Walk through old cemeteries, like this one above in the kinlands of Squirrel-Eating Jon. See whole families that died of cholera or a flu of some kind. Imagine the mothers lying under those headstones who would have loved for plumbing and vaccines and antibiotics. Be happy for these things too, and keep in mind on the other hand how we overdo and overuse it all. Think about the negative effects from the overuse of antibiotics. Children being felled by a peanut. Think about all the negative effects of today’s versions of those people not dying, as well. Utopia ever a fiction.
Who would be just as happy without plumbing? If you think going without plumbing is hard, have you ever tried it? Do you know what hard even is? Which is dirtier, an outhouse backfilled when necessary and moved over another pit or today’s sewage situation? Plumbing becoming important mostly in situations of crowding. Nomadic peoples in crowded villages dealt with the ill-effects of overcrowding by moving camp. In short order nature cleaned things up, benefitted from them having been there.
So much of our modern story we realize, going back even 400 years, is the story of overcrowding. Of moving camp. It’s what drove us to this continent. Time to move camp. And in very short order, we became overcrowded here, too. The game was all but gone before 1900. We got lucky (or so it seemed) with oil. Harnessed oil to make it all keep working, our ever-escalating numbers. The game returned, significantly, cos now we turned oil into food. We all started eating oil. Our numbers exploded like never before. Now that equation is souring too, the oil equation. We have burned through our endowment like locusts burning through an alfalfa field, and it will soon be too expensive to burn what we can still produce.
There is nowhere to move camp to now. What will make it all work next? Nothing, the math suggests. We’re finally, definitively both out of space and out of tricks. Look at covid, how it became a pandemic literally overnight. How? Overcrowding as it’s never been before. The entire world now one colossal, contiguous population.
We will live out our days as The Great Exploiters and then we will go down the drain summarized Farley Mowat.
Those few who remain will witness this planet exploding back to life. Back to normal, back to her glory. And over the centuries we will rise again, embedded-in and subject-to the closest thing to utopia we have known and ever will know. We will know it again, a fortunate few.
There remains as much reason as ever for hope.
What Rough Beast 
Thanks John, we’re still without plumbing after several years at this place, hope that gets us a ticket to the rebirth. The outhouse is no problem we shit in a bucket, put sawdust on it, and empty the bucket in a pile when it’s full. Running water would be a nice luxury. A shower would be nice, but I’d miss my flies.
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Flies are such terrific pets for one because they are so economical. I just wish i could train one to bring me my slippers.
One very cold winter early-on here our plumbing froze solid right to the house foundation. Installing the outhouse was still on the to-do list at the time. So we took to the woods. At first it was an inconvenience, but in a week or so we hardly noticed the ritual anymore, and it has not lodged in our minds as a hard time. When i hear some oldster tell me how hard they had it based solely on the lack of plumbing i conclude they had a pretty smooth go of it. And that they’re pretty soft.
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