Buxqi > writes

>Oh now you mention it I do remember reading about a
>self-sufficient, organic vegan community. They use human
>compost and I assume it works effectively enough for them.
>I'm not sure I'd want to eat their veggies though....

Veganism hasn't been about long enough to know how sustainable that is.
It took perhaps 1000 years to deplete the english downland and a few
hundred to deplete the breklands. Certainly if you do recycle all your
nutrients you can keep going for a very long time. What you can't do is
sell anything off (food, clothing, wood etc).

>> althrough even here so of the food you eat actually goes to make
>> 'more you'
>
>That raises a question: Is it not the same with animal compost.
>We eat the animals so their corpses don't get receycled. How
>are all the nutrients returned to the soil?

They mostly go out to sea (potassium) or get buried in landfill/burned
(phosphorus). For about 20 years we used large amounts of sewage sludge
here and that did provide significant nitrogen and phosphorus.

Personally I think it should be illegal NOT to spread ALL sewage sludge
onto land.

>> and whilst we could technically deal with that by shredding and
>> recycling corpses as well I don't advocate that.
>
>Mind you, our corpses are gradually recycled when we are
>buried in the ground, are they not? Admittedly we get
>buried in graveyards rather than farms but I suppose it
>doesn't have to be that way....

No. One could have human compost, with rather tight phytosanitary
controls I suspect.
Burning is bad because you lose many volatile elements, particularly
phosphorus.

>> Because we import food, if all human sewage was returned to the land, then
>> the land would probably gain fertility because we would import it with the
>> food
>
>Although that certainly wouldn't solve the issue globally...

Depends. There are vast deposits of potassium around the world, but high
grade phosphorus is a little limiting in the very long term (a few
hundred years). Of course the sea contains essentially unlimited
quantities of nearly every element.

--
Oz
This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious.