For idle minds there’s an answer for every problem, and what to do with gallons of unwanted urine managed to attract NBN’s metal wanderlust for this week. Let’s start with this “problem” that we would like to see a lot more people have. Right now, it’s safe to say few people in this country are looking to discard gallons of urine each week. That could change if we all started using composting toilets. Why would we do that? Because every sizable river in the country has many millions of gallons of partially treated sewage dumped into it every day. In the case of the Mississippi River, it’s hundreds of millions of gallons. During heavy rain, in dozens of older cites across the country, that sewage is dumped completely untreated into those rivers.

_ America is poisoning its coastline in part through these wastewater treatment plants and we’ve made only token efforts to correct the problem. We have thousands of aging wastewater treatment plants across the country in desperate need of costly improvements at a time when public works spending is only figuratively going into the toilet. To put things into perspective, billions of dollars in the President’s Stimulus Plan to fix these plants—a small fraction of what is needed—is viewed by half this country as a waste of money. That brings us back to the problem NBN wants more people to have: discarding a few gallons of urine, and a few pounds of the stuff pictured here, each week. If we all used composting toilets, we’d turn our current river pollution problem into a land-pollution problem. Fortunately,  answers are more readily available for the land-based version of this problem. For example: Bamboo loves urine and, according to this LATimes article, builders are starting to love bamboo. Why not install composting toilets alongside every home and surround them with bamboo which can then be harvested and sold for building products?

_ This bamboo building boom brainstorm is what launched this alliterative exercise of an article and now it sounds like a silly oversimplification of a serious problem. But how much more so than killing our coastal ecosystems by dumping human fertilizer into our rivers, while farmers are buying fertilizer to grow crops? Worse yet, a large percentage of that farm fertilizer runs off the fields and into our rivers creating ever-expanding dead zones emanating from every estuary in our ecosystems. These dead zones are no joke, folks and the fact we’re so willing to sacrifice them for the sake of personal vanity is plain stupid.

NBN loves wetlands as much as life itself, because wetlands are life itself. So, upon hearing of a recent federal study saying wetlands are being lost at an alarming rate we decided to wade into the discussions. First, a study saying wetlands nationwide  are being lost and an "alarming" rate is due for some serious clarification, because not all wetlands are created equal. Next, we notice the headline doesn’t seem to completely jibe with the conclusions of the study it cites. On one hand the study says, “The difference in the national estimates of wetland acreage between 2004 and 2009 was not statistically significant.” On the other hand it says, “There were notable losses that occurred to intertidal estuarine emergent wetlands (salt marsh) and freshwater forested wetlands.”

Back to that 1.5 percent loss of salt marsh. Again, it sounds like nothing. At that rate it will take more than 300 years before we run out of salt marsh. But what NBN found in its sudden marsh die-off study is that salt marshes are dying all over the country for all manner of reasons. On Cape Cod a crab is believed to be the culprit. In New Jersey a grasshopper. Farther south a fungus is thought to be involved and, of course, rising sea levels are taking a toll everywhere. In other words everything is killing the salt marshes and where fresh water wetlands can be replaced by bulldozers and backhoes, salt marshes are much more delicate and complex. Moreover they support and produce many, many times the biomass and biodiversity of fresh water wetlands.