Discipleship and Defecatory Justice (Sarah Nahar)
Discipleship and Defecatory Justice
by Sarah Nahar
In order for complex life forms to survive on planet Earth, people—especially those of us responsible for contributing to climate changes and benefiting from global inequality—must make significant transformations to how we live, at a basic level. Other contributors to this edition of AllCreation have spoken directly to how theologies of domination have created a situation where we are in dire straits. Due to this theology in action, we now must foreground basic questions of survival on the planet (let alone survival in hierarchal society) instead of giving attention to thriving.
But here we are. So, let's start with the basics and seek transformation from there. Human survival depends on access to water and food. We have rightfully given considerable attention to these essential human needs. But we have given far less consideration to the equally essential human need to release excess water and food from our system through urination and defecation. There is a dearth of dignified, sustainable sanitation options and systems. Ecological sanitation is a neglected area of consideration for environmental innovators. I offer "defecatory justice" as a framework to analyze the power dynamics at play when addressing the climate issues created by dominionism.
What is Defecatory Justice?
First, a word about language, since we often avoid conversations about sanitation because of social taboos around bodily waste. Children in Western cultures are taught not to use “bathroom words” in public. English does not even have a neutral word to use to describe the nutrients and leftovers that come out of the body.The word “poo” is childish; “shit” offends people (though the word's root simply means "to separate"[1]); and “feces” and “excrement” seem too scientific for normal conversation. Dominant social conventions have discouraged us from talking about the reality of bodily elimination, thereby making it more difficult to address sanitation as an ethical issue or a matter of public concern, or for new ideas to be shared at every level of society where innovation could be happening. As a result, our social movements, institutions, and organizations, like our bowels, are often constipated. We need to get the flow going to be healthy.
The term I have created to describe the challenge humanity faces in this regard is “defecatory justice,” a concept still in development since I am just beginning to find interlocutors for this conversation.[2] Defecatory justice is a theoretical framework that examines the power dynamics of all interconnected systems related to human elimination and the subsequent journey of that expelled matter. It is both a theory and a practice. As theory, it works alongside other visions of justice in the service of collective liberation, planetary regeneration, and the adoption of pro-environmental behaviors. As a practical concern, it seeks to ensure that what comes out of our bodies remains within the natural cycle of decomposition.[3]
The argument that human “waste” should remain within the natural cycle of decomposition stands in opposition to the taken-for-granted wastewater treatment and septic processes familiar in many Global North contexts that have been so heavily influenced by dominionism. These systems are problematic not because they have failed to help us resolve a perennial problem of separating human excrement from the places humans eat—they have. But modern wastewater systems enable fantasies of what it means to flush "away" human bodily waste. Away is a false notion; away is somewhere. People and other beings live there. The ways that waste is treated frequently has a negative impact on others through the use of chemicals and the release the hazardous materials into freshwater and landfills.
The willingness to shit on others is encouraged by a theology of dominionism that creates a hierarchy in which behaviors that degrade other humans and the rest of the natural world are reinforced--rather than questioned or repealed--if they are increasing the power of those who achieve the greatest dominance. Sim Van der Ryn challenges the absurdity of the dominant class' current "waste" management system. In The Toilet Papers he writes "The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work. Nature admits no waste. Nothing is left over; everything is joined in the spiral of life." [4]Building massive systems on this incomplete understanding of how nature works is deadly. Though those in the flush-and-forget society have pushed the problem out-of-sight and out-of-mind for many years, the pipes are backing up and we'll have to deal with our crap.
Part of the aim of my research is to share the various ways that people of faith and conscience can approach the emerging conversation about our collective shit/"waste"/refuse/poop towards a future of defecatory justice and ecological sanitation. This conversation need not take over, but can be smoothly integrated in a broader framework of discipleship and environmental ethics.
Defecatory Injustice
Sanitation is one area in which the violence of interlocking systems of oppression is often unseen and routinized. Currently, some 2.5 billion people—particularly in the Global South—lack adequate sanitation facilities, while those in the Global North consume an excess of fresh-water in their sewage treatment facilities. According to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, one in three people have no stable sanitation facilities.[5] This means people with no toilet, no bucket, no pit latrine, no port-a-potty, no box. Left untreated, open defecation nearly always breeds diseases. In many parts of the world, diarrhea—something people in the overdeveloped world usually consider a minor nuisance—is deadly. Over 2,000 children die of diarrhea each day.[6] Indeed, diarrhea and subsequent dehydration are the second biggest killer of children under 5 years old worldwide, the source of more deaths than HIV, malaria, and measles combined. “The 1.8 million child deaths each year related to clean water and sanitation dwarf the casualties associated with violent conflict. No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation."[7]
Sometimes, people refer to diarrhea euphemistically as a “water-borne” illness. And many countries with sanitation issues spend a great deal of money on freshwater. NGOs prefer to focus on water rather than sanitation because the public image of freshwater flowing from a pipe is much more attractive than photos of toilets or latrines. Freshwater, of course, is vitally important; but without adequate sanitation, the freshwater supply quickly becomes contaminated by dirty fingers and feet. When human waste is properly channeled and treated, the risk of infecting drinking water sources is significantly reduced. But because people do not want to talk about excrement and urine there is less funding for innovation in this area. Indeed, sanitation has been the Millennium Development Goal furthest from its target.[8]
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) has acknowledged that climate change most adversely impacts vulnerable populations, calling out the “protection gap” that leaves those who contribute the least carbon emissions most vulnerable to their negative impacts. Sanitation is another area where those of us in a protected class are having a disproportionate adverse impact. In the Global North our treatment of human waste is designed to fully separate the consequences of our mundane actions by the push of a button or the jiggle of a handle. But before thinking about this as simply an issue of making sure that “everyone has a toilet like we do,” it is worth asking whether or not that approach makes sense.
In many ways, the flush toilet was a brilliant invention. In 2007, readers of the British Medical Journal voted the toilet and the accompanying sanitation revolution as the best medical advance of the last 200 years, choosing it over surgery, antibiotics, or even anesthesia because of the impact that sanitation systems had on reducing disease and child mortality.[9] But the flush toilet and modern systems of sewage treatment hide a host of problems (another essay in itself). Suffice to say that systems in the Global North are overloaded and worldwide, the task of finding water to make our combined sewer systems work is going to be more difficult in the coming years, and it is already becoming more expensive.
Pause to Digest
Doing this research, it has been disconcerting to discover that the most mundane of our everyday practices have made us complicit in egregious harm. Yet, unless you are using a waterless toilet, closed-loop system, or composting toilet, most of us participate daily in perpetuating this crisis.
These issues of defecatory justice should matter to Christians. Many believers understand the natural cycles that are a part of God's purposes. As people committed to following Jesus, who cared for everyone, especially the marginalized, we should care about the places and people and beings who live downstream from our actions.
Nevertheless, a great gap exists between many understandings of how Christians should live our lives and the way we in fact live them. Inasmuch as we have assimilated into the broader petro-chemical and industrial-growth society that surround us, we are acting in ways that disregard the environment and other species created by the God we worship. Our ability to believe that we can flush our urine and excrement “away” reflects traces of a dispensationalist theology that sees no need to preserve our planet in light of the fact that the earth is not a believer's final home and so, ultimately, everything is going “away.”
But if, as most Christians profess, God loves life on this planet—and if that life is in peril—then our theology will need to reflect this. We are called, after all, to minister to the sick; and millions of people in the world are getting sick because of poor sanitary conditions. The most compassionate way to help the sick is not to treat only symptoms, but also to change the (meta)physical structures that sanction sickness.[10] Dominionist theology and the hegemonic Christianity that supports it are part of those structures.
Seeking Solutions
Figuring out how to address the sanitation catastrophe befalling streams and our global siblings is not an alter call for individuals--there is no salvation by oneself in this pile--it is a call to organize together in multispecies party to "deal with our crap." In our initial research, Rianna Isaak-Krauss and I recognized that most North American Christians, like others who live in houses that have flush-water toilets pre-installed, do not currently have adequate theological resources or social relationships to re-think our relationship with excrement, or the toilet (aka the porcelain god).[11] Digging into the history of our daily soil can help prepare our souls for the journey ahead.
Our holy texts and best traditions have some wisdom to offer. For example, there is an etymological connection between the words for “bowels” and “compassion” in biblical Greek (σπλαγχνίζομαι, meaning to be moved in the inward parts). When we have constipation in our compassion, it is crucial that our “bowels of compassion” are moved by what we are observing around us.[12] In Judaism, the Asher Yatzar blessing (יָצַר אֲשֶׁר בִּרְכַּת), is a prayer recited upon leaving the bathroom. This prayer comes in a series of blessings generally offered upon waking up in the morning, following on blessings for the miracles of opening your eyes or having your feet touch the floor.
Blessed are you, Adonai our God, ruler of the universe who formed humans with wisdom and created us with openings and hollows and tubes. It is clear in the presence of your glorious throne that if one of them were ruptured or if one of them were blocked it would be impossible to stand before you and praise you for any length of time. Blessed are you Adonai, who heals all flesh and acts wondrously.[13]
The humble bowel movement can remind us of our own humanity and the Creator’s greatness...and humor. It can also remind us of our connection to all things. When participating in faith-based decolonization work alongside First Nations leaders in Canada, an indigenous elder said:
you Christians say “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We say yes to that, but we also have always recognized that humans aren’t the only ones in the flow. It’s deeper than that. We say, “do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”[14]
Who is downstream of us? What are they experiencing metaphorically and literally from our disposable-heavy society? What does it mean for us to flush our waste onto them? Who is upstream of you? What do you have to say to them? This is the golden rule literally translated into our water systems.
Thinking about where our excrement and urine go is the first step in activating our ability to turn “waste” into resources. We must design sanitary solutions in ways that do not compromise the health of our neighbors and future generations. Change is hard; but it is necessary. Transforming our systems is safer than staying with the status quo. The next time you go to the bathroom ask yourself, “Where does my poop and pee go? Will they be gainfully employed? Or will they be wreaking havoc in some waterway somewhere?”[15] If you don’t know, find out. And if you don’t like the answer, go to the people who have decision-making power in your area and let them know that you are ready to have an open conversation about transformative change in our sanitation systems. With our disciplined determination and collective effort, a future of defecatory justice is one that can yet emerge from a history of dominionism.
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Sarah Nahar sits atop the composting toilet at Wildseed Community Farm.
Sarah Nahar neé Thompson (she/her) is a nonviolent action trainer and interspiritual theologian from Elkhart, Indiana (Potawatomi traditional land). Now as a PhD candidate at Syracuse University in New York (Haudenosaunee Confederacy traditional land) she focuses on ecological regeneration, community cultivation, and spiritual activism. Previously, Sarah was a 2019 Rotary Peace Fellow and worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a member of the Carnival de Resistance and has been the Executive Director of Christian Peacemaker Teams (now Community Peacemaker Teams). She attended Spelman College, majoring in Comparative Women’s Studies and International Studies, minoring in Spanish. She has an MDiv from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in her hometown.
Notes
[1]. Rose George, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 11; "Shit comes from a family of words that also contains the Greek skihzein, the Latin scindere, or the Old English scitan, all meaning, sooner or later, to divide or separate...science is the art of dividing/distinguishing things by knowledge."
[2]. In recent research I came across David Waltner-Toews', The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society (Toronto, ON: ECW Press, 2013). Waltner-Toews is a Canadian Mennonite author, veterinarian, and poet. I reached out to him; we connected and are already swapping stories and contacts. Also, Shawn Shafter, an educator, artist, and performer affectionately known as the "Puru," is a friend who travels the world sparking conversations about the body, our poop, shame, and change.
[3]. There is much more that could be said, as well, of the other substances that leave us—mucous, blood, urine, spit, earwax, sweat—as well as what becomes of the post-life body that will allow it to stay within the natural cycle of decomposition (e.g. escaping embalming, using slow-degrading caskets, human composting etc.). My initial research focuses on human bodies and human feces, though a defecatory justice lens could examine other species' feces as well. Except for those using ecological sanitation, currently humans are the only species not returning their leftover nutrients to the ecosystem from which they fed.
[4]. The Toilet Papers by Sim van der Ryn (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra, 1978.)
[5]. Millennium Development Goal 7 is to Ensure Environmental Sustainability. Access to clean water and sanitation is a sub-goal (7C). "By 2015, halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" It reports, "with regard to basic sanitation, current rates of progress are too slow for the MDG target to be met globally...The number of people living in urban areas without access to improved sanitation is increasing because of rapid growth in the size of urban populations."—https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/millennium-development-goals-(mdgs)
[6] . Li Liu, et al., “Global, Regional, and National Causes of Child Mortality: An Updated Systematic Analysis for 2010 with Time Trends since 2000,” Lancet 379 (2012), 2151-2161.
[7]. Ibid., 3.
[8]. WHO and UNICEF, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking-Water: 2013 Update (Geneva: WHO Press, 2013), 3. In 2015, the year by which MDG targets on sanitation were supposed to have been met, UNICEF and the WHO reported that “the world has fallen short on the sanitation target, leaving 2.4 billion without access to improved sanitation facilities.”—UNICEF and WHO, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2015 Update and MDG Assessment (Geneva: WHO Press, 2015), Foreword.
[9]. Annabel Ferriman, "BMJ readers choose the “sanitary revolution” as greatest medical advance since 1840," British Medical Journal 334 (2007), 111.—Retrieved from: https://www.bmj.com/content/334/7585/111.2.
[10]. Cf. "A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."—Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence, April 4, 1967.—Retrieved from https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.
[11]. Cf. Isaak-Krauss' sermon entitled "The Great Meal--Then What" https://www.rivereastchurch.ca/sermon/the-great-meal-then-what/ (River East Church, Winnipeg, Manitoba, August 11, 2019) and my keynote presentation for the 20th Annual Dialogues on Nonviolence, Religion, and Peace (Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, South Bend, Indiana, October 25, 2018) https://kroc.nd.edu/news-events/events/2018/10/25/the-20th-annual-dialogues-on-nonviolence-religion-and-peace/.
[12]. Cf. the first edition of the African Methodist Episcopal book of Discipline (1817) cited in Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s "Of the Black Church and the Making of the Black Public," in African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 341.
[13]. Jewish blessing recitation information, Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berachot (60b). Listen to a contemporary musical rendition of the prayer by Shoshana Jedwab: http://www.shoshanajedwab.com/openingssingle (2020).
[14]. Delegation with Christian Peacemaker Teams Steering Committee, April 2013.
[15]. Molly Winter, Recode Ted Talk, April 2016.
This piece is part of our Spring 2022 collection, Dominionism.
