Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Learn about composting your own poo by checking out our new post, How to Save the World by Pooping in a Bucket, at the consciousness shifting blog Reality Sandwich, for which we write a regular column. And should you want more potty talk you’re in luck due to a minor sewage synchronicity going on in the magazine/internet world. As we wrote our meditation on human waste, a number of other stories on the subject came out at the same time: Wasteland...

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Our Disastrous Summer Garden

...ith better raccoon fortifications. Take out stone fruit that isn’t performing (Kelly has wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve dragged my heels). Take better notes. Improve soil and restart a composting project. Come up with small metal cages to enclose fruit (I have a notion that involves 3D printing–more on this later). How did your garden do this summer?...

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051 Toilets and Poultry

.... Eric mentions a podcast episode of Tiny House Chat where they talk about composting toilets. Then we discuss poultry biosecurity lessons that “West Coast” Erik learned at a recent conference. So, yes, toilets and poultry! Take that Elon Musk! If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The the...

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Compost Piles on Fire!

...the biology. BioCycle has a whole article on fire prevention in municipal composting facilities that covers this common problem. So what situation(s) can lead to a fire? Here’s what can happen with a low moisture, large pile with little air exchange, combined with water getting into the pile in a place where there is enough air to support biological activity and chemical oxidation, but not enough to cool the pile. An old, dry compost pile, or a p...

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Cybernetics: A Fatal Flaw

...that this type of “cybernetic utopia gone bad,” birthed in the idealistic pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, is how we ended up with Google and Facebook’s spyware based business model. Think for a second about how absurd it is that Mark Zuckerberg seems to believe that algorithms can parse the subtleties of all the world’s languages and flag the sort of hate speech that leads to deaths in countries like Myanmar and India. Still from Adam Curtis’ A...

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