When Nance Klehm sent letters to several dozen friends and acquaintances last year asking if they’d like to help compost their own excrement, she didn’t expect an enthusiastic reaction. And at first, she didn’t get one. “People are truly freaked out about this potty stuff,” she says.
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Humble Pile is one of several efforts that the 43-year-old urban ecologist has launched in the past few years in an effort to help city dwellers reconnect with the natural world. Many have an explicit conservationist thrust: “Yeah, we can actually save fuel, eradicate certain forms of pollution, save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and create rich fertile soil rather than parched earth,” Klehm writes of Humble Pile at her Web site, spontaneousvegetation.net. “Billions of humans suck nutrients and don’t give back to the dirt. Change that now. Stop wasting live water. Stop sewage spills by composting your crap.”
But don’t call her green. “Those terms are marketing terms,” Klehm says. “They are not helping us connect to a more abundant and self-renewing way of being.” The question she wants people to ask isn’t “Which ‘green’ products should I buy?” It’s “What’s the nature of my connection to the soil, and can I deepen it?”
Though there are plenty of environmental reasons to avoid or minimize the use of flush toilets—and though she enumerates some of them in her pitch—Klehm says they’re not the main impetus behind Humble Pile. “I do it because I think it’s important to be friends with my own body,” she says. She likes “the idea that you can take something you’re not friends with and you relax around it and it’ll be transformed into something that can grow flowers.”
Klehm also continues to work for Greenhouses of Hope, a program of the Pacific Garden Mission faith-based homeless shelter at Canal and 14th Street where she’s been a consultant for the past five years. Residents there use worm composting to transform food waste from the shelter’s cafeteria into soil that they then use to grow food for the shelter. “No one in there has ever grown anything in their lives, and now they’re recycling 500 to 600 pounds of food waste and newspaper waste a week and creating more than 9,000 pounds of worm castings,” Klehm says proudly.
