Guest Post: A Donation from the Heart, and the Bladder

By: | April 7, 2021
Wald carrying some of her donated urine.

When I was a few weeks pregnant, I met a new friend, who is an expert in sanitation for low-resource contexts, for coffee in The Hague, where I live. I hadn’t told her about my status, but she must have gotten some whiff of a pheromone or something because she mentioned, off-handedly, that a program in the Netherlands collects pregnant people’s urine.

I hurried home to sign up. Amazingly, the program, today called Moeders voor Moeders (Mothers for Mothers), has been operating since 1931. The hormone they’re after is human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which peaks in early pregnancy. It’s most famous for making the second line on pregnancy tests, but it can also stimulate ovulation as part of a regimen of fertility drugs.

I had struggled to get and stay pregnant, a painful experience. If my urine could help another person, this seemed like something worth participating in, I thought. Plus, I had been covering sanitation as a journalist, and was thinking of writing a book, which later became Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet, just released.

What I didn’t anticipate was how hoarding my urine would transform my relationship to it.

Many ancient cultures kept and used urine. The ancient Roman Columella suggested watering pomegranate trees with the nutrient-rich liquid. In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes, “I’m told that our ancestors would put the squash seeds in a deerskin bag with a little water or urine a week before planting to try to hurry them along.”

Some cultures used urine in tanning, laundering, felting, dyeing, and even making gunpowder, mouthwash and toothpaste. One intriguing detail that many people (including me) remember from Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series is how Ice Age people could have used aged urine, which has a high pH, to make white leather. Indeed, urine was once so valuable that the Roman Emperor Vaspasian famously levied a tax on public urinals, from which comes the term pecunia non olet, “money doesn’t stink.” 

Today, however, we treat urine as just another gross squirt of bodily waste–and that’s more or less how I thought of it, too. Our toilets dilute it with water, mix it with poop and toilet paper, and shoot it into our sewers, where it meets more water, cooking oils, cleaning supplies, industrial chemicals, and other substances. Not only does this make it harder to recover the useful elements of urine, but it also potentially turns them into pollution. Nitrogen and phosphorus, if not removed during sewage treatment, can contribute to environmental problems such as dead zones in coastal areas.

A few bold innovators are trying to save urine from that fate. The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, collects it from nearly two hundred participants, pasteurizes it, and then offers it to local farmers to fertilize hay. It also publishes do-it-yourself instructions for eager gardeners. The program works with scientists to study the fertilizer’s efficacy and safety (pharmaceutical residues that people excrete in urine are a particular concern) and with regulators to develop new policies and codes. As I learned while researching my book, scientists are also developing ways to use urine to make bricks, hand sanitizer, and electricity.

Some of the Brattleboro donors use home-made urinals: Tricked-out 5-gallon jugs plugged with ping-pong balls. For Mothers for Mothers, I lovingly peed into a beige pitcher and then poured the urine into a blue jug, passing it to a driver in an unmarked van every Wednesday for several weeks. But new products will make urine collection less hands-on, such as a toilet design that uses the “teapot effect” to dribble urine down the inside of the bowl to a separate exit.

I have come to have mixed feelings about the program to which I gave my urine. Mothers for Mothers asks women to donate altruistically, as part of an “intergenerational Dutch success story, tying the previous donations of older women together with the current donations of younger, pregnant women,” as cultural analyst Charlotte Kroløkke of the University of Southern Denmark puts it in her book Global Fluids: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value. But, as she also points out, this is in many ways just a nice bit of marketing: The urine goes to a pharmaceutical company, which makes money when women buy the drugs, for which there are synthetic alternatives. When I spoke to someone who had used the urine-derived drug, she didn’t know where it had come from, or the free work that pregnant people like me had done on her behalf.

Still, I would gladly donate my urine again, if somebody would only come for it. My hCG has long faded, but those weeks of peeing and pouring and hoarding made their mark, transforming my mental image of my urine from icky waste into something almost precious, golden.

Chelsea Wald has a bachelor’s in astronomy from Columbia University and a master’s in journalism from Indiana University, and has spent more than fifteen years writing about science and the environment. On April 6, she released a book about the future of the toilet, called Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet (Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster). You can find her at chelseawald.com, on Twitter @chelseawald, on Instagram @chelsea.wald, and on Facebook @chelseawaldwriter. Chelsea invites you to participate in her release celebration, called “It’s My (Online, Asynchronous, Book Launch) Potty!” on April 10-11, mostly on Instagram @chelsea.wald. She will (try to) make synthetic feces in her kitchen, host a toilet paper fashion show and a toilet show-and-tell, and answer questions about the book.

In Praise of Minor Bulbs

By: | April 5, 2021

The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la. I love them faintingly, I gaze at them, hands folded reverently, such dears they are, oh my darlings, my minor bulbs!

Minor bulbs are not the same as spring ephemerals — really their name — like spring beauties, dog-tooth violets, may apples, shooting stars, and Dutchman’s breeches, their names alone are a song. They grow in woods and each one is so delicate, so oh-please-stay-awhile that they break your heart when in the next minute they’re gone. I’ve tried planting these and it never works.

Neighbors and passers-by say how beautiful are the daffodils-narcissi-hyacinths, which I also love though more prosaically. Thank you, I say, but come look at my minor bulbs. Oh nice, say the neighbors and passers-by, and continue having transports over the major bulbs. But look at this one, I say, it’s called Chionodoxa, chion meaning glory and doxa meaning glory, snow glory, glory of the snow, see how the white centers fade into the blue petals, so interesting! The fact is, minor bulbs seem to interest no one but me.

For years I ignored them in the catalogs — minor, unworthy of my attention, and dirt cheap. The catalogs say to plant them in masses and drifts so you notice them. I don’t know about that: I’m kind of a minor bulb myself but I wouldn’t be better drifting all over the landscape.

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An Invisible Wrong

By: | April 2, 2021

There’s something wrong with men. I am one, I feel it. Something is broken. The last two mass shootings — two massage spas and a grocery store — might be old news by the time you read this, but it feels like an open wound.

How are you doing? 

We say we’re becoming numb and I don’t believe it. I have never hurt so much in my life. No matter how loud you turn up the radio or how many devices you bury your head in, it still hurts. 

Does it need to be said that the shooters were male? They almost always are. If we’ve got one thing going for us, it’s consistency. I don’t want to determine here on this page why men indiscriminately kill, but I want to recognize that this is a thing being done by men. Women have their own brand of rage I’ve found, but that is not my business to solve. It does not leave so many bodies on the ground. Women are murderers, there’s no doubt. I taught a writing workshop several years ago in a women’s prison in Anchorage, Alaska, and sat in a circle of women, some of whom had killed. Good writers, I have to say, enthusiastic about the craft. They had their demons, and maybe they weren’t so different from any of ours, but I’m not talking about theirs. I imagine they had reason to kill. I didn’t ask. 

I didn’t grow up fighting, but I grew up male. My dad was a brawler. We were playing pool and a guy stacked quarters on our table. My dad didn’t like his look and swiped his coins to the floor, saying, “Go play with yourself.” As in, don’t interrupt me and my son, but in a less polite way. I talked the guy down. I’m better at that than fighting, maybe it’s growing up with a single mother.

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Voice Mails from the Great Beyond

By: | March 29, 2021

On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.

I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.

I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.

I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone. 

When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter. 

Photo: Pxhere

Redux: A Photo By Any Other Name

By: | March 26, 2021

This post originally appeared in 2012, before advances in artificial intelligence brought the possibility of deep fakes and other ways for storytelling artifacts to lie. Here I looked at the ways in which information can be false, and how we typically only look or check for certain kinds of veracity.

Ever since reading the comment thread for Ginny’s Lie to Me piece, I have been searching myself for the truth behind the convenient story that I am vehemently opposed to, and vigilantly on guard against, any kind of untruth in journalism.

Festivities have begun in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Shackleton/Scott expeditions to the South Pole. I know someone who’s going to be re-enacting the Shackleton expedition, tall ship and all, so I headed down to the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace to see the exhibit of photography from those trips.

Among many artfully arranged photos of penguins and icebergs, loving portraits of sled dogs and triumphant group shots of the team, there hung two photos that were different.

Elephant Island was the site of a gruelling test of survival, with fourteen men sleeping under two overturned boats, waiting for rescue by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Among them was photographer Frank Hurley.

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Relearning

By: | March 24, 2021
A screenshot of a Duolingo screen to translate the sentence "There are 1,500 cat photos on my cell phone"

The fall of 5th grade, my parents gave me two options: I could either enroll in Chinese school, or join the youth orchestra. I loved playing cello so I opted for the latter, but as an adult, I wonder if I made the right choice. While I have some basic Chinese conversational skills, I didn’t learn to read or write until college, where I spent three years in a class full of kids like me who grew up speaking the language but had limited reading and writing skills. At one point, I learned up to 2,000 characters, but after years without practice, I’m illiterate again.

I’ve had no shortage of excuses for not practicing my Chinese. First, it was school. Then I got into running and climbing and I told myself I had time for other activities. Finally, over the pandemic, those excuses mostly fell away, and I’ve realized my resistance to learn was rooted in shame, embarrassment, and fear of failure. Am I a “bad” Chinese American for not learning this earlier? What does it say about me that I can’t even write to my grandpa in his native language?

I resolved to get over it, and accept that I’d be starting from almost scratch. I checked out children’s books from the local library: one was about a little boy who found a spider, and the other, about a class who discovered their teacher is also a rapper. I could just barely make out the contours of the story without help from the English translation. My mother was delighted to hear that I’m trying to learn again, and mailed me a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales — the same volume she’d recently sent to my cousin’s toddler.

I’ve also been obsessively completing Duolingo lessons. Today makes the 117th day of my streak and I am already worrying about what will happen to my stats once the weather is warm enough to go backpacking, where I’ll be without wifi. I notice the reading has come easier; while practicing writing characters, certain words or strokes came back to me easily, like a long-lost friend.

Sometimes, the app feeds me a sentence to translate that stirs up some unexpected emotion. In a lesson on travel, there was the sentence, “Be careful, it’s not safe there at night,” and I felt like my mom was in the room with me. And “I will try harder to learn Chinese” made me feel like an irritable teen again. I AM trying, Duolingo! Look at my streak!

But then there are the sentences that make me wonder: Duolingo, are you ok? In what world are these the sentences I’ll need to learn? If I were a creative writing instructor, some of these might make interesting prompts or character details. Here are some of my favorites:

  • He is handsome, but he is not a good person.
  • How can we be better than other people?
  • There are 1,500 cat photos on my cell phone.
  • There are too many people here.
  • He had three bottles of Baijiu, and now he is sleeping.
  • None of us like him, so luckily, he didn’t come.
  • I have a smart little bird. It likes to dance.

I’ll leave you with the question that almost sent me into an existential tailspin the other day:

Are you happy?

Quick, Call This Number Right Now

By: | March 22, 2021

Have you ever dialed a phone number to get the weather forecast?

This is one of those questions and answers that dates you, like describing your favorite TV show in adolescence, or the brand of shoes that were extra cool in 10th grade. 

Dialing a number: There’s the first anachronism in that example. I don’t remember the last time I dialed a rotary phone, like literally turned a dial seven times to reach seven different numbers in sequence. But I am both old enough to have done this in my life, and old enough to have been sufficiently old at the time to form a memory of having done so. 

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