Why I Use Toilet Paper

On the surface, the answer is trite and obvious, and this may seem like a strange topic, especially for a blog concerned with the "big picture".  The timing may be puzzling, too, unless you follow The Archdruid Report, where his did discuss sewer districts recently.  The point he was making was about forming local associations to deal with local problems.  I and several others made the point that dealing with your own waste is best done at an individual or household level.  The problem, of course, is when your neighbors refuse to properly deal with their own waste and try to pass it along to you.  This, then, becomes a management of the commons issue, which was the post John Michael Greer put up three weeks before.

Back to the issue at hand, there are several arguments against using toilet paper.  From the prepper/survivalist crowd, you hear that toilet paper is an industrial product which will not be available after a major collapse, so you might as well get used to it now.  Environmentalists say that it is very resource intensive for something that just gets used once and disposed of.  Some who have switched to rinsing say they like the results better.  These are good arguments and I agree in principle that at some point I will need to switch.

So why haven't I?  First and foremost, I live in town connected to a sewer system which I am obligated to pay for and to which I can only attach approved plumbing fixtures.  Mullein might make great cowboy toilet paper, but I don't dare flush it.  Health codes do limit my choices too, although composting toilets are an option. Of course, for composting toilets, toilet paper is a good source of the carbon needed to keep odors down. From the collapse standpoint, a weakness of bidets is that they require a supply of fresh water under pressure. And if you use a washcloth, you need to have a means of washing it.  So, you really have to consider your sewage system if you decide to stop using toilet paper.

But there is a much, much larger issue, one that you probably intuitively grasped at the very beginning of this article.  Toilet paper is just one small piece of the puzzle when it comes to preparing for the future.  It is relatively cheap, especially if you can get it on sale, and especially because it can have a very long shelf life.  Not only does it take time to set up a system that does not use toilet paper, it takes time to maintain it.  On the flip side, you can save some money.  What each person has to do is evaluate where to invest his or her time to get the best payback.  For me, for now, toilet paper is not the answer.

We must manage our time and choose our priorities as we make the Long Ascent.

The Ratchet Effects

For those who don't know tools, a ratchet is a device which allows something to move in one direction but not the other.  A ratcheting screwdriver, for example, will only turn the screw in one direction, so you can twist it back and forth without having to let go.

When a technology is introduced that expands the capacity to produce food, population grows to use all that extra capacity.  People don't generally voluntarily reduce population size, so the adoption of that technology becomes irreversible.  (I would like to thank Garrett Hardin for introducing me the ratchet effect.  It really is just an extension of Thomas Malthus's ideas and is central to Jevon's Paradox, that increasing efficiency in using a resource increases the overall use of that resource.  Hardin was specifically concerned with food production, but the ratchet effect applies to many other endeavors.)

Just because people don't choose to do something, however, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  Technologies can be lost and populations reduced without any intention.  When they cut down the last tree on Easter Island, being a lumberjack was obsolete.  The bubonic plague significantly reduced the number of Europeans.

Going back to the tool analogy, a screwdriver which only tightens or only loosens screws isn't very useful.  That's why ratcheting screwdrivers have a switch: flipped one way it tightens, flipped the other it loosens.

There also is an reverse ratchet effect.  Extinction is a 100% phenomenon; a species is not extinct until every male or every female of a species is dead or incapable of reproducing.  So too is it with technology.  As long as someone somewhere in the world knows how to do something, the technology is not completely lost.  With the key technologies that allowed populations to expand, this leads to a ratchet effect on the downside.  Those who still have those technologies will have an advantage over those who don't, and they will grow in proportion to those who don't.  (Please note I am talking about relative percentages, so if one group loses 50% of its population and the other loses 75%, the first has doubled in relative proportion to the second.)

No matter how bad things get in the short term, the reverse ratchet effect will determine where we resume the Long Ascent from.

The Abundant Earths

"Rare earths" are the focus of a number of high tech applications, including high-temperature superconductors and very efficient photovoltaic cells.  They are a collection of 17 elements which, while actually not uncommon in the Earth's crust, rarely form large deposits.  This makes them difficult to extract economically.

Looking at the abundance of elements in the Earth's crust, the top four elements stick out: oxygen (47.4%), silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8.2%), and iron (4.1%).  I propose calling them the "abundant earths".

Iron has been the basis for civilization for over 3 millenia.  Lightweight and corrosion-resistant aluminum has been critical to much of the progress of the twentieth century.  While the semiconductive nature of pure silicon allowed for the development of modern electronics, as components of glass and especially clays, silicon has played a major role in human culture since before the beginning of history.

Why I am concerning myself with these abundant earths?  Because we are not going to run out of them any time soon.  Concentrated deposits that are cheap to extract may become harder to find, but most of us have more of these elements than we could ever possibly use literally under our feet.  The only issues with these abundant earths are the knowledge and the energy to refine them.  If we truly follow the philosophy of "reduce, then reuse, then recycle", making sure our uses of these are expenditures rather than expenses, there is no technical reason they couldn't be available far into the future.

These abundant earths provide a firm footing for the Long Ascent.