BITS & PIECES - TILLING FOR INSOMNIACS

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The book covers basic distiller designs for basin-type, titled-wick, multiple-effect, multiple-sun, and greenhouse distillers. It also describes the subsystems that can be used to support these different designs. Lemon provides technical diagrams that illustrate each type of distiller, give measurements, and show the relation of the sun to the source water.

Lemon believes, "People should choose solar distillation as the permanent solution to their drinking water problems. Solar distillation is the way to go....I want to see people assure their personal health by drinking pure, solar-distilled water."

For more information about the manual or to order it, call 1-800-590-0090 or write to SunPure Drinking Water Systems, 400 Main St. North, PO Box 1725, Lyons, CO 80540-1725.

—Meleah Rush

Compost Happens

"Cigarette butts, empty beer cans lying along the road, plastic six-pack rings, Styrofoam clam-shell burger boxes, deodorant cans, disposable diapers, discarded appliances, discarded pop bottles, newspapers, old car tires, spent batteries, junk mail, nuclear garbage, convenience foods, exhaust emissions, the 5 billion gallons of drinking water we flush down our toilets every day, and the millions of tons of organic refuse discarded into the environment year after year," these things J.C. Jenkins calls "human waste."

But human excrement is not "human waste," says Jenkins, unless you waste it, flushing it away instead of recycling it. It's a resource we regularly waste and along with it we waste plenty of pure water as well, which really rankles Jenkins, who recently wrote and published The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure (Emphasizing Minimum Technology and Maximum Hygienic Safety).

The guide is riddled with quite a few puns ("When the Crap Hit the Fan," and "Holy Sheesh" are chapter subheads) and quite a bit of Jenkins's politics, from which you get the impression that composting "humanure" is your civic duty along the lines of voting. But mostly the handbook contains a lot of hard information taken from the author's 15 years of humanure composting experience. Jenkins has composted all of his family's humanure since 1979. The resulting compost has always been used in his food garden. Jenkins has also done considerable research; he's packed directions for safely composting humanure with tables and figures of things like carbon/nitrogen ratios for killing pathogens and compost temperature curves. He includes diagrams of sawdust toilets and various composting toilets from your Guatemalan moldering toilet to your camp composter. The handbook provides extensive references, glossaries, step-by-step illustrations, tables, and supply source lists.

Jenkins, who clearly believes composting is the only moral thing to do, tries to debunk what he considers to be myths around composting human waste that has fueled what he calls "fecophobia." "There was some literature published on the subject of composting humanure back in the 1970s which insinuated that humanure compost was practically as toxic as nuclear waste." While denouncing the raw sewage fertilizers of the Third World, Jenkins provides a convincing case that human waste can and should be a safe composting material, a fact that seems to be supported by the growing popularity of Clivus Multrum composting toilets in "mainstream" facilities such as national parks. Jenkins approves of the Clivus Multrum, since no water is required to operate the toilet. A major drawback, however, is that they cost anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 They also require electricity

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