In his latest book, The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer notes the problem of increasing yields in organic crops using the most obvious fertilizer source, one that literally falls out of farmers' asses:
So why has the world been unable to get its fertilizer together on this issue? What keeps composted humanure and urine from being a primary
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But if you're not taking it in, you're not putting it out, right? So using your own..
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And whenever it's convenient, I pee into the flower beds.
If the proverbial feces ever impacts the rotating airflow device, I've got 20+ buckets to use as (among other things) composting/sawdust toilets. Use, mix, seal, put away. Dump into compost pile after a week or so.
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I will grant the Organic crowd one concern, that of heavy metals that find their way into the sewer systems of larger and even small cities. I'm not sure what can be done about such discharges, and these metals are, I imagine, more of a concern as plant fertilizer than biological substances.
That said, I'm going to challenge your root for biophobia. I think, and I think Lewis had this in mind when he coined the word, that the roots are actually closer to an evolutionary revulsion to human waste, not a "discovery" one can make logically. Consider the miasma theory of disease, based on nothing more than disgust at smells.
Such a revulsion does carry an evolutionary advantage, of course, since those that wallow in feces will likely spread disease more readily than those who reflexively avoid crap based on the squick factor.
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In lay terms, the human brain appears to have evolved an alert system whereby a certain class of extreme smells triggers an involuntary disgust response that effectively short-circuits one's ability to think clearly -- and produces a powerful desire to avoid objects associated with the smell. It's easy to imagine the evolutionary pressures that would bring this trait into being.
(Johnson, The Ghost Map, Riverhead, 2007, p. 129.)
So, yes, Miasma was used as "an attempt to explain observations" as you note. As Johnson notes, though, there was more to miasma's wide acceptance -- a cultural inertia:
Why was the miasma theory so persuasive? . . . This kind of question leads one to a kind of mirror-image version of ( ... )
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