Wendell Berry: Farmer, Ecologist and Author

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BERRY: That's because he uses every resource available to him and wastes nothing, not even his own excrement. Human wastes are excellent fertilizer when composted properly.

PLOWBOY: I understand you can speak on that subject from personal experience. You have built your own composting privy, haven't you?

BERRY: Yes, although we aren't using the compost on any food crops until we've worked with it for a while and are sure of it. We do put the compost on ornamentals and young trees and it's good stuff.

For us that privy has solved several practical problems. We ha a limited water supply from our well and a poor soil for a septic tank system, and we also wanted to stop the effluent from getting into the river. Of course, there are other reasons . In An Agricultural Testament, Sir Albert Howard talks about bringing growth and decay into balance. Our society is interested in growth and production but isn't really interested decay at all. And as long as it doesn't get interested, its excrement and garbage will just remain a nuisance and a danger and never become part of that cycle everybody's talking about.

PLOWBOY: It's certainly much easier to gabble about our "sewage disposal crisis" . . . while we keep right on flushing the toilet. Do you think most people — people in this country anyway — are really willing to alter their habits that drastically? Can we become realistic enough to swap our flush toilets for for composting privies?

BERRY: There's a state of mind that has to accompany a a change like that. The American mind has been schooled for years to think that you oughtn't to spend time on any regular basis on anything that isn't glamorous. And you especially oughtn't to have to spend it turning manure piles in a composting privy. But once you become willing to involve yourself in the kind of discipline and faithfulness it takes to see to jobs like that when they need to be seen to, then it seems to me you're getting away from the sickness that afflicts the society everywhere and going to work on some kind of cure.

PLOWBOY: That still sounds pretty idealistic!

BERRY: Well, I have an American head like everybody else and there are times when it seems there are better things for me to be doing. Anything you go into regularly is going to lead to a certain amount of disenchantment. The first time you ever clean out your privy, you're going to go down there with great enthusiasm and really throw that stuff out of there. It's going to be a great thing to do. But about the fifteenth time you've got to do it it's going to be raining or you're going to be in a hurry and you're going to think to yourself — maybe you're a writer — "I could be writing, but here I've got to clean out this old privy''.

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