If you think about where our food comes from, particularly in colder climates, you’ll realise it’s grown someplace else. As our bananas, apples, lettuce, corn and rice grow, they extract nutrients from the land.

That food is then trucked, shipped and flown to where we live – and where we ...

Our local sewage treatment plants clean that water from pathogens, but not from the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium this wastewater is rich in.

These potent fertilisers usually flow into a body of water nearby, constantly overfeeding the lakes, rivers and the ocean.

That results ...

• With so much smart tech, why haven’t we closed our metabolic rift? The problem is that we have to mend another huge fissure in the excremental ideology – not the metabolic but the mindset one.
• Unlike people in ancient societies, we still think of our excrement as the ultimate waste ...

• For the most part, we try to distance ourselves from it as much as possible. The exact mechanisms of that process depend on where you live.
• In the Western world, we flush it down the toilet.
• In the less fortunate places, it’s left to decompose in pit latrines or underneath ...

• Because we don’t ship our shit back to where the food comes from, we keep perpetuating the redistribution of nutrients on the planet.
• Soils grow barren, so we use synthetic fertiliser, which isn’t anywhere near as good as the real shit, and also is very polluting to produce.

• In the developed world, we built flushing toilets, underground pipes and gigantic sewage treatment plants to protect ourselves from our massive sh*t piles
• Yet, these marvels of modern engineering have done significant damage to Earth's ecology.
• Soils grow barren, so we use sy...