Green Thoughts

I cut down on stuff coming into my house. I save electricity—curly lights in every room. I save water—the lawn dies happily each summer. I buy less—don’t have the money anyway these days.

And I pay attention to what goes out. I recycle—I sort stuff into big green and blue bins and instruct my wife (with moderate effect) on the intricacies of plastic reuse classifications. I compost—my banana peels and coffee grounds will soon be born-again dirt. I dutifully trek back to Safeway with my plastic bag offerings (suspecting that they just chuck them in the dumpster when no one is looking).

I am one green guy.

But I have been thinking about something we send out everyday and spend God knows how much money, time, effort and energy in transporting to a big industrial-style, centralized processing plant. You know, the family sewage.

In this time of decentralization, how come we have a big, superhighway of poop under every street? Right next to the fresh water pipes and cable TV.

I know that in the good old days everyone just dumped their poop out the window and men just took a walk in the newly invented garden behind every upscale urban house. Sewers were a big (but little considered) advance for civilization. With sewers, poop flowed downstream and the rich moved up on the hills. Then when the scientists learned how to cook it and clean it up in their processors for dumping in the rivers—Wow! Cities didn’t smell the same. Except for the horses and then later for the cars.

I left out the part about cholera and dysentery, (formerly known as the bloody flux, thanks Wikipedia) going away. With these guys flushed from polite society, stomach growling and cramps were a thing of the past. Hurray for Sewers!

But now in post-industrial America, when we have closed down shoe factories, plants for making steel and iron and even lots of our airplanes get built in France, do we need the biggest factory in town to turn out processed poop, just to remind us that the US was once the industrial giant of the world. I suspect no.

It's just no one has had the foresight to see what is hidden. Sort of like before vacuum cleaners, or food processors, or even back when the best place to sit and read was just over a big hole in the floor. This was before Mr. Crapper (now of great fame--his name made immortal thru daily use) did his great work and invented the toilet with its water valve that lets poop go out, but keeps smells from coming in.

Now is time to move beyond centralized, industrial-sized solutions. We have cell phones, not central switchboards; we have laptops, not IBM 360’s; we have ipods, not radio stations; we have skateboards, not steam trains. Life in the US is small and spread out, like the suburbs, and poop needs to keep up.

We need a new way to deal with it. No pipes coming out of the house. Just pull the handle and BAM: everything gets processed, clean water flows out to the tomatoes and a pile of clean, sweet-smelling, org-dirt comes out ready for the garden.

We have a prize to send someone up to outer space. That encourages rocket development. I say lets develop the poopster. Offer a new prize, a million bucks, to you, Mr. or Ms. hot-shot inventor, to think about poop for a few minutes and design us a poopster. that's what I call the invention now, but remember, it will be named after you when you succeed.

Mr. Crapper’s big days are over. When you win, you will be remembered once or twice a day by everyone on earth (if we have good marketing).