Our water is poopy water. It's even worse in the places like Haiti, where there may be no water treatment before people ingest it, but the fact of the matter is that raw sewage makes its way into our waterways, and then into our water intake pipes -- and eventually into our drinking water (in trace amounts, we hope). We're drinking each others' poop. We've got to be careful not so swim in it, too: when my brother and I go kayaking on the Licking River in northern Kentucky, we see several signs along the banks, next to the overflow pipes, warning us that in times of downpours we should stay clear, because we're liable to be in the path of raw sewage pouring out.
Northern Kentucky alone dumps 930 million gallons of raw sewage mixed with storm water into the Ohio watershed every year.
How do I know? Well, for one thing my northern Kentucky water sanitation company tells me so!
Here's a beautiful graphic provided by northern Kentucky's Sanitation District #1, illustrating sewage flowing into our rivers (choose "Wet" for your weather conditions, because it has to be rainy to overflow).
People love their flush toilets however: your poop is whisked away, and you never have to see it or smell it again. Flush toilets are great for flushing away other things, too, of course: used motor oil, dead gerbils, whatever. It's amazing what people will put down their toilet. Hey, once it's down the toilet, it's not their problem anymore!
In Ranquitte, where water is at a premium, I once heard a woman in a group that was visiting campus urge her group members to "flush cockroaches", because if they were left dead on the ground then the ants would come. It simply didn't occur to this woman that wasting 3-5 gallons of water to flush a cockroach that could be given a decent burial outside is a collossal waste -- a squandering of valuable resources.
Furthermore, poop is a valuable commodity: it's a very good fertilizer, once rendered safe. Putting flush toilets in Ranquitte is wrong because it
"Ecologically transformed human excreta is not contaminated with heavy metals and toxic chemicals like sewage sludge. Sewage sludge accumulates these undesirables because domestic sewage is mixed with industrial effluent, pesticide run-off and anything else people care to throw down the drains." (from Closing the loop in wastewater management and sanitation -- an international symposium)
So the obvious question is, what are the alternatives?