by Prof. Nicole Elizabeth Barnes (Duke University)
Our planet is dying. It turns out the fossil fuels hidden beneath its crust were properly placed there, tucked away in the darkness. We cannot put them back any easier than we can reverse climate change, but we can, and must, seek every possible solution to our current predicament. This means every form of knowledge, past and present, is a resource to mine with as much diligence as we mine coal and drill for oil. The history of farming in China is one such resource, as I show in my open access article “The Many Values of Nightsoil in Wartime China” Past & Present No. 259 (May 2023).
The problems can seem insurmountable. Agroindustry and rampant application of chemical fertilizers have so depleted our soils that, according to some reputable entities such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) we have just sixty harvests left. Chemical fertilizers cause harm from their inception. Phosphate mining damages habitat, pollutes waterways, and creates a radioactive byproduct, phosphogypsum. Chemical fertilizers emit methane pollution into the atmosphere during production and after application. They also pollute waterways with excess nutrients in a process known as eutrophication. And even this filthy industry cannot save us. Scientists predict a global shortage of mineable phosphate. Even if we overcome soil extinction and the phosphorous crisis, water scarcity will undoubtedly threaten millions of farmers and the people who depend on their produce. Severe droughts, often alternating with deadly floods, are already occurring in many parts of the world. Both kill crops and lead to deaths by starvation.
Amid this looming devastation, some voices are murmuring hope. Slow down and listen. Our own urine is a potent renewable source of phosphorous, the very stuff that plants love, and we can produce it without driving the Florida panther to extinction. The Rich Earth Institute in Vermont is heavily engaged in this ‘peecycling’. It’s part of regenerative agriculture, a type of farming that restores soil to extraordinary health, produces scrumptious food that nourishes a healthy gut microbiome, and sequesters carbon. All this without chemical fertilizers or pesticides, or even sweaty tilling. Pennsylvania farmer Joe Jenkins will teach you how to safely compost your humanure – human excrement and urine together – and not only have the most productive compost heap in the neighborhood but also create, for no money and a negligible amount of labor, one of the very best fertilizers available. Sound simple? It is.
At least in technical terms. The biggest obstacles are in our heads. Disgust at the very idea of applying a fertilizer made from our own ‘waste’ to food crops. Resistance to changing the industrial farming practices we have long seen as an effective bulwark against hunger. Insistence that human society develops linearly and, therefore, a wise person would sooner jettison than emulate the past. Belief that sending trash ‘away’ exhausts its filth. An urban bias that has secured an uncontested spot in the English lexicon for derogatory phrases like ‘hick’, ‘country bumpkin’, and ‘white trash’, and that leads urban Chinese youth to bandy about the very word ‘farmer’ (nongmin 農民) as an insult.
For more than a millennium, Chinese farmers used humanure (also called nightsoil) as one among several fertilizers they applied to their fields. In this way, farmers replenished hardworking soils and ensured a steady supply of food for a massive population. Routine humanure collection also preserved a degree of cleanliness in China’s densely populated cities that astonished foreign observers, accustomed as they were to urban filth. Another characteristic feature of China’s humanure culture was economics. Human ‘waste’ was not trash at all but a valuable commodity in a society that knew how to put it to good use. This fact is pithily captured in the Chinese phrase ‘transforming trash into treasure’ bianfei weibao 變廢為寶.
Foochow, Fukien province, China: a woman carrying buckets of night-soil. Photograph by John Thomson, 1871, image part of the Wellcome Collection via Wiki:Media Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license applies.
People who used humanure to coax food from soil understood its exchange value and signaled so in their language. The headmen of the nightsoil guild in Chongqing, a city in southwestern China that served as its capital during World War II, knew this very well. They likened their right to empty public toilets and residential nightsoil stools to the most revered form of property in their farming nation: land. ‘All of the toilets belong to our private industry, which like other people’s fields, land and real estate, is protected by law’, they wrote in a petition to the governor of their province in March 1940. They appealed to the governor’s morality to protect their means of livelihood from what they deemed an ‘unlawful seizure’. Their claims sound just, until you consider that the usurpers were local health officials attempting to staunch disease.
This is important because, although China’s humanure exchange kept cities clean and farmlands productive, it also spread disease. Lots of it. Since people lacked knowledge about microbes, both pathogenic and beneficial, they inadvertently produced high rates of endemicity of a variety of fecal-borne diseases – including schistosomiasis, cholera, polio, ascariasis, typhoid, and hookworm – that foreshortened or ended millions of people’s lives. In the 1940s, soil scientists and public health professionals launched research projects to disentangle the production of life through soil fertility from the production of death through disease transmission. By the 1950s and 60s, specialists were armed with precise knowledge that rivals contemporary science, but it proved challenging to implement across a large, impoverished nation mired in incessant socialist revolution. In technical terms, assuring the safety of humanure is astonishingly easy. One need only secure proper conditions—the right amount of moisture and sufficiently high temperature—to attract the many classes of bacteria that evolved over billions of years specifically to digest detritus. But again, the social conditions in messy human societies prove much more difficult to stabilize.
Another major problem of China’s humanure industry points directly to social conditions: the system relied on violent labor exploitation. An abused underclass of nightsoil porters hauled the contents of public toilets and nightsoil stools to processing stations before transporting it further, usually by boat, to farmlands. Porters did not have the option to work for themselves. They toiled for others who invariably claimed the lion’s share of the profits. Ironically, the Communist state did the best job of simultaneously seizing the profits of the industry and the labor power of the porters while calling it ‘liberation’, as the example of Hankou (now Wuhan) in 1951 shows.
A refuse boat near Hangzhou sometime between 1917-19, made by Sidney D. Gamble, held at Duke University Libraries.
Masters of our craft openly acknowledge that history is never just about the past. It is intricately interwoven with the present and implicated in our potential futures. We can learn from China’s history of humanure while discarding its problems. Dozens of ‘reinvented toilets’ and start-up endeavors have already solved the problem of disease transmission. They do ‘double doody’ (forgive the pun, ‘duty’) by simultaneously bringing safe sanitation to some of the estimated three and a half billion people without that basic human right. Many of these initiatives use simple technologies to bypass human labor. Flush toilets no longer serve our water-scarce and soil-starved world. We can re-design our sanitation solutions with creative attention to the past. And let’s get moving, because the time to learn from China’s agricultural history is well upon us.