underdog city

It is right out of a Frank Herbert novel, this garden. Frank Herbert was himself an avid gardener, and, I just found out, a Tacoma native. Before I knew that piece of trivia, Herbert was on my mind for another reason altogether: the stillsuit.

As I shoveled one and a half cubic yards of “Class A biosolids” out of a friend’s truck and into my yard, suppressing the fear that I might unearth a log or two that had somehow escaped processing, Herbert’s fictional body-waste reclaiming getup was at the forefront of my mind.

I imagine the stillsuit might look a bit like a wetsuit, an all-encompassing version, except thinner and far more high-tech. Developed to make life on an inhospitable desert planet possible, these fictional bodysuits recycle their fictional wearers’ sweat, urine, and feces, thus minimizing moisture loss and making the reclaimed moisture quickly available for re-consumption.

When I read Dune a decade or so ago, the idea of consuming one’s bodily wastes, no matter how carefully processed, struck me as disgusting. It nearly made me gag. Those few moments I put the book down to attend to my collegiate responsibilities, I couldn’t stop wondering if I could hack it on Arrakis. Would I be able to overcome my revulsion and suit up with the rest of my clan? Or would my upturned nose and I quickly wither on that unlivable planet, my squeamishness dooming me to become nothing more than a pile of hot Arrakis dust?

That was then. A month ago when my need for soil arose, I hardly batted an eye before saying yes to a garden full of human feces. Your feces, Tacoma. In my front yard.

Aside from the convenience of tripping down to the TAGRO plant and having a scoop and a half dumped in the back of a pickup for $45, I also was acting on an embarrassingly recent revelation that the earth is sort of a closed system, like a body in a stillsuit would be. When we eat, we eat nutrients that come from the soil, and when we crap, we crap totally valuable, totally reusable nutrients that can be returned to the soil, that should be returned to the soil. To indulge in a little anthropomorphism, it’s what the earth would expect.

We don’t flinch at putting horse poop on our vegetable crops; even the non-gardeners among us understand the value of bodily wastes in that light. But we are unaccustomed to thinking of human feces as a soil amendment. When human waste was phased out of American agriculture at the advent of cheap, petroleum-based fertilizers, the farming that followed was based on the idea that the earth’s natural resources were not only bountiful but bottomless. In that case, we decided, let’s just flush our filthy fecal matter, and send it where we send the rest of our trash: away. Well, it turns out “away” doesn’t really exist, so why not make use of all that sludge?

Since the whole of America is waking up to formerly fringe concepts like local food, composting, and recycling, it would seem possible that humanure’s time has come. So for me, TAGRO it is, and TAGRO it shall be. It’s local, safe, sustainable, and easy to come by. Assuming my green thumb doesn’t fail me in the front-yard garden, I will soon be eating what you have eaten, fellow Tacomans. I think Frank Herbert would approve.