Best practices for dealing with human waste in the great outdoors

We are apex predators, and our shit contains the condensed toxins from all of the lower rungs on the food chain. The other extreme would be an animal like a cow, which shits basically smellier grass.

That's basically it. A human being that's only eaten plants has much less devastating poops.

I don't think this last conclusion is true. It's really about harmful bacteria, not "toxins". Even vegetarians have a complex digestive system that can harbour pathogens. Perhaps their faeces are safer to use as manure than those from a meat-eating human, but much closer to that than to a cow.

It is far from a certain that we are apex predators since we can survive on a largely herbivore diet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_predator#Human_trophic_le...

And "our shit contains the condensed toxins from all of the lower rungs on the food chain." lacks any credibility unless you can provide a link I have never seen.

I have heard that it's unusually nutrient rich - maybe not toxins, but human shit definitely causes algal blooms.

> And "our shit contains the condensed toxins from all of the lower rungs on the food chain." lacks any credibility unless you can provide a link I have never seen.

I’m not who you’re asking, but I can only assume that they refer to the observed phenomenon of bioaccumulation, which was factor in the unexpected harms of pesticides such as DDT on bird populations.

That said, I don’t know of any risks to wildlife or the environment from bioaccumulated toxins solely due to human waste. If I am reaching and wildly guessing, I suppose folks who eat a lot of fish might pass more mercury in their waste? From what I understood, most toxins like that are processed by the liver and don’t get flushed out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation

And human urine

Wouldn't be the first time humans tried to use human manure as fertilizer. It always ended quite shitty (for humans).

Dumping ANY manure into a body of water causes algal blooms. Fecal matter concentrates nutrients. This has happened with modern megafarms, when flooding overflows their manure pits.