Fecalphobia Not Allowed

by Tricia Dower

Colin and I toured what will be “the first code-approved, load bearing, high-occupancy two-story cob home in North America.” Located on eight acres in the Highlands area of greater Victoria, it will be 1550 square feet when done and house three generations of Ann and Gord Baird’s family. You can read more about them and their philosophy here. Although a cob house is sculpted of earth, sand and straw, the one they’re building doesn’t look too Hobbit-like and you can’t huff and puff and blow the place down.

Ann is 40 and Gord, 37. When I was forty I was living the upward mobility life in a four-bedroom, two-story, energy-gobbling house. A few years later, I moved to an even bigger place. Recycling, composting, reusing grey water and cobbing were not in my vocabulary. Sustainability? That meant working hard to keep the money coming in.

Oh, years before, when the kids were little, I had fantasies of raising them in the woods where I’d label the flora (pine, spruce, fern, foxglove, wild garlic, poisonous mushroom) as part of their home schooling and deer would come for the salt lick we set out. To dry-run the dream, I rented a rustic cabin for a long weekend and nearly killed us all lighting the propane stove. In truth, I’m not that into roughing it.

Ann and Gord’s home will be powered by the sun and wind and use a grid inter-tie net metering system with BC Hydro. Solar water heating tubes will provide domestic hot water and hydronic in-floor heat. The home will also feature a rain water catchment system and composting toilets and re-use all of its grey water (from bathing, laundry and dishwashing) for irrigation of fruit trees. Organic vegetable gardens are planned for the future. Chickens roamed free the day we visited. A particularly nervy rooster named Mr. Doo pecked at the decorative buttons at the bottom of my three-quarter length pants. I’m not that into roosters either.

Part of the tour was a presentation about waste water by eco-consultant Angela Evans. There is no such place as “away” when it comes to waste, she told us, yet we treat our oceans and rivers as though their health has little to do with ours. For example, medications make their way into the sea through the human waste our treatment plants (and cruise ships) dump into them. Designed to break down in fat, not water, meds retain their properties and get into the fish we eat. Tuna on steroids? Along with your salmon, halibut and cod, you may be getting somebody’s hypertension pills or worse.

According to Angela, the average human produces only one cup of “poo” (her word) and two cups of urine each day, yet we use five gallons of water to flush it away. She encouraged us to test out Ann and Gord’s outdoor flushless, composting toilet. (They’ll have one or more inside the house). Constructed according to the Joseph Jenkins method described in the Humanure Handbook, this type of toilet uses wood chips, evaporation, the addition of carbon and a process for recycling waste into compost. I can tell you honestly that it didn’t smell. But it calls for more responsibility than most of us are prepared to take on as well as a willingness to deal with what Ann and Gord call “fecalphobia.”

Ironically, although a composting toilet costs only about $150 to construct, Ann and Gord had to spend $30,000 to install a septic field they’ll never use so they could pass the housing inspection. What’s more, because they required a lot of land, they ended up in an area in which you’re dependent on a car. I like our city home from which we can walk to nearly everything we need, but I also admire this family. They may be the only ones with power and operational toilets when the environmental reckoning comes.

Photo credits: Ann and Gord Baird (Deddeda Stemmler); model of cob house (from Ann and Gord’s site); Mr. Doo and part of his harem (me); how the house looked a few weeks ago (Caspar Davis) .