I have been writing, mostly for GOOD magazine. For starters, I wrote about a group in Chicago that has saved 1,500 gallons of precious human waste and is turning into compost. It’s not legal, and if you read the Crap Caper, you’ll discover a technique for hiding a barrel of poo in plain sight. The project’s mastermind, Nance Klehm is a renaissance woman. Please go to her website because she’s doing loads of cool stuff.

I had a lofty plan to create a one-page how-to that urbanites could use to compost their business. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed. Making humanure is complicated and I’ve never done it, so I couldn’t draw on experience to make my own guide. Check back with me in two years, which is how long it takes to turn human waste, mixed with sawdust or other carbon-rich material, into rich, loamy soil that is free of human pathogens and other bad things. (Nance can do it in a year, because she’s good at it.)

Done right it is safe. But do be careful. If you do want to try your hand at it, you can get started here:
-A general how to in MAKE magazine.
-The Humanure Handbook, the ultimate guide.
-The Handbook on the sterilizing effects of heat and time.
-How to make a sawdust toilet and a box for it.
-Some dos and don’ts.

While I failed to produce a soil-making onesheet, I did write close to half a dozen other how-to stories for GOOD’s past two issues. In the Slow Down issue, read my impassioned defense of time off and find cooking tips and ways to take a vacation from digital communication. May Wired’s editors forgive me; some days I just don’t want to be a cyborg at all.

For the Neighborhoods issue, I learned how to share my yard with the neighbors without getting into a shouting match and how to be a regular. Lastly, I talked to artist Ted Purves about the Reading Room, a storefront he opened with Susanne Cockrell in Oakland, California, to distribute free local fruit and collect local history about the neighborhood’s origins. The place took on a life of its own and Purves’s advice on how it happened falls somewhere between tips for a small business owner and tips for an art experiment. For more on the project, go here.

Photo by Phil Yip.

In the three weeks it’s been online, my latest story for GOOD magazine, a primer on the best burgeoning bike scenes in North America, has earned a lot of comments. Many readers wrote in other cities as candidates and it would have been nice to include them all. While reporting the story I learned, as at least one commenter noted, that you can go to any city in the U.S. and find a burgeoning bike scene. That’s a wonderful thing.

Everywhere I looked I found community repair shops where people could build and fix bikes at little cost. Every town has formal and informal clubs that organize fun rides and races. And, thanks to rider activism, many cities are planning to expand their networks of bike paths and are considering bike-rental systems like the Velib program in Paris. Or at least they were at the end of last year, before the economy pooped out on us.

I’d guess that the strong showing from these communities is the result of the fairly small number of bikers relative to drivers on the road. When you’re part of just a tiny percentage of all commuters, you feel a sense of camaraderie with your fellow cyclists. At least I always do.

One last thing to say: All that thinking and talking about bikes inspired me to haul one of my old, broken-down bikes out of the basement and into the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, which is full of friendly geniuses who have helped me fix it up from the bottom up.

One of the secrets of journalism is that other people do your work for you. All the raw material that gets crunched up into an article comes from somewhere else—it’s the good characters, dynamite quotes, and unreal stories that make the final piece good. Oh sure, putting sentences together with style is an art, and identifying and drawing out the key details of a subject is not easy, but the writer doesn’t create anything out of nothing. He just lays out the readymade pieces.

That’s how I feel about my latest story in GOOD magazine, about why public school teachers are quitting in such high numbers. The short answer is that their jobs are a pain in the ass and subject to heartbreaking, soul-crushing conditions. But there’s no way any collection of adjectives on my part can illustrate the situation as well as the words of the seven teachers in the article. Examples: One Oakland, CA biology teacher wonders how she’d even keep a pet while holding down her job. And, after budget cuts squeeze out a Ukiah, CA teacher of the year, he doesn’t bother to push back because his paycheck barely supports his family anyways.

Photo of the Berkeley Pit by Don Ankney

Some people have been asking me how I could call a lake so polluted it kills swans a romantic getaway. And am I serious about visiting these ecodisaster sites, or was the article a joke?

Yes and no. The story was a satire on the style of ecotourism destination roundups, but all of these places are totally worth visiting. Each one is like a historical monument that tells us how we came to be the country we are — the miners of Butte, for example, dug that big hole in the ground so we could make copper electrical wires and light our cities.

Each one is also a great place to go and ‘be with nature’. We tend to think of nature as some other place away from the cities and away from civilization, but, as Jenny Price pointed out in her great Believer piece about finding nature in LA, by doing that we ignore the natural world around us and, crucially, our role in shaping it.

So! My prescription for a romantic Superfund encounter: Stand at the edge of the Berkeley Pit, under the ridge of the continental divide and at the edge of the Deer Lodge National Forest, and look for yourself in its red waters. You might just have one of those ‘the world is so big and I’m so small’ moments that we usually associate with mountain peaks and Niagara Falls and that make us reach for our loved ones.

Speaking of Jenny Price, tours of environmentally damaged areas that are cropping up all over the place and she’s right in the thick of it with trips to the LA River and disputed Malibu beaches over at the LA Urban Rangers. Another travel idea is the Futurefarmers’ Silicon Valley Superfund tour, which you could take on your own with the help of their interactive map (follow the Superfund map link). There are also Global Exchange’s Reality Tours and there’s a Toxic Tourism book about using site visits as an environmental advocacy tool. For more self-guided experiences of our impact on the environment, the database at the Center for Land Use Interpretation is a great resource. In August, they’re doing a bus trip to the Puente Hills Landfill in LA, which was the nation’s largest landfill in 2005! Too bad it’s all booked.

There’s more, too. You can find some gathered at the Temporary Travel Office and advice on visiting Chernobyl, plus links to the dirtiest spots in the world at the pollution tourism blog.

Welcome to the Internet, a convenient place to find my new blog and news about the articles I’ve written. I was on NPR talking about my latest story today — a guide to hot ecodisaster travel destinations in the United States, published by GOOD magazine. It’s a roundup of five super fascinating spots like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the country’s largest body of toxic water, and Centralia, Pennsylvania, a ghost town on top of an underground coal fire that’s been burning for over 40 years. Sounds like a joke, but it’s not. They charge admission to the viewing platform at the Pit, and another of the sites — the Salton Sea in southern California — used to attract more visitors than Yosemite!