Gene Logsdon: Selling A Book That Has No Name
From GENE LOGSDON
Prairie Public Radio interviewed me recently about my latest book, Holy Shit. The interviewer was kind about my writing. He knew a lot about farming which is rarely the case but always a relief when discussing agriculture before an urban audience. The only problem was that he did not mention the title of the book during the entire interview! He said that he would get fired if he did. Regulations forbid the utterance of that awful word, shit, even when it is in the title of a book.
It happened again. The excellent website, The Chronicle of Higher Education, referred to my book with kind praise, even calling it “charming.” But never once did the reviewer give the title of the book. Policy, he said.
Several years ago, I wrote an article for The Draft Horse Journal in which I felt obliged out of sheer honesty to use the naughty word. This proved to be a problem for Maury Telleen, the editor. He didn’t have a problem actually, but his lovely wife, Jeannine, (they are two of my favorite people) ruled the roost when it came to proofreading and she did not intend for the naughty word to soil her publication. They compromised and rendered the word as “sh#!” ! By now I’ve seen “sh*t”, “sh–”, and even “s…”, none of which is quite as ingenious or resourceful as “sh#!”. But it opens up a whole new frontier. How about “czhit” or “sh?t” or “sh[]t”.
I should just have been content to call the book Holy Manure. But all this hypocrisy speaks eloquently to the main underlying point I wanted to make. We are so ashamed of our excrement and that of all the other animals on earth that we pretend the stuff doesn’t exist. It is as closely connected to us as our digestive tracts, and having been delicious food just hours earlier, it becomes in the very instant that it leaves the colon, obnoxious and poisonous. So fearful is our attitude in this regard that we have scrubbed the most common word in the American language (well maybe the second most common word) from polite language. We have even made excrement disappear in real life. Flush it and forget it.
Because flushing seems to be so handy, agriculture is making one of the biggest blunders in its history. For some thirty years now it has been trying to handle uncountable tons of livestock manure by flushing it out of animal confinement buildings with water and electric power into large ponds lugubriously called “lagoons” or into underground, fly-infested toxic pits. These “manure handling systems” have led to some of the worst cases of polluted waterways in our history.
The amount of manure we are talking about is beyond comprehension, at least mine, especially when the water to do the flushing and treating the sewage is included. Each of the 300 million plus people in the U.S. excretes about a thousand pounds of fecal material a year. Every toilet flush takes about two to three gallons. You can do the arithmetic. An expert in these matters whom I quote in the book says if the whole world flushed like we do, it would be impossible to handle all human manure this way.
It takes about ten tons of barn manure and bedding to fertilize an acre of corn adequately. The cost of commercial fertilizer is averaging a little under $100 an acre. That means that just in pet horse, dog and cat manure, (9.5 million horses, 73 million cats, 68 million dogs) there’s about two billion dollars of fertilizer much of which is being thrown away, as I pointed out in an earlier blog. There are about 100 million cattle in the U.S., each of them defecating 80 to 100 pounds a day. The latest figures show an ongoing pig population in the U.S. of about 60 million. A hog defecates at least as much as a human does. There are over a billion chickens in the U.S., each of them contributing as much manure as a cat. I don’t even want to try to do the totals.
This could be charged off as just the necessary cost of doing business. (My elders used to refer to a bowel movement as “doing your business,” another euphemism to avoid uttering any dreadful words.) But the sources of commercial fertilizers are rising in price and declining in easy availability. We need to find alternatives. Manure is the best one as centuries of farming traditions have attested. Even farm manure that is being returned to the land now (as slurry out of animal factories or as material artificially dried at great cost) has lost much of its plant nutrient value because of improper handling. The book that often has no name describes how we can turn this situation around. Shit really is holy.
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Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 11:29 am
I bought your new book from the solar store in Greenfield, Mass, and I just finished it. It was wonderful! I am going to buy several and give them out for Christmas.
September 22nd, 2010 at 3:10 pmRead it, loved it and proudly put it on my “every book Gene Logsdon has ever published” shelf for all the world to see.
September 22nd, 2010 at 4:13 pm“Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self… He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity… Yet, at the same time, man is a worm, and food for worms. … His body is a material fleshy casing…that bleeds and will decay and die.” Ernest Becker, _The Denial of Death_
And, not incidentally, that body also eats and shits. And who wants to be reminded of that fact when contemplating the infinite?
September 22nd, 2010 at 4:31 pmPeople lack an understanding of the origin of words. In the 1600´s dried manure was sold and moved by ship. Some captains of leaky vessels made the mistake of putting the manure in the bottom of their ships hold. Water moistened the manure allowing anerobic activity to begin along with the production of methane. When a sailor with a lit candle or lantern went to see what that horrible odor was some ships were destroyed. When enough ships were lost the problem was eventually dianosed. Manure was eventually labeled as a cargo that must be Shipped High In Transet. You can imagine some English officer telling a sailor don´t put the manure down there it´s SHIT.
The story makes sense but could also be one of those urban legend things.
September 25th, 2010 at 3:26 pmJust got the book and can give it an unconditional thumbs up. (Maybe I should reword that, given the subject matter.)
And yes, I think the ship story is bogus. I read something about it a while back and the big problem was that the use of acronyms is a fairly recent development, WWII vintage. Shortening Ship High in Transit to SHIT is something that simply would have not made sense to anyone of the sailing ship era.
September 26th, 2010 at 8:28 pmYeah.. the ship story is an urban legend.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shit
September 28th, 2010 at 11:30 amAs a professional folklorist, I can assure you that this ship story is an urban legend. Gene Logsdon
September 28th, 2010 at 4:05 pmStrange that the Chronicle of Higher Education wouldn’t publish the title. A couple years ago they held an architectural competition to design a tongue-in-cheek presidential library for the outgoing administration, with the constraints that the building had to be drawn on the back of a standard business envelope (apropos of the theory that building designs often began on napkins/envelopes). One of the submittals included the Statue of Liberty as a centerpiece, making a double-barreled hand gesture many people might find offensive (and probably familiar to anyone who’s been cut off on the highway at 75 mph).
The Chronicle not only included the drawing, but made it the starting image on their online video documenting the finalists. I know this because it was mine. The design was easily understood as a humorous (if not humorless, depending on one’s point of view) political statement. On the plus side, it got third place out of 100+ entries.
September 30th, 2010 at 11:21 amHello Gene,
I can’t wait to get this book!
As the Vice Chair Sierra Club here in Washington State, a task force was set up between the Ag community and the local tribes to have a dialogue for a more sustainable future!
The fertilizer question hasn’t even been brought up by the Ag folks, ether does the concern over “Compost Digester” and the tribes will not break their treaty rights!
My question is, and I’ve asked this of you on another blog is; What is it with the compost digesters on farm land, using shit from animals that are given antibiotics, sick cows, fertilizers that are toxic, spraying this back on the land, where it can leach into the nearby rivers, the aquifers, etc…
Are digesters the way to go, and do they spew out, as a by-product, something far worse then co2?
Thank you,
October 4th, 2010 at 11:33 amRobert Havelock, Tbe term, compost digestor, can mean anything from a backyard barrel to a huge methane digester, where liquid manure is allowed to heat or be heated to produce enough methane gas to generate electricity. I am not sure what you mean by the term. I am very leery of this process and its attempt to make very large-scale animal confinement operations practical. I explain my bias in the book. Gene Logsdon
October 4th, 2010 at 1:41 pm