Waste Not, Want Not

It's hard not to make jokes about it . But many of the jokes cannot be repeated on this website, given the respectful tone toward readers it aims to maintain.  We do have a high-sounding word for those low jokes: "scatological."  Yes, I'm talking about feces, manure, dung.

Perhaps a courteous way to begin to talk about it—especially in a website about Nature—is to talk about dung beetles.  When observing them, the comedy, instead of being scatological, can become lighthearted.  And, indeed, it is hard not to make jokes about dung beetles once you know that the oversized ball they comically struggle to take home is made out of manure.  When the manure the dung beetle locates is rolled in the usually sandy soil in which the beetle lives, it usually becomes a perfect sphere, sometimes larger in diameter than the beetle in length. As if to add another gag to its comic act, the beetle will often walk on its forelimbs, pushing the ball backwards with its rear legs.

There is, however, a seriousness of purpose behind the act.  The aim of the beetle's often difficult struggle is to get the ball into a burrow, where the beetle's eggs laid into the sphere will incubate in the decomposing heat of the manure. That choice of a material for a nursery also means that there will be ready-made food right at the mouths of the larvae once they hatch.

It is so fascinating for naturalists (or Nature lovers) to watch the dung beetle's maneuvering that they inspired the classic opening essay in Jean-Henri Fabre's ten-volume book on entomology, the study of insects.  He wrote of a group of them:

"What excitement over a single patch of Cow-dung! 
Never did adventurers hurrying from
the four corners of the earth
display such eagerness
in working a Californian claim."

Now that I've coyly talked about insects, I can return to my more delicate subject.  Viewed from a wider perspective than the several square yards a dung beetle inhabits, the matter of manure takes on larger implications.  Life on this finite planet could not exist if one species' waste did not become another species' raw material.  Moreover, the long-term quality of human civilization will depend in part upon how adept we become at recycling what we would have otherwise considered to be just trash or waste.

Given the critical nature of caring about where things go once we think we have gotten rid of them, the content of that beetle's prized ball might not be a bad place to begin our reflections. We humans, for good reason, do not talk too much about what we flush down the toilet. (One TV talk-show host in the early days of television even got disciplined for making a joke about what was demurely called a "water closet.")  Nevertheless, much could be revealed about the practical challenges of building a human civilization if we examined how humans have dealt with such waste.  Although I've never encountered a copy of the book, I do know that the nonfiction writer Lawrence Wright has written a book titled Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet.

house in Tibet with manure-brick wall

People who have economically poorer lives in traditional cultures live out the meaning of "Waste not, want not."  In some societies, animal dung is even shaped into bricks, dried in the sun, and used as fuel.  Or even to make houses!  Mind you, I'm not suggesting that such a method of house-construction be widely adopted.  But such ingenious uses of even the most distasteful waste (as that little beetle knows) can help remind us that Nature is the Great Recycler. And it must be.

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Have these reflections lead you to any thoughts about life?

(The quotation by Fabre is from his Souvenirs Entomologiques.)