Urine

Our homeschool topic, “What is a Person?” was motivated by an Elder in our community, who has a storied history of decency, civility and commitment both to community and to the Earth. 

As a young man, the Elder worked with Helen and Scott Nearing, the grandparents of the back to the land movement.  During the March from Selma to Montgomery, the Elder managed the crew of Seminarians who set up all the tents for the Marchers’ daily meals and sleeping.  After the March, he stayed and helped build the Selma Free Public Library.  

During the Vietnam war he organized protests, then was exiled to Canada where he managed large scale urban construction projects.  In 1973 he was arrested, on his return to the United States, for violation of the Selective Service Act.  Charges against him were later dropped.  He worked in various Union factories, and became, in 1980, a labor activist for the AFL-CIO.  In 1987, he helped organize the historic Jay, Maine Paper mill strike against International Paper Company.  My son studied this in depth.  

The Elder lives off-the-grid on a homestead powered by solar energy, with houses, barns and workshops all built by hand. He and his wife grow their caloric needs raising legumes, chickens, bees, all varieties of annual and perennial vegetables and a forest farm of berries and nuts; they do, though, buy dairy, oils, nuts, seeds, and citrus when needed.  

In May I drove my son to their homestead, eagerly anticipating a vital discussion about “What is a Person?”  I was stopped by a most unexpected issue: urine.  

In keeping with his frugal, wholly integrated living with the natural environment, the Elder saves all their urine, and in the spring, dilutes it with water at a ratio of 1:10 and then applies it to the garden’s root zone as a free, highly concentrated nutrient rich source of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK).  Consumers at Big-Box garden centers pay between $1 to $3 per pound for NPK-rich organic fertilizers.  Since bombing began on the Fertile Crescent, birth-place of agriculture, the cost of fossil fuel-based fertilizers has jumped 30% to 40% in the past three months.  The Elder is no fool.

Like almost 90% of American citizens, my children have been raised on city water, using flush toilets on a sewer, so this organic frugality was overwhelming.  What to my son seemed a bio-hazard used to fertilize food was a brew too toxic, he was rendered catatonic.  After a tour of the gardens, the Elders shared home pressed apple cider and muffins but his appetite was gone.  I carried the conversation.  

In fact, this was an essential learning opportunity.  Here at our Homeschool Academy, I raise my son to question authority, ground his opinions on fact, and consider all sides of a topic.  To the mainstream this is a “cringe” factor, but “pee cycling,” the technical term for this practice, is the vanguard; large-scale grassroots community programs are under way in Sweden, China and Vermont.  For my son’s Zoomer generation, this will be an increasing issue.  

The Global Water Monitoring Report released by the World Bank in November 2025 reported the world is losing 324 billion cubic meters of freshwater every year, enough to meet the needs of 280 million people annually.  The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that roughly 27% of indoor household water is used just to flush toilets, and four out of five flushes are solely for urine.  Human urine makes up less than 1% of the total volume of municipal wastewater, yet it contains roughly 75% of the nitrogen and 55% of the phosphorus. 

Municipal waste water systems in the United States pump, treat and distribute more than 39 billion gallons of water per day, consuming 30% to 40% of municipal government energy use while emitting greenhouse gasses, discharging residual nitrogen and phosphorus into local watersheds, catalyzing algae blooms that choke out oxygen, creating dead zones.  

My son needs to learn there are two sides to every story, and the fact remains that prior to the advent of modern sewage systems infectious diseases like cholera and dysentery killed millions of people around the world.  Arguably, indoor plumbing represents one of the major success stories of government.  Even today, India has battled cholera, dysentery and diarrhea and so in 2014 Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Clean India Mission was launched to modernize solid waste management.  More than 100 million latrines have been installed, with nationwide practices to ensure safe drinking water supplies.  The World Health Organization has estimated that Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) interventions prevent an estimated 1.4 million deaths and 74 million disability-adjusted life-years annually worldwide.

Municipal waste systems come at a high cost. The Congressional Budget Office reports that, in the United States between 1956 and 2014 – the Boomer generation – federal, state, and local governments have spent over $4.1 trillion (adjusted for inflation) on operations, maintenance, and capital infrastructure of water and wastewater utilities.  That aging infrastructure increasingly leaks water, and becomes less efficient.  The AWWA estimates updating drinking water infrastructure will cost $2.1–$2.4 trillion over the next 25 years (2026–2050), a cost my son’s generation will bear, in addition to national debt exceeding $39 trillion.  And growing. People complain about fraud and government waste, but then flush it all down the golden toilet.

In January, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) published “Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era,” declaring the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy.  For my son and his peers, this issue will be not abstract but omnipresent.  Creative solutions will be needed.  

Reclaiming urine reduces the consumption of water while converting a major pollutant into a free hyper-local resource.  If “pee-cycling” seems outrageous now, its time may be near.  ScienceDirect, a scientific research platform operated by Elsevier, the respected academic publishing house, conducted a multi-national survey of 3763 respondents at 20 different universities across 16 countries asking “people’s willingness to consume food grown using human urine as fertilizer.”  68% of the respondents favored recycling human urine, 59% stated a willingness to eat urine-fertilized food, and only 11% believed that urine posed health risks that could not be mitigated by treatment.

With urine as number 1 on our list, the number 2 topic is feces.  A hyper-local solution is readily available in the “humanure” movement.  Recycling human excrement has been practiced for thousands of years, including “night soil” collected in towns of China, Korea, and Japan.  Evidently it was common throughout the Middle Ages, but fell out of favor around the 19th century with the advent of flush toilets and municipal water systems.  Since the mid-90s, however, “night soil” has regained traction.  

The Mother Tree, who teaches my son “biogeochemistry” – a/k/a Soil Science – is at the vanguard of the “humanure” movement.  In 2008, she launched the “Humble Pile” project as a nutrient recovery project in dense urban Chicago.  She recruited 22 volunteer households, providing “dry bucket toilets,” snap on seats, and sawdust to eliminate odors and catalyze the carbon-to-nitrogen balance.  Her goal was to “transform waste into fertility, pollution into resource, and isolation into connection.” 

For three months she personally collected the buckets and transported them – by bicycle – to a location outside the city, for the high-heat composting process, to ensure pathogens like E. Coli were killed off.  In total, she diverted 1,500 gallons of waste from Chicago’s water treatment system.  And in the end, “The Great Giveback” returned the nutrient soil back to the volunteers, in parcels, for use in their gardens.  The cycle was complete.  Community, connected.  

In 2009, Time Magazine published “Humanure: Goodbye, Toilets.  Hello, Extreme Composting” that described projects in rural Pennsylvania; Austin, Texas; Marin County, California; as well as Chicago’s “Humble Pile.”  The Mother Tree was introduced as “…a self-described radical ecologist” and quoted, “I’ve sent a sample in for a coliform test.  There is zero detectable fecal bacteria.”

In Arthur Magazine, she was quoted, “I’m not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me.  As an ecologist, I don’t expect law to keep up with me—it’s more important to get this done.  I’m just interested in people understanding that their body is producing soil all the time, and there’s no reason not to return it back to earth.”

My son’s visit to the Elder was not a waste, but an awakening.  Where I hoped for dialogue, he experienced a basic physical truth, uncomfortable as that may be.  To the mainstream, we live on Planet Earth.  The Anxious Generation has been trained to experience life through a screen.  But the Mother Tree and the Elder show him we live with Planet Earth.  

In terms of “What is a Person?” they each demonstrate, quietly and profoundly, in my son’s presence, that a person is not a passive consumer, but an accountable participant in our community and ecosystem.  To the consumer, life is linear, a constant quest for accumulation of more, regardless of the waste left behind.  To the steward, life is circular where recycling creates nutrient rich soil, to grow nutrient rich foods to nourish the body; by owning the full consequences of living, an environmental pollutant is converted into life-giving food. 

Humanure is but a humble lesson in entropy: heat – 135 to 160 degrees F – kills off the pathogens, creating bio-rich soil, sweet smelling, as fresh as the forest. Complex organic matter is violently broken down in thermophilic (hot) compost; fragmented, and disassembled. Humus is left behind —an incredibly stable, chemically complex, and highly organized soil matrix. The stuff of life. Giving off heat, the microbes build a structured, nutrient-dense masterpiece in the soil.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states the total entropy of the universe always increases: the “Arrow of Time” points ever forward. But through stewardship, my son’s generation can return the cycle to a restorative, nurturing future: waste converted into growth, into nourishing food.

Any city-raised boy can learn this lesson.  Very likely all the Zoomers will need to learn this humble lesson.  This will be our 8th grade lesson.