World Toilet Day

Yes, it's a crappy subject.  Toilets are something that we in the developed world tend to take for granted. Finding a place to 'go' is rarely an issue.  Why then do toilets merit their own global day of recognition.   Turns out that 2.6 billion people around the world do not have access to even the most basic toilets.  Thus, November 19th is World Toilet Day.

Hundreds of millions of people are living in urban slums,  literally immersed in their own raw sewage.  Dealing with human waste is a huge issue no one likes to think about.  What we have now are major urban areas, particularly in lesser developed nations, in which the waterways are choked with turds and garbage of every description.  We're talking about slums with thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of humans with no infrastructure for handling waste at all. 

 

Ever driven by a dairy farm or a cattle feed lot when the wind is blowing your direction?  Imagine living with that kind of stench 24/7.    That's the life for a very large portion of humanity.

Fortunately, there are people who are working to make a difference. The Gates Foundation is putting money into developing low cost waterless toilet systems that can be mass produced to help aleviate this problem.  All such efforts inevitably bump up against a hard reality.  There are more than seven billion humans on Earth. Every year, another 75 million are added to that number. We're talking the equivalent of a dozen cities the size of Los Angeles added evey year to the human population, mostly in the poorest, most dysfunctional parts of the world.

World Toilet Day is an important day of recognition, because people who have to live in their own shit have no dignity. If ever there was a human right, it should be the right to live with at least a modicum of dignity. In 2012,  nearly a third of the world's people do not have even that basic kind of dignity.

On this special day of recognition for human sanitation, let's thank the good people who have chosen this arena for their activism.  My source of information on this subject is Michael Campana, a hydrologist at Oregon State University. I'm sure Dr. Campana feels a bit like Sisyphus  when he talks about the lagging  response to the need for toilets around the world.  The good news is, people like him and those focused on this challenge at the Gates Fondation are trying to make  headway.

It's hard to be optimistic about resolving the world's toilet troubles as long as we fail to deal with the root issue, which is population growth.   The solution to the sanitation problem starts with universal reproductive choice and guaranteeing that all couples have access to contraception. 

Here is a link to Michael Campana's webpage http://aquadoc.typepad.com/waterwired/

Here is a link to Bill Gates' inspiring, 'Reinvent the toilet challenge' http://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/bill-gates-reinvent-the-toilet-challeng/