Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 21

In the morning, after the alarm sounds, nature calls. The bladder and bowels fill and send nerve signals to the brain, saying, “Do something!” It’s one of the few times in a day that Joe and Jo College are conscious of nature’s influence on their lives. So college students creak out of bed, shuffle into the bathroom, and relieve themselves. Flushing the toilet, we put nature behind us, and we don’t think much of it. But the toilet is a place where the body’s plumbing meets the plumbing of culture and nature, so it’s a rich ecological niche.

Nature’s Free Lunch: Ecosystem Services

Provisioning	Making stuff so people can make do.
Sunshine	Nature’s furnace and lighting system—good for tanning, but also for photosynthesis: the conversion of sunbeams to food.
Plants	Nature’s alchemists, converting sunshine to food (and spices and pharmaceuticals) by a process of photosynthesis, which also releases oxygen—a substance that is handy for our breathing. They also generate other useful materials (cotton, wood, etc.) and energy.
Animals	Nature’s meatpacking plants, converting plants—some of which humans can’t digest—into protein.
Rain, snow, etc.	Nature’s cleanser, soft drink, and liquid recreation—also habitat for aquatic plants and animals, and a necessity for land-based flora and fauna, too.
Oceans	Nature’s primary habitat—from phytoplankton to fish to great blue whales. Source of most of the seafood we eat.
Rivers	Nature’s highways and a flowing source of hydropower.
Prairies, forests, wetlands	Manufacturer of biomass and biodiversity, with topsoil as a biologically beneficial by-product.
Topsoil	Keeps plants from falling over and nourishes them.
Forests	Provide food, lumber, and oxygen, limiting erosion and runoff.
Metals	For making stuff, including cars and computers and beer cans.
Air	Makes breathing easier—also flying.
Everything	Cycling (and recycling) of nutrients in system.
Regulating	Keeping biotic systems in control.
Atmosphere	Nature’s screen (from ultraviolet rays).
Plants	Nature’s carbon catchers, sequestering carbon dioxide and partially regulating the climate.
Decomposition	Nature’s waste management, reducing the amount of garbage and shit we live in by breaking down organic wastes.
Trees and other plants	Nature’s air quality control, removing pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter from the air.
Trees	One of nature’s sunscreens, shading people and buildings, and saving energy.
Clouds	Another natural sunscreen, and an evaporative part of the water cycle.
Predators	Nature’s pesticide and its population control.
Wetlands	Nature’s water filter, purifying water going to groundwater.
Wind	Nature’s coolant, conveyor belt for weather systems, and seed-dispersal system.
Polar regions	Nature’s air conditioner.
Wetlands, plant cover	Nature’s flood control, protecting coastal areas from storm surges.
Everything	Catalyst for curiosity, source of science.
Most everything	Stimulant for aesthetic appreciation and expression.
Landscapes	Nature’s art museum and people’s playgrounds.
Moon	Nature’s romancer and tide pull.
Stars	Intimations of infinity, invitation to astrologers.
Animals	Totems for tribes, individuals, and sports teams.
Ecological design	A baseline for biomimicry and human cultures.
Ecosystems	Ecotourism.
Birds	Birding.
Flowers	Beauty in the wild and in the home.
Diamonds and beaches and chocolate	For romantic love.
Gold and silver	For the monetary imagination.
Preserving	Keeping all the moving parts of the system, maintaining resilience.
Biodiversity	Preserving more choices for natural selection.
Bioregulation	Partial stabilization of climate.

College students talk shit all the time, but not ecologically. A superficial conversation is shooting the shit. Something obvious is “no shit!” while “bullshit!” is a standard response to falsehood. If you care, you might give a shit. If not, you might get shit-faced at a party. And if the party gets too wild, the shit hits the fan. “Shit” is on the tip of our tongues, but we need to bring it to the front of our minds, because shit isn’t just a linguistic construct; it’s a daily reality. Americans make about five billion gallons of waste a day without even thinking about it, but we don’t know shit.¹¹

When students need to take a shit on campus, they go to a specialized space called a bathroom. In the average college residence hall, the bathrooms seem a long way from environmental studies, but waste management is an environmental study. If you’re a human being of average size and weight, for example, your body produces about a pound of waste, solid and liquid, every day. It’s one of the few forms of production still remaining in America, one type of manufacturing that can’t be shipped offshore.

The process seems simple, but it’s fairly complex. When Joe College orders a cheeseburger and french fries, he chews his meal and swallows, sliding the food down his alimentary canal. There, a variety of digestive enzymes convert complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, transform fats into glycerol and fatty acids, and transmute proteins into amino acids and peptides. In Joe’s small intestine, these digested nutrients are absorbed by blood and lymph vessels to be carried into the circulatory system to feed various organs. What’s leftover is excremental, the waste that waits until, as the bumper sticker says, “shit happens.” When it happens, we head to the toilet and drop our load into a small pool of water where it’s submerged along with its pungent smell. After wiping with soft sheets of treated trees, we flush the toilet. To most of us, it’s not worth a second thought.

This hasn’t always been the case. Two-hundred years ago, college students disposed of their bodily wastes on campus. In the winter, people used bedpans, and then carried their waste to the outhouse. Removed from the main buildings, the outhouse was close enough for people to comprehend the problem (and the possibilities) of waste. In cities, entrepreneurs regularly cleaned “night soil” from outhouses and sold it as a fertilizer for outlying farms, providing a useful second life for what we call “waste.”¹² After the arrival of indoor plumbing, however, when shit happened, it went down the drain instead of back to nature.

Most college students, like most Americans, live by what Philip Slater calls “the toilet bowl principle of American life”—out of sight is out of mind. But when the toilet flushes, shit doesn’t just evaporate. It travels through sanitary sewers to a solid-waste treatment plant. At most such plants, sewage receives several different treatments. After screening and grit removal, the mixture of excrement, urine, water, paper, and other items enters a settling tank. There, solids drop to the bottom so that grease and plastics can be skimmed off the top. The water heads for secondary treatment, where microorganisms feed on bacteria, purifying the liquid. Finally—using sand filters, natural or artificial wetlands, ultraviolet light, or ozone—the water is “polished,” to bring it up to legal standards, and discharged back into rivers. When we flush on campus, we’re intimately (and institutionally) involved in the water cycle.¹³

Biologically, excretion can remind us of the beauties of the natural world, the ways in which our bodies are designed to manage the ins and outs of animal life. Ecologically, our bathroom break reminds us that all natural systems, including the human body, are involved in processes of consumption and return. Taking in nutrients, we expel wastes, which function in the grand scheme of nature as nutrients for other species. Culturally, however, our excretions are a mess: We treat shit like shit. As Christopher Uhl says, “We take two perfectly good resources—human manure and fresh water—and splat them together in the toilet bowl, making them both useless.” But if we ever get our shit together, perhaps we’d see that human wastes aren’t wasted when we use them—properly treated—as fertilizer or fuel, thus returning them to the productive and regenerative cycles of nature.¹⁴