, aside from
the fact of public restrooms, of which there is still separation from each other
while pooping. In 1974 the surrealist
filmmaker Luis Buñuel released a film titled The Phantom of Liberty. In
it, there is a scene with a handful of people surrounding a kitchen table and
instead of chairs, they sit on toilets.
These people shit together but later retreat to small, closed off rooms
to eat. This scene is questioning the word
“natural”, as we have done in class.
Perhaps it is more natural to shit together in public and eat in
private. Perhaps it is more natural the
way things are currently. Either way,
when we refuse to talk about crap or what happens to it after we flush, humans
reject a fundamental part of themselves and refuse to take ownership of their
shit. Refusing to take ownership of
something like that or any mistake a person makes results in internal tension,
leading to confusion and anxiety about our identities.
Our
identities are then flushed down the toilet with the press of a lever. Toilet water begins its journey down pipes
connected to our homes to a larger grid system within neighborhoods. These pipes all eventually lead to a wastewater
treatment plant, where the water first goes through metal mesh to remove large
pieces of debris like braches and paper.
The water then enters a chamber to settle sand, dirt, and other
solids. The matter collected from these
tanks is usually hauled to landfills. Clarification
tanks are the next step where sludge, collected at the bottom, and scum,
collected at the top, are scraped together and sent to digestion tanks. There, the mixture stews and forms methane,
carbon dioxide, and water. Anything
leftover is again sent to a landfill, sometimes to an incinerator, and other
times used as fertilizer. After
clarification tanks, the water then moves to secondary treatment in the form of
activated sludge. Oxygen is pumped into
the tanks to promote bacteria growth in order to break down any toxins in the
water. Another sludge-like substance
called floc is collected and used again in the activated sludge process. The final stage of water treatment occurs
when chemicals like chlorine are added to kill more bacteria. Water then passes through a final filter made
from activated charcoal and is discharged into the environment, whether a river
or body of water. Power consumption for
water treatment is large, and the most is used for transporting water. For example, New York City relies on 14
wastewater treatment facilities and processes about 1.3 billion gallons of
water a day. 700-1800 kWh of electricity
is used, depending on the size and method of treatment, per million gallons of
treated water. For New York City, this
translates to over a million kilowatt hours a day in water treatment
alone. There are all kinds of statistics
I could include about wastewater treatment facilities, but I really wanted to
get an idea for how much power these necessary services consume.
After
the United Nation’s Millennial Development Goals expired last near, another 15
year plan was drafted. The result came
in the form of 17 goals called the Sustainable Development Goals, meant to be
fulfilled by 2030. The food issues class
I am taking this semester already covered this topic and the injustice of
global poverty rates. Goal number six of
the SDG deals specifically with water, and requires both access and sanitation
for all human beings. According to the
United Nations website, enough freshwater already exists on the Earth to
hydrate everyone, but poor infrastructure and bad policy have created the
inequalities more than two billion humans face everyday. More specifically, that number of people lack
access to basic sanitation. It is
unfathomable the amount of humans that have to deal with this problem, while
the wealthy in the United States are primarily preoccupied about the next
president and uninteresting domestic “concerns”. I think goals four, five, and fourteen are
the most important, and they are, respectively, quality education, gender
equality, and life below water. We have
talked about in class how much poverty and inequality are reduced when women
are given importance in education and representation in government, and to me
this is the first domino to be knocked down.
Education, especially about quality environmental stewardship, would
foster a greater appreciation for the resources we have and hopefully more
careful use of those resources.
Looking around and
walking on campus at the noon hour, there appears to be thousands and thousands
of humans, and there are, all going about their sad little lives but, I do not
know quite what it is… There is something wrong. Perhaps the best way to describe the feeling
is fake. I know students are meant to
construct and challenge their ideology in college, but it does not look like
these students want to change their consuming or overtly American
ideologies. Still very few want to think
about having to shit out in public or, for that matter, next to someone on the
other side of the stall. Nor do any
consider how much energy it takes and how long the process of water treatment
is, and where it goes afterwards. I also
imagine next to no one on campus has any knowledge of the previous 15 years of
MDG accomplishments or the targets of the SDG.
But I am no better than the rest of the 30,000 students, especially
based on my water consumption habits and list of trash items. This knowledge only incites the activist
inside me. After graduating, I want
nothing more than to witness the severity of human suffering the world
over. But right now, I attempt to take
extreme ownership of whatever I can, in the form of trash discarded or shit
flushed down the toilet.
Sources
Consulted
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