The Origin of Feces
What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society
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Narrated by:
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Kevin Scollin
About this listen
An entertaining and enlightening exploration of why waste matters, this cultural history explores an often ignored subject matter and makes a compelling argument for a deeper understanding of human and animal waste. Approaching the subject from a variety of perspectives - evolutionary, ecological, and cultural - this examination shows how integral excrement is to biodiversity, agriculture, public health, food production and distribution, and global ecosystems. From primordial ooze, dung beetles, bug frass, cat scats, and flush toilets to global trade, pandemics, and energy, this is the awesome, troubled, uncensored story of feces.
©2013 David Waltner-Toews (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Pandemic
- Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
- By: Sonia Shah
- Narrated by: Sonia Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera - one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens - and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.
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You will probably enjoy "Spillover" more
- By serine on 03-01-16
By: Sonia Shah
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Farmageddon
- The True Cost of Cheap Meat
- By: Philip Lymbery, Isabel Oakeshott
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Farm animals have been disappearing from our fields as the production of food has become a global industry. We no longer know for certain what is entering the food chain and what we are eating - as the UK horsemeat scandal demonstrated. We are reaching a tipping point as the farming revolution threatens our countryside, health, and the quality of our food wherever we live in the world.
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Excellent insight of industrial farming
- By Grazyna on 04-19-14
By: Philip Lymbery, and others
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The Nature of Nature
- Why We Need the Wild
- By: Enric Sala
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.
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Amazing
- By Lars Pardo on 11-21-24
By: Enric Sala
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The Upcycle
- Beyond Sustainability - Designing for Abundance
- By: William McDonough, Michael Braungart
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, the most consequential ecological manifesto of our time. Now, drawing on the lessons gained from 10 years of putting the cradle-to-cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don't just reuse resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve them as we use them.
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A "must read" for the environmental movement.
- By Love owls on 07-09-13
By: William McDonough, and others
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The Triumph of Seeds
- How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History
- By: Thor Hanson
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.
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Delightfully simplistic!
- By Adrian on 03-30-16
By: Thor Hanson
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Mycophilia
- Revelations From the Weird World of Mushrooms
- By: Eugenia Bone
- Narrated by: Aimee Jolson
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In Mycophilia, accomplished food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone examines the role of fungi as exotic delicacy, curative, poison, and hallucinogen, and ultimately discovers that a greater understanding of fungi is key to facing many challenges of the 21st century.
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Absolutely awful, insufferable, racist author
- By Rs 🦇 on 11-25-19
By: Eugenia Bone
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Fruitless Fall
- The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis
- By: Rowan Jacobsen
- Narrated by: Rowell Gormon
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Many people will remember that Rachel Carson predicted a silent spring, but she also warned of a fruitless fall, a time with no pollination and no fruit. The fruitless fall nearly became a reality when, in 2007, beekeepers watched 30 billion bees mysteriously die. And they continue to disappear. The remaining pollinators, essential to the cultivation of a third of American crops, are now trucked across the country and flown around the world, pushing them ever closer to collapse.
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Compulsory Reading - Share with Everyone!
- By Charles Koenen on 04-12-20
By: Rowan Jacobsen
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Water in Plain Sight
- Hope for a Thirsty World
- By: Judith D. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
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Crucial solutions
- By Shane Emanuelle on 07-25-19
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Collapse
- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 27 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.
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Jared Diamond Downs You in Explanation
- By Rob on 07-20-18
By: Jared Diamond
What listeners say about The Origin of Feces
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- danny
- 03-31-16
fucking rad book
If you take an interest in biology, the natural world and science in general and you have a half way decent sense of humor, you MUST read.
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- serine
- 01-23-16
too much poop humor
Whenever I watched Monty Python and South Park I loved the philosophical humor but always hated, what seemed to me, overly polished fart jokes. Reading this book felt in many ways the same. I love waste. I love the waste different types of cells produce, how that "waste" becomes the building blocks for complex life and builds the yummy food I eat. I love thinking about ecosystems, how living things connect. The author suggested taking care of our waste was just as important as the process of voting. I agree. He did a great job of discussing the various problems that can arise if we don't handle waste properly, what has been done in the past, what is being done now, what would be idea uses of waste, etc. All of that discussion was great. But, I really didn't love his waste humor. The word shit appears in this book so often, I now dislike the word. Something that was not true prior to reading. If there exists a joke about shit, it's in this book. I didn't need that in order to remain interested in the role of waste in ecology.
That said, I have to believe that writing a book about waste is a difficult task. I had no idea how often I read while I ate until I was reading about shit. I had to switch to other books fairly often, just so I didn't have feces on my mind. Since we have by nature an aversion to feces, I do not know how I would go about helping my reader overcome that. Considering the foregoing, I had a really hard time settling on a rating for this book. If the shit humor appeared less often, I would definitely rate it higher.
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