Keep It Simple, Stupid (S**t happens).

I'm going to make an extremely unglamorous selection, here. The person I chose to follow works in the United States, does his work somewhat quietly, and literally in his own backyard. He's somewhat older than the target audience here and his web presence is low-key, and slightly low-tech.

He's also brilliant. Part of the driving Evoke principles is to really a****s what you have in terms of resources. What could possibly be more brilliant and helpful to find a way to use as a resource than human feces? I mean, seriously. Come on. If we're alive, if we're eating, we've got more crap than we know what to do with. And here in the U.S. what we've decided to do with it is flush it into large, sometimes faulty municipal water systems along with 5 gallons of clean drinking water per turd. THAT MAKES NO SENSE. Clean water will become more and more scarce in the coming years, and we're literally flushing it down the crapper by the cubic mile. And when the systems that process become compromised by increased demand, water scarcity, or weather related flooding? Well, then it all overflows into the stream and groundwater systems that we rely on to drink, contaminating them.

Aside from the issue of water, have you ever wondered what's in your crap? Well, in addition to the by-products and possible pathogens that make it vile, stinky and possibly dangerous, a wh*** lot of useful nutrients. Every time we eat food that comes from one location, and return the nutrients from that food (via our waste products) to another location, like a river system and eventually the ocean, we remove those nutrients from their place of origin, necessitating that they be replaced. usually synthetic fertilizers are used (with great collateral harm) to do the trick.

So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Joseph Jenkins. He outlines a way to safely, at home, with minimal ick-factor and with minimal cost, process and re-use human excrement. It's an excellent work about "closing the loop" between production and waste, and valuing resources in all their forms. He can be located at Jenkinspublishing.com. He has also made his work on the composting and safe re-use of human waste available for free. http://humanurehandbook.com/contents.html

Read the book before you get grossed out and judge. It's funny, pursuasive, informative and eminently useful. To shadow him, I'm keeping tabs of his web presence and reading all of his available online material. I also intend to get in touch, and perhaps offer to maintain a blog where he can publish articles in a more user friendly format.