In order for complex life forms to survive on planet Earth, human beings must make significant transformations to how we live – including our basic inputs and outputs. In this webinar, Dr. Sarah Nahar, illuminates the field of excretory justice to help us understand the power dynamics at play around who deals with our crap, who doesn’t, and why. Her analysis helps us consider how we can “do to those downstream as we’d have those upstream do to us” and how the Work That Reconnects might help us close the poop loop!
Resources Shared During the Event
Intro Music: Openings by Shoshana Jedwab
Chapter 5 of Sarah’s dissertation Fertile, Social, Dangerous, Sacred, Gift, and System: Religion, Salt City Harvest Farm, and the Future of Human Shit – Shit as System: Thinking with Joanna Macy
Rich Earth Institute – richearthinstitute.org
Portable peecycler 🙂 https://richearthinstitute.
Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins: https://humanurehandbook.com/
Community composting toilet projects are on the rise around the world! https://cbsa.global/
Sewer Catastrophe Companion https://www.susana.org/
Reusing the Resource by Carol Steinfeld: https://www.goodreads.com/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
P.O.O.P. Peoples Own Organic Power – https://thepoopproject.org/
A Rumi favorite quote: “The Earth’s generosity takes in our COMPOST and grows BEAUTY.”
Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory – State University of New York Press – Joanna Macy’s PhD thesis
“The teachings which I first found most compelling points to the process nature of the self. They reveal the self as a changing, fluid construct created by the dynamics of the mind. Through attention to these dynamics, without recourse to supernatural entities or absolutes, these teachings explain the suffering we create, the traps we fabricate through fear and greed, and the possibility of liberation from them” (Macy, 1991, xi).
https://sanitationlearninghub.
With Microbes: https://www.matteringpress.
Guest Presenter
Dr. Sarah Nahar (she) was trained in the Work That Reconnects via the 2nd People of Color Cohort over the course of the year 2014. She is also a nonviolent action trainer and interspiritual theologian. An emerging expert of Excreta Infrastructure Technologies, her doctoral work centers on ecological regeneration, community cultivation, and discard studies. She teaches in the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. She was a 2019 Rotary Peace Fellow and worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been the Executive Director of Community Peacemaker Teams. She attended Spelman College, and has an MDiv from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in her hometown, where she also initiated climate justice efforts.