Do you realize there is poop on the
moon—human feces, to be exact? Twelve American men walked on the
moon. Each time a lunar module prepared to return to the orbiting
ship, various instruments, the module bases, and human waste were
left behind. This was done because the astronauts collected moon
rocks, and an equivalent or larger weight had to be left on the moon
so that the lunar module could successfully break free of moon
gravity and rejoin the orbiting spaceship. So much for “Leave only
footsteps, take only pictures”! I can't help but see this as a
very telling metaphor for the environmental crises we face today. It
didn't have to be this way, but extreme thoughtless littering seems
to be part of human nature.
Do you also know that when a human egg
is fertilized by a sperm, a sheet of cells develops, called the
embryonic disc? A lot happens in this disc, but early on part of it
folds into a tube, creating the basic gut or alimentary canal of the
developing human being. This is called the archenteron, with what
will be the anus at one end and the mouth at the other. It appears
that the anus begins to form even before the mouth. In any case,
this tube is one of the first constructions within the cells of the
developing embryo, as is appropriate. All life depends on ingestion
and expulsion. As human beings, we take in food and expel feces. We
take in fluids and expel urine. We take in air and expel it in
modified form. We females even take in sperm and expel a newborn
human.
In some of the processes listed above,
what we expel is dangerous to us. We expel what is left after we
absorb all the nutrients our bodies can use. Urine may be sterile,
but feces obviously can cause disease in human beings. The air that
we expel would not sustain us if not replaced by “fresh” air.
Thus, it is also a truism of life that we pollute our environments.
Since we expel from our bodies that which can harm us, we cannot live
amidst our excretions for any length of time without becoming
diseased.
All animals have to devise ways to deal
with this situation. When left to their own devices, most mammals
will poop at some distance from the area they sleep and eat in. The
original rest rooms for humans were apparently bushes, where feces
could be deposited without contaminating living areas. Today, a
well-maintained septic system in a rural backyard efficiently
converts human waste to biological products that are harmless to
humans and actually beneficial to vegetation.
Problems develop, especially for
humans, with overpopulation. Human waste in urban environments has
been known to cause cholera when it comes in contact with drinking
water. The bigger the city, the more polluted will be the rivers and
streams that run through it, without a large waste disposal system.
And this only deals with body waste. Our garbage is buried in
landfills, often destroying wetlands in the process, and dumped in
rivers and lakes and oceans, polluting those water sources to
different degrees. Or it is carted off to pollute other, less
affluent lands.
When I was a child vacationing on the
New Jersey shore, for a couple of years there were globs of tar
floating in the ocean water and staining those of us who swam in it,
because it was most convenient for an oil company to get rid of its
waste by running a pipe under the shore and out into the ocean.
Today not only are there huge islands of plastic in the ocean, it is
actually raining micro-particles of plastic around the globe. We
still have no safe way to handle the radioactive waste from nuclear
power stations. And since nothing human is perfect, waste systems
and nuclear power plants do fail.
We human beings are really, really bad
at taking care of our own shit, and we are polluting our own
environment, the whole earth, as a result. It's very interesting that
a colloquial term for our material possessions is our shit. What we
use and discard, whether in the body or outside it, is pollution
because we do not manage it well. Certain paths up Mt. Everest are
covered in human debris.
Humans spend a lot of time planning and
planting and harvesting and preparing what we put into our mouths.
But we spend relatively little time dealing with what comes out the
other end. Donald Trump once remarked that one thing he most
appreciated about this wife Melania was that after she used a
bathroom, you couldn't even tell anyone had been in it. Some
Japanese women use little music boxes to hide the sound of their
eliminations in a public bathroom. We basically deny our
eliminations; we deny a natural human process. We flush down our
urine and feces and think no more about them, not about the people
who do have to deal with human waste and not about where that waste
ends up.
Given that the alimentary canal is the
first major physical construct of the developing human form and that
the anus develops before the mouth, we are blind to a lesson from the
origin of our beings. The canal that runs lengthwise through our
bodies is more fundamental in human development than the lungs that
will eventually breathe or the heart that will eventually move blood.
We have to take in nourishment AND get rid of waste before the rest
of the body can thrive. Yet we choose to ignore as much as possible
this most fundamental part of ourselves. Our waste stinks; it can
cause disease; we don't want to deal with it on an individual basis.
But because we choose not to deal with it, we are making our home
planet uninhabitable—and not just by us.
Almost anything is more important to us
than what we do with our shit. We have no qualms leaving human feces
and human-made things on the moon because it is so obviously much
more important to bring back moon rocks that we can analyze. The
mind is of greater value than the environment. We live with such
pollution as tar or plastics or toxic chemicals or other garbage in
the ocean because human industry (in all senses of the term) is of
greater value to us than aesthetics or even basic health. We care
for little beyond our own desires.
Can you imagine people from a culture
that saw the moon as the habitation of a goddess leaving human shit
there? Can you imagine those people so freely and carelessly
polluting the ocean if it were the home of Neptune? We mock and
belittle pagans of old, but which in these terms is the saner
society? We are our own gods, and all we do for ourselves diminishes
the value of everything else. Take a look at William Wordsworth's
“The World Is Too Much with Us.”
If we had larger minds, greater
consciousness of ourselves, we would have to acknowledge that we need
to put at least as much effort into managing our shit as we do into
what we consume, in all senses. If we consume, we have to be
responsible for what we expel. It's simply a slightly different way
of being, a more responsible way of being that accords with our own
physical development. If we tried, we could grow flowers in our
shit. Instead, we wallow in it.
