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Best practices for dealing with human waste in the great outdoors

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76 points rntn | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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amarant ◴[31 Aug 25 20:39 UTC] No.45086858[source]▶
Why is human fecal matter worse for the environment than animal fecal matter?

Something in our diets?

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vbezhenar ◴[31 Aug 25 21:32 UTC] No.45087305[source]▶
I think that the main reason is that human population is unusually huge, humans live in the huge dense groups. So there's just too many fecals and environment struggles to process them.

Just to compare: there's an estimation that there are around 300 000 gorillas in the entire world. There are over 20 000 humans for every gorilla.

Though I think that "environment" is too vague. Planet doesn't care. Some bacteria probably would think that it's pretty nice environment. It's more about human waste making environment bad for humans themselves.

There are just too many of us, so we need artificial ways to produce food, artificial ways to protect from cold and heat. And also artificial ways to safely dispose of our waste.

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1. BobaFloutist ◴[01 Sep 25 16:40 UTC] No.45094254[source]▶
We also tend to congregate in high concentrations, since we have communication (and now social media!) to show all the best places. If everyone was dispersed camping on BLM land, somehow equally distributed regardless of distance from the road, it would probably be less of a problem, but when everyone wants to do ~the same extra special hikes and camp in the sameish spots, the concentration would get pretty high.

Also, animal shit can be bad for the local environment. There's a lovely lake near us, and a nice big tree with a sign on it from the municipal parks department saying "Cormorants are using this tree to nest. Eventually, their droppings with kill the tree."