The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure

Are you "Disaster Prepared"? Do you have your water, canned foods, coleman stove, flashlights, duct tape, medical kit? Good for you! Now, what will you do if the water pipes break, or the sewer lines are clogged or severed? How will you flush that toilet? This is a topic no disaster preparedness materials ever cover! And it is, indeed, a very important and potentially hazardous area of our existence in a disaster. I bought this book for just that purpose - to help me properly prepare for this portion of our survival. Not only has it helped me in that area, but has also given me a tremendous amount of other valuable information. I highly recommend that everyone read it!

Keep in mind that the author of this book composts his humanure with all of his other compost material. By properly placing the humanure material in the center of your larger compost pile you will eliminate any sort of pathogen disaster that A Microbiolgist warns of. Granted, his concerns are valid, but don't despair, composting humanure is easy and sawdust toilets are most excellent party favors.

This book improved our lives as soon as I finished it! Thank you Joe Jenkins! After living for four years with a well known brand of composting toilet, the sawdust toilet in this book has finally given us simple living. I read this book cover to cover the day I got it. My husband built it in one hour and we started using it. Simplicity at it's best! Everything in this book makes total sense. I only wish I'd bought this book four years ago when we first moved to our homestead. I highly recommend it-it should be required reading to live in this country!

One could be forgiven for thinking that this is just another "how-to" book, albeit a bit off the beaten path of woodworking manuals and the like. Not that "The Humanure Handbook" doesn't deliver practical information. On the contrary, the book empowers the reader to exploit a vital and overlooked resource, and to eliminate personal contribution to a chronic source of pollution, water and power waste in the bargain. (Trying doing *that* with a router.) The methods described are cheap and simple. And the author puts his money where his mouth is, espousing methods he has personally employed for over two decades, and backing this practical experience with impressive in-depth research.This much easily justifies the purchase price, but there's much more here than "A Guide to Composting Human Manure". The Humanure Handbook dispels some fallacies of commonly accepted and widely repeated composting techniques. Even if you're already an avid composter (and I was) chances are Jenkins has some surprises for you (and he did).As social commentary, I can think of no other "how-to" book that tells such a compelling, frightening tale of blind assumption and culturally ingrained self-destructiveness. We see with startling clarity how the "civilized" world has combined ignorance, chemistry and technology to convert a needed resource into a nightmarish and wholly unnecessary problem. We are forced to confront the false assumptions each of us has unconsciously absorbed. And, by extension, we are forced to question how many other fundamentally bad ideas have become invisibly institutionalized in modern society.Unlike many preachy indictments of modern life, however, The Humanure Handbook provides answers rather than merely posing questions. The solutions can be applied on any scale, from personal to global, in virtually any climate and economic environment.If I have a quibble with the book, it is that key concepts are repeated extensively. I suspect some fierce editing could boil the book down by a fair chunk. To an extent, the repetition is by design; most of the book's chapters can be read in isolation, and it makes a superb reference volume. I suspect most readers who get through the introduction will end up reading it cover to cover, and a bit of repetition is a small price to pay for a message that is vital, practical, maddening, empowering, humorous, and inspiring.*Everyone* should read this book.