In olden days humans lived in an environment that had a diversity of animals, plants and people.
So when they plucked a mango off a tree, ate the fruit and scattered the seed and skin somewhere else, it was good for the tree : seed dispersal and for some deer or cow that liked eating mango skins. If they ate meat and threw the bone away there was a dog to eat the bone.
With agriculture came the habit of people planting the same kind of plants in one place, tying up the same kind of animals in one place and living in the same group in one place. It was one level of homogenisation.
With industrialisation, came most people migrating to cities, where you can hardly see any animals other than dogs. In this super homogenised culture – people only live with other people – and other people consume and throw away the same kinds of things. So we have competition for the same resources and create huge mounds of rubbish.
If people eat a packet of lays and throw the plastic wrapper somewhere it will Not grow into a tree yielding more potato chips. So the habits that millenia of evolution have taught us don’t work in cities and synthetic cultures.
In olden days when a few people defecated in the open, they were providing manure for plants and trees and making the soil fertile. Even when people moved to villages and agriculture defecating in the fields was a good thing.
Cold societies find it hard to defecate in the open and taught the rest of humanity that culture was to defecate in closed places and have someone clean out your chamber pot.
Then they said that you had to flush the crapper with treated water and clean it with chemical detergents and disinfectants and dump all this sewage water into the rivers. Then they said that you had to treat the sewage water before dumping it in the rivers otherwise.disease would spread.
Of course this system kills of the fish and river life and people down stream have the advantage of drinking and bathing in this polluted river water.
Now, the govt. is advocating ‘a no toilet no bride’ scheme though it knows that it cannot supply water to drink, let alone to flush!
The basic problem is living in homogenoous industrialised cities, which have no natural eco system.
We have a need to live in places less crowded by humans and with more bio-diversity and start avoiding food that is wrapped in plastic. We need to eat food wrapped in organic skin. Like mangoes for example.
We still can’t wrap cellphones in fruit skin, and would still need to recycle/reuse those boxes and things. But we need to use less, make less, sell less.
ie, we need a recession. When people can’t buy, they won’t. Then they won’t turn the planet unfriendly to living things like humans. And when they don’t buy as much, they won’t work as hard. And they will have time to rest and think.
We don’t really need advertising and marketing.
The sort of people who can read this post would die before they can defecate or urinate in the open. And they turn up their noses at people who do.
But from today if you see someone peeing on a tree or in a field, feel some gratitude to them, for not polluting rivers and wasting treated water.
If you see someone littering – think – at least they are not filling up the landfills in villages of India and Ethiopia while keeping their own areas clean and engaging in land polution on a large scale.
And if some village house does not have a toilet – think – at least the daughter-in-law does not have to carry extra water in from the river for flushing as well as drinking and that precious ground water is not being converted to sewage water.
I’m not for using borewell water for flushing. That’s kind of criminal.