David Waltner-Toews

An entertaining and enlightening exploration of why waste matters 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.

What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society

The Origin of Feces

An evolutionary, ecological, and cultural exploration of our conflicted relationship with having insects on the dinner plate.

An Exploration Into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects

Eat the Beetles!

Valerie A. Brown

John A. Harris

Any effective response to an uncertain future will require independently thinking individuals working together. Human ideas and actions have led to unprecedented changes in the relationships among humans, and between humans and the Earth. Changes in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the energy we use are evidence of Nature – which has no special interest in sustaining human life – looking out for itself. Even the evolutionary context for humans has altered. Evolutionary pressures from the digital communication revolution have been added to those from natural systems. For humans to meet these challenges requires social re-organisation that is neither simple nor easy. Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World explores workable, field-tested strategies from the frontiers of creating a viable future for humans on Earth. Based on research results from hundreds of social learning workshops with communities worldwide, many of them part of Australian National University’s Local Sustainability Project, authors with diverse interests explore the gap between open-minded individual thinking and closed socially defined knowledges. The multiple dimensions of individual, social and biophysical ways of thinking are combined in ways that allow open-minded individuals to learn from one another.

A Mind of One’s Own

Independent Thinking in an Uncertain World

A brilliantly-written collection of linked short stories presenting the interconnected lives, and world views, of several Mennonite families in Winnipeg and northern Alberta. One Foot in Heaven opens and closes with Prom Koslowski, a character who flees murderous bandits in Russia, gains twin babies and loses their mother on a torturous journey through the mountains into India, and finally makes a life for himself and his children in rural northern Alberta. His children go to Mennonite high school in Winnipeg, and go on to missionary and other work in their adult lives. In various ways, they are both drawn to the South East Asian region of their beginnings. They interact with a host of other characters as they grow - the innocent veterinarian Ab Dueck, the enigmatic Jael Freed, Ab's best friend George, whose own spiritual views differ so oddly despite arising from the same roots. In the fashion of much Mennonite writing, David Waltner-Toews uses both humour and pathos to present his characters juggling matters of the flesh and of the spirit in their quest for the true purpose of their lives and the best way to serve their god.

One Foot in Heaven

The real-life experiences of creatures great and small. The collection looks at everything from sheep farming to herbal remedies and rabies.

Gaia, Goats and Garlic

One Animal Among Many

If you have any interest at all in epidemiology, modern medicine, or the survival of the human race, do read The Chickens Fight Back —Georgia Straight Emerging diseases like mad cow, SARS, and avian flu are — for the moment, at least — far more prevalent in animals than in humans. Still, the knowledge that measles, TB, and smallpox were at one time “emerging” diseases that eventually made a permanent, and quite deadly, jump to humans gives epidemiologists pause. This book examines the various groups of animal diseases, explains what attracts them to the human population — from food to sex to living conditions — and offers suggestions for keeping them at bay. It also points out that diseases must be looked at from an ecological, cultural, and economic point of view as well as from a biological standpoint. Cooking meat till its well done and slathering on insect repellent for a hike in the woods are effective preventative measures, but as the author notes, it’s more important to fundamentally rethink humankind’s place in the world.

David Waltner-Toews

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