barefootpermaculture

An interesting day at the camp:
self-organisation of humanure hauling is going quite well. I hear that city waste water treatment and environmental services visited the camp and were pleased with how clean it was. Crime levels have also gone down since the occupation began. In their well-meaning efforts they contributed disposable gloves and clear garbage bags for handling the compost. I've been calling volunteers to say that while this equipment is optional, it is certainly not necessary. On the upshot, city waste water did not go around arresting people or calling them names, or telling anyone else to arrest them. Yet.

Whew! I've been too busy to be able to post about this until now. I've slept for twelve hours last night, and spent the past 4 days contacting volunteers, gathering sawdust from some stumps that the city ground up and left in a happy coincidence, going to consensus-based leaderless meetings, and driving around at night in enormous pickups with some beautiful souls, picking up and transforming pallets.

We will probably be able to service 40 people a day. Onsite is a porto-booth made with pallet lumber and tarps. In the booth is a bucket with a seat, toilet paper, and another bucket with sawdust. There are signs explaining what people should do to use the apparatus. Outside the booth are two garbage bags of sawdust, more clean buckets with tight-fitting lids, and a pop bottle of hand sanitizer made with 2L of water and 3/8 tsp of chlorox bleach. I have four volunteers with bicycle carts including myself to show up every day and take filled buckets (with tight fitting lids) to composting sites (of which I have three, so far). At the sites are more (like ten) garbage bags filled with sawdust and carbon medium, which can also be bike-carted to the occupy site.

Police stood by in mild curiosity as we set up the booth and wrote "composting toilet" in marker on the tarp. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I was a bit trepidatius about unleashing this technology on Halifax in such a bold way without more grassroots support being in place first, but the temptation to teach up to 2 or 3 hundred receptive people was just too much for me! At the meetings the chair stumbled over what to call it "the eco-sanitation facilities?" "the eco outhouse?" "What about composting toilet?" I suggested. It made it into the minutes as "eco sanitation composting toilet".

I gave a workshop yesterday on humanure to those interested in the theory and a walkthrough on using it.

No pictures of the facilities yet! Pending! Pending!