Humanure Handbook 2nd Edition

The Humanure Handbook has been recognized at the Three Rivers Environmental Awards, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, Benjamin Franklin Awards, Independent Publisher Outstanding Book of the Year Awards, and has repeatedly been a category bestseller on Amazon.com.

Humanure: waste or resource? Joseph Jenkins boldly steps where no author has gone before. Considered by many a "moving" book, The Humanure Handbook will surprise you with its timely relevance, delight you with its humor, and impress you with its thorough research. Brilliantly simple, profoundly mundane, this is one book you will never forget. Full of "eye-candy" illustrations, practical information, history, philosophy, and science, it addresses an issue relevant to each and every human being on Planet Earth.

The Human Nutrient Cycle is an endless natural cycle. In order to keep the cycle intact, food for humans must be grown on soil that is enriched by the continuous addition of organic materials recycled by humans, such as humanure, food scraps, and agricultural residues. By respecting this cycle of nature, humans can maintain the fertility of their agricultural soils indefinitely, instead of depleting them of nutrients, as is common today.

Food-producing soils must be left more fertile after each harvest due to the ever-increasing human population and the need to produce more food with each passing year.

Written in laypeople's terms by a humanure composting practitioner with twenty years' experience, this book is for anyone interested in a unique topic that is fundamentally related to every human being on planet Earth. The second edition of The Humanure Handbook is completely revised, expanded, and updated, but retains that element of improbable humor that made this book an underground classic. This fascinating, one-of-a-kind book tells you how to safely recycle human manure, and includes color photographs of humanure-compost gardens, listings for international commercial compost toilet sources and manufacturers, and a list of backyard composting bin and compost thermometer retailers. This new edition also contains a chapter on alternative graywater systems; illustrated, step-by-step instructions for building a simple, low-cost, composting toilet for household, camp, or emergency use; current information about community-level composting; and the latest material on composting microbiology.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Joseph Jenkins lives with his wife, Jeanine, and several children, in western Pennsylvania on their 17 acre wooded homesite. He is an organic gardener, maintains an orchard, berries, a flock of chickens and some ducks. He began self-publishing books in 1995. Since then, he has produced three titles: The Humanure Handbook - A Guide to Composting Human Manure (first edition, 1995 and second edition 1999); The Slate Roof Bible - Everything You Wanted to Know About Slate Roofs Including How to Keep Them Alive for Centuries (1997); and Balance Point - Searching for a Spiritual Missing Link (2000).