humus.io - Nature Calls

Nature calls

the soil that feeds us needs us

(refresh browser) 2026.05.31

Nature invites us all into communion with the facts of life. Our being alive, and our interdependence in The Web of Life, was not by human choice. Our death in The Web of Life is not what we want to believe. Accurate answers about how to best live in harmony with Nature is the knowledge we seek. Observations over time dispel the myths we leave behind.

Three feelings of belief are at the core of human conflict and suffering, dividing us from within and without:

Delusion of Ego: Believing that we are the star of our own movie, with everyone else acting as supporting cast in our personal drama in Nature on Earth's reality stage.
Delusion of Immortality: Believing that we will live forever, even while knowing that everyone dies without knowing what we will actually experience in death.
Delusion of Separation: Feeling that we are separate from Nature and others, rather than interconnected in a single Web of Life spinning on a living planet in the sky.

Death is our final reality check on delusion. Life as we know it is not permanent and individuals are not inherently superior or separate. We know from observation and corroboration that belief in separatism is an aberration. Although unique, every human-other flora/fauna requires the same Five Things, regardless of belief or unbelief. To believe, or not believe, does not define one's true self, nor Nature's capacity to sustain us within habitats we understand and together help maintain, or degrade and destroy in ignorance or delusions that separate us.

Beliefs are evidence of what one does not know, usually while arguing, lying and fighting as though beliefs are facts.

"Belief is the insistence that the truth is what one would `lief' or wish it to be.... Faith ... is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go... faith is the essential virtue of science..." -- Alan Watts

Animals need similar fauna to reproduce their group. Community is our only means of future survival, so we instinctively question, avoid or deny uncomfortable facts that conflict with group beliefs or practices, especially if we fear retaliation, isolation, or embarrassment.

When Nature calls loud enough to be seen and heard above the noise of belief in beliefs, the most crucial facts of life, which are universally the same for everyone, become more readily acknowledged realities that require our attention and response. Our tribe, like locusts or deer over populating on a monocrop energy source, humans too, for lack of predators and biodiversity, can be just as energy blind, free-falling out into nothing, with no chance of recovery from having overshot a nonrenewable energy supply that also destroyed its habitat.

Adaptation does not require anyone to believe in beliefs, it requires aligning our practice significantly enough with reality to avoid over extraction, over consumption and over contamination, which, if not maintained by self-correction, inevitably results in species collapse and disappearance.

Mindfulness in reality offers more relief than belief.

Doing the math, shows clearly, beyond any shadow of doubt, that closing our own personal nutrient cycle is, in reality, by far the single most significantly important, frictionless, and most satisfying way to every day truly give a shit for and about life.

Reality is indeed an experience beyond belief! In the simple daily act of choosing where to do our number one and number two, we can more than double the return on our life-energy deposit, and instantly receive two priceless, life-giving, multigenerational future benefits:

Stop wasting Earth's very limited supply of clean fresh water (1% of all water) by flushing it into an unbelievable volume of wastewater, which requires an insane amount of nonrenewable energy to treat the residential, commercial and industrial toxic effluent, landfilling the contaminated solid waste, in a futile god-forsaken attempt to avoid irreversibly polluting our drinking and fishing waters, depleting the soil life and air/temp quality that we need to breathe, feed and shelter ourselves.
Start creating from our own daily food scraps and living excreta about one half cubic yard per year of completely new humus life energy, which is more than enough organic energy to fertilize and reproduce a surplus of the food, fuel and fiber that we need to continue our life-cycle, while also increasing water retention in the topsoil by 93 gallons (25k gallons per acre/inch), biologically purifying fresh water continuously.

ENERGY BLINDNESS

The blind pursuit of money from finite energy sources did not rise first in the oil fields of Texas. It began falling upon us with the first felling of old growth forests for monocrop agriculture, which dried out the land and eroded the soils, altering rainfall patterns and destroying the biodiversity of life in and above the humus layer of the watershed. Desertification from biodiversity loss is the first and most devastating cause of climate change.

Fossil fuel emissions multiplies the climate change from biodiversity loss, driven by the blind pursuit of fiat money profits. All modern money-states emerged and continue to operate as slave-states that rely for their existence on artificially financing continuous customer/labor growth and consumption in order to extract unfair profit and violent control over resources and people.

Money separates us from the real thing and
keeps us from doing the right thing.

Overshoot and The Great Simplification (Hagens)

Of the estimated one billion acres of original virgin forest-land that covered the US before the Euro-Christian invasion and genocide of the first peoples, over 96% of these virgin forests have been felled. Many of these trees of multiple species were 1000 to 3,000+ years old, with as much life below the soil as above ground. Today less than 4% of America's original old-growth forests exist. The world has lost one-third of the forests in The Web of Life to humans. Incentivized by energy-blind money growth, half of this loss has occurred since 1930. A third of what remains is used for monocrop timber production, which cannot reproduce the biodiversity of original forest ecosystems.

Only 2.5% to 3% of Earth's water is freshwater. Over 96% is ocean saltwater. Of Earth's relatively very small amount of freshwater, roughly 68% is held in glaciers and ice caps, and about 30% is subsurface groundwater, leaving less than 1% in lakes, rivers, and streams. Amazingly, these inland surficial waters support more aquatic species than all of the saltwater oceans combined. Today 50% of inland fresh waters are too polluted for fishing or swimming. Approximately 26 million households (25% +/-) are overdrawing from freshwater aquifers and surficial sources, flushing 4 billion gallons of fresh water each and every day into onsite, anaerobic, toxic gassing, subsurface wastewater; engineered and approved as a solid waste zone that must be moved or removed (to where?) again and again, always pluming unpredictably, sooner or later, through underground fissures, contaminating more fresh water.

In the U.S. 130 - 150 gallons per person per day of fresh water becomes wastewater, excluding thermoelectric use which accounts for 41% to 56% of total US water withdrawals in recent years, making it the dominant source of freshwater consumption, while industrial manufacturing, mining, and oil/gas extraction add hundreds of billions of gallons more to the annual wastewater total. An estimated 27% is not treated to safe levels, whatever safe means, e.g., on January 19, 2026, a major municipal (residential/industrial) sewage crisis erupted when a 60-year-old, 72-inch section of the Potomac Interceptor Sewer Line collapsed, releasing over 243 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the Potomac River. Emergency remediation is ongoing and such incidents are likely to increase as infrastructure becomes more difficult to maintain in the post-growth era of energy descent.

Over half (21 out of 37) of the planet’s largest aquifer systems are overstressed, with 71% of monitored aquifers showing declining water levels. Studies indicate that 36% of analyzed aquifers around the world declined significantly between 2000 and 2022. Groundwater is being withdrawn faster than it can be naturally replenished, accelerating depletion rates, especially in agricultural and densely populated areas, making many regions vulnerable to water shortages, land sinks, saltwater intrusion, agricultural and industrial contamination.

Globally, humans are consuming 100 billion metric tons of Earth resources each year, equal to 16,000 Great Pyramids of Giza. This includes fossil fuels, metals, minerals, and plant-animal derived products for food, fuel and fiber. Seventy-five percent (75%) of this total are non-renewable resources. At current rates of growth, global resource extraction, waste disposal and environmental destruction to support 9+ billion people is projected to surge a staggering 150% by 2060, which is physically impossible given Earth's capacity.

The Midwestern United States has lost 57.6 billion tons of topsoil and 100 million acres are considered significantly or severely degraded, due to farming practices over the past 160 years. The current rate of erosion, even while following the U.S. Department of Agriculture's guidelines, is still 25 times higher than the rate at which topsoil forms, and the degradation of topsoil continues at a rate 10 times faster than it naturally regenerates.

Monocrop farming prioritizes yield over quality. The nutrient density in fruits, vegetables, and crops has declined significantly over the past 50 years due to soil degradation from chemical intensive farming, with some minerals and vitamins dropping by 40% or more.

The Living Planet Report 2024 highlights the average change in observed population sizes of 5,495 vertebrate species shows a decline of 73% between 1970 and 2020, and according to a meta-analysis of 16 studies, insect populations have declined by about 45% in just the last 40 years. Insects pollinate about 75% of global food crops and their loss poses huge threats to ecosystems. A 2025 study found that insect populations are rapidly declining even in relatively undisturbed landscapes. The abundance of flying insects during 15 seasons between 2004 and 2024 on a subalpine meadow in Colorado, a site with 38 years of weather data and minimal direct human impact, showed an average annual decline of 6.6% in insect abundance, amounting to a 72.4% drop over the 20-year period. The decline is associated with rising summer temperatures, supra.

What hath we wrought?

Americans produce 4.9 pounds of municipal solid waste per capita, per day (up from 4.5 lbs in 2017, nearly doubling since1960). half of which is industrial/commercial waste Of the estimated 316 million tons of solid waste in 2018, approximately 53% was buried in 1,266 landfills; 13% was incinerated for energy; 24% was "recycled" and 10% "composted", of which 50%+ in "Biosolids" was applied to land as fertilizer for agriculture and other uses, generating 270 million tons of CO₂e, equal to 5% of U.S. energy-related CO₂ emissions. In 2022 landfills were the third-largest source of U.S. anthropogenic CH₄ emissions, accounting for over 17% of total CH₄ emissions and about 1.9% of total GHG emissions.

There are over 10,000 closed landfills in the U.S. -- Some estimates are much higher due to abandoned sites uncounted. The EPA reports roughly 3,000 active municipal solid waste landfills. While the number of active sites has decreased, they are generally larger in size and capacity. Contamination in the watersheds of abandoned and older landfills was inevitable, and the latest liner and leachate systems only expand and extend our toxic nightmare, as we mire more deeply into energy descent; where, in just 200 years, net energy from fossil-fuels is now declining inversely to the exponential population growth and landfill waste it fueled.

The U.S. exports over 5,600 shipping containers of plastic waste every month to countries with high waste mismanagement, according to 2019/2020 data. In 2018, total plastic waste exports were 1.07 million tons, representing about one-third of all U.S. plastic waste. Only about 5% to 6% of plastic waste is recycled in the United States. A 2025 OECD report confirms that globally less than 10% of plastics are recycled due to the money-profit incentives of slave labor by "invisible" waste-workers in the "informal economy", a euphemism for black market corruption, perpetuated by planned obsolescence, a term watered down to the euphemism, "throwaway design", now coined and promoted under the euphemism, "fast fashion" -- anything to keep the sects and tribes of debt-based money-States believing in money beliefs.

Toxic waste that is not shipped globally from the U.S. and does not directly enter fresh water and ocean dead zones, is trucked to States that are willing to accept money in payoff for environmental contamination of their lands and waters. Top Landfilling States are Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Connecticut has announced that, "We are in a Waste Crisis... [we have] too much trash and not enough room."

Closing our nutrient cycle by creating new living humus for food, fuel and fiber, instead of producing toxic waste, is the single most effective and meaningful act of life we can practice each day to reduce subsurface waste pollution and the depletion of our soils and water supplies, sequester carbon, and significantly improve ecosystems. The alternative is like pretending to believe away the facts in game-play with a Pokémon Sludge Bomb that deals toxic damage but only has a 30% chance of poisoning the target.

Or maybe read some poetry: What hath man wrought?

For amazing filmography and inspiration, check out Humusation

Below are site planning documents of humus.io in operation, with over 200 curated supporting documents from our research on the history and culture of human excreta, organized into five (5) categories, archived on both Google and Proton servers.