You’re going camping!  You’ve made up your mind to camp out for a few days - off the beaten path - away from the campground sites with their neat spaces and the fire pit and the place where you park your SUV or trailer or motor home.  You’re going to hike back into the woods - somewhere - and set up a campsite for a few days.  You and your girlfriend/boyfriend.  I mean the idea is to get away from people - cars, traffic, noises, the hustle and bustle, the competition, the striving, the gym, the joints and lousy restaurants - but not to be totally alone.

So you and your buddy start making plans.  “What gear should we take?” he or she asks.  And so you start talking about what you really need to pack.  “Sleeping bags, a tent, a stove, matches, bug stuff, mats, food, water...”   And so it goes.  

Not a single thought about how to deal with YOUR poop.  Not even a notion of such a subject.  It’s simply implied that “oh we’ll just poop and leave it on the ground.  Nature will deal with it.”  Not a single inkling of the potential harm from such behavior.  Well, that's about to change.

We here at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet are introducing the Packit Toilet kit and it should be the FIRST thing you pack.  Your FIRST planning thought should be “how do we handle our poop and toilet paper?”  And if you really care about the wild places - if you care about the creatures that live there - you should also make certain when you pee you cover it over with dirt.  Animals lick it and that can cause all sorts of problems for them.

Simply put, there must be a change in the level of consciousness of people who enter wilderness areas or deep backcountry areas - about what they’re going to do with their own poop.  For most of a century we’ve polluted our rivers and streams.  After all, we want the products from the companies that pollute our rivers and streams.  We want what others have.  I mean we’re consumers, right?  Civilization is about production, about consumption, about competition, about throwing a lot of stuff away, including production wastes.  And where do we throw all this crap? 

We throw it into the rivers and streams, or we bury it in land fills, or we barge it out and dump it into the ocean, or we simply throw it over the side of a cliff (everywhere we go in the backcountry we find mattresses, broken furniture, garbage, old leaking gasoline cans, and every form of junk imaginable - lying at the bottom of a cliff).  Let someone else deal with it - is too often the thinking (if we can call it 'thinking').  

But that sort of thinking has been making a lot of people sick.  So finally after many years of wrangling with politicians and corporations, some saner minds prevailed and we got some environmental laws passed that began the process - which may take another hundred years or so - of cleaning up our rivers and streams (we haven’t really gotten around to dealing with what’s going on in the oceans).  We even got a Wilderness Act passed in 1964, which attempts to protect them with laws against being cut down.  And there are congress persons who want to add to the wilderness areas (fighting with those who want to cut them down every step of the way).  The result is an improvement in the overall condition of many rivers and streams.  And we have a few wilderness areas to go to - to try and mend our psyches so we can go back and compete and strive some more.

But now that more and more people are using these remaining wild places - you know to get away from all the crap [strewn about] out here in our ‘civilized’ world - people have got to come to terms with the fact that they can no longer just poop on the ground and leave it when using wilderness and backcountry.  Either the PACKIT TOILET KIT, or something like it, must be part of, ideally the FIRST part, of anyone’s plan to visit and stay in the wild places.  The wild things that live there need your help.  The wild things that live there need your cooperation.  Simple truths like these are the hardest to sell.  But believe me, we’re determined to sell them.