College students talk shit all the time, but not ecologically. A superficial conversation is shooting the shit. Something obvious is “no shit!” while “bullshit!” is a standard response to falsehood. If you care, you might give a shit. If not, you might get shit-faced at a party. And if the party gets too wild, the shit hits the fan. “Shit” is on the tip of our tongues, but we need to bring it to the front of our minds, because shit isn’t just a linguistic construct; it’s a daily reality. Americans make about five billion gallons of waste a day without even thinking about it, but we don’t know shit.11
When students need to take a shit on campus, they go to a specialized space called a bathroom. In the average college residence hall, the bathrooms seem a long way from environmental studies, but waste management is an environmental study. If you’re a human being of average size and weight, for example, your body produces about a pound of waste, solid and liquid, every day. It’s one of the few forms of production still remaining in America, one type of manufacturing that can’t be shipped offshore.
The process seems simple, but it’s fairly complex. When Joe College orders a cheeseburger and french fries, he chews his meal and swallows, sliding the food down his alimentary canal. There, a variety of digestive enzymes convert complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, transform fats into glycerol and fatty acids, and transmute proteins into amino acids and peptides. In Joe’s small intestine, these digested nutrients are absorbed by blood and lymph vessels to be carried into the circulatory system to feed various organs. What’s leftover is excremental, the waste that waits until, as the bumper sticker says, “shit happens.” When it happens, we head to the toilet and drop our load into a small pool of water where it’s submerged along with its pungent smell. After wiping with soft sheets of treated trees, we flush the toilet. To most of us, it’s not worth a second thought.
This hasn’t always been the case. Two-hundred years ago, college students disposed of their bodily wastes on campus. In the winter, people used bedpans, and then carried their waste to the outhouse. Removed from the main buildings, the outhouse was close enough for people to comprehend the problem (and the possibilities) of waste. In cities, entrepreneurs regularly cleaned “night soil” from outhouses and sold it as a fertilizer for outlying farms, providing a useful second life for what we call “waste.”12 After the arrival of indoor plumbing, however, when shit happened, it went down the drain instead of back to nature.
Most college students, like most Americans, live by what Philip Slater calls “the toilet bowl principle of American life”—out of sight is out of mind. But when the toilet flushes, shit doesn’t just evaporate. It travels through sanitary sewers to a solid-waste treatment plant. At most such plants, sewage receives several different treatments. After screening and grit removal, the mixture of excrement, urine, water, paper, and other items enters a settling tank. There, solids drop to the bottom so that grease and plastics can be skimmed off the top. The water heads for secondary treatment, where microorganisms feed on bacteria, purifying the liquid. Finally—using sand filters, natural or artificial wetlands, ultraviolet light, or ozone—the water is “polished,” to bring it up to legal standards, and discharged back into rivers. When we flush on campus, we’re intimately (and institutionally) involved in the water cycle.13
Biologically, excretion can remind us of the beauties of the natural world, the ways in which our bodies are designed to manage the ins and outs of animal life. Ecologically, our bathroom break reminds us that all natural systems, including the human body, are involved in processes of consumption and return. Taking in nutrients, we expel wastes, which function in the grand scheme of nature as nutrients for other species. Culturally, however, our excretions are a mess: We treat shit like shit. As Christopher Uhl says, “We take two perfectly good resources—human manure and fresh water—and splat them together in the toilet bowl, making them both useless.” But if we ever get our shit together, perhaps we’d see that human wastes aren’t wasted when we use them—properly treated—as fertilizer or fuel, thus returning them to the productive and regenerative cycles of nature.14
The Artificial Waterfall
At some point in the day, most college students take part in a purification ritual called a shower. They walk down the hall to the bathroom carrying a plastic caddy holding soap, shampoo, conditioner, and other lotions and potions. Towel on shoulder, washcloth or loofah in hand, students look for an open shower, set their supplies on a bench, draw a plastic curtain, undress, hang up their clothes, step under the showerhead, and then open the valve to a torrent of cultural assumptions and expectations. Though turning the tap seems mechanical, it’s also organic and very complex. In Northfield, Minnesota, for example, the water flowing in the shower is drawn from the Jordan Aquifer. It’s pumped through a purification plant for chlorination and fluoridation, and then to water towers that provide the pressure for the whole municipal system. In a hydraulic civilization, water goes not just where it falls or flows, but where we want it.15
The shower gets us clean, but it also performs cultural work. Dirt is evil in our culture, and so we ritually cleanse ourselves in a sort of daily baptism, initiating us into a sect of sanitation. Early in the morning, as we’re trying to wake up, a shower is cleansing and stimulating. Later in the day, after a run or a game of basketball, it’s cleansing but also relaxing. In either case, a shower is a way of washing the body, but it’s often also a luxury, too. The water streaming over the skin, massaging the muscles, is a sheer delight. The sound of constant flow is soothing, like a cascading creek. And the steamy heat penetrates our pores, comforting us with wondrous warmth. We bathe not just physically, but also psychologically. When we’re dirty, we tell ourselves we need a shower. When we’re tired or stressed, we tell ourselves we deserve a shower. A long shower, too, is a counterpoint to the culture of speed and efficiency so recently reinforced by our alarm clock. In a small way, a slow shower is a protest movement against a world of enforced time poverty: As we linger in the liquid tranquilizer, we’re not quick and we’re not efficient. This ultimately is a problem. Resisting the time pressures of our society might be a good instinct, but using fifty gallons of fresh water in the process is not so good.16
The Social Construction of Showers
We all understand how a shower works, and how it can work to wake us up, but we need to wake up to how it functions in the moral ecology of everyday life. Considered analytically, a shower, just like the toilet, is a way of transforming drinkable water into wastewater. The drain water finds its way (sooner or later) to an ocean, where it evaporates and circulates in clouds until it precipitates into places where we can pump it once again. In the shower, we’re in the water cycle, which is affected by every turn of the tap.
We think of a shower as a private act, but when we get in the stall, we enter with a lifetime of education and expectations. Every day, ads for soaps, shampoos,
