The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society
The Origin of Feces takes an important subject out of locker-rooms, potty-training manuals, and bio-solids management boardrooms into the fresh air of everyone's lives. With insight and wit, David Waltner-Toews explores what has been too often ignored and makes a compelling argument for a deeper understanding of human and animal waste. Approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives -- evolutionary, ecological, and cultural -- The Origin of Feces shows us how integral excrement is to biodiversity, agriculture, public health, food production and distribution, and global ecosystems. From the primordial ooze to dung beetles, from bug frass, cat scats, and flush toilets to global trade, pandemics, and energy, this is the awesome, troubled, unexpurgated story of feces.
"At the heart (or gut) of The Origin of Feces is the idea that whether we like it or not, excrement is not only connected to every aspect of our lives but is also a crucial ingredient of life itself...Those sorts of ideas, along with a load of surprising facts and a good dose of levity (your inner five-year-old will think the poop jokes are hilarious), make for an enjoyably absorbing and profound read." --Canadian Geographic
"Uses humour and science to discuss its evolutionary, ecological and cultural perspectives. He shines a light on a subject many people would rather not think about, thank you very much." --The Record
"David Waltner-Toews picks up the thread with his impassioned treatise on the long, strange, even transcendent afterlife of poop in The Origin of Feces, a book whose cover is guaranteed to make you few friends at the coffee shop." --Slate.com
"Waltner-Toews takes as humorous approach to the scatological subject as you can; one chapter is titled 'The Other Dark Matter.' But at the heart of the book is a rather weighty message: 'Unless we change how we think about' waste, he writes, 'we are doomed to forever live in it.'" -- The Washington Post
