Anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her powerful book Purity and Danger, points out that "our idea of dirt is compounded of two things, care for personal hygiene and respect for conventions." There are some lingering taboos at the very core of our relationship to dirt and waste (especially our poop). Dirt reflects on the relation of order to disorder, purity to impurity, form to formlessness, and death itself. Dirt represents danger to our total well-being. The "rites of cleanliness" are powerful practices in the West. The need for "cleansing" permeates Christianity's dogma.

So, "disorder" (think disorderly conduct) is concerned with social structure and control; impurity with morality and holiness; formlessness with clarity of pattern and aesthetics; and death with decay: the fact that we're such finite beings, dying moment by moment (the deepest fear of all fears). We intend to reverse some of these perceptions with a line of reason that says "we need wilderness to have any chance of preserving the human family. We cannot expect "nature" to do the work of managing our poop. The time is now to accept the responsibility for our own poop management when in the wild places."

Much of man's waste, for example, is a direct byproduct of the creation of [so-called] order - the unwanted bits of whatever it came from - body, food, wrappings, manufacturing, etc. Our entire argument is that trash and human poop and toilet paper and tampons and condoms have no place in wilderness. They clearly produce disorder there and all our senses teach us that truth.

So the move toward a new convention regarding wilderness behavior or ethics begins to take on steam. We agree with Freud on this, "But whereas cleanliness is not to be expected in nature, order, on the contrary, has been imitated from her." So we establish a convention about how and where to bury our poop. A convention is significantly more powerful than an ethic, which too often requires policing. A convention operates without policing, which the wild places demand. We recall that the Israelites were told to bury their poop away from camp, away from the population, in order to keep the camp holy, and to avoid offending God by the sight or evidence of pooping as he walked through the camp at night (Deut. 23:12-14). God was the policeman who forced the ethical behavior. No such policeman exists in wildernesses.

And so in the West when we flush our poop down into a sewage system or a septic tank, we like the image that it's going somewhere away from where we and other's live. Here we see a connection between the taboos established over millennia regarding human poop and the conventions of so-called "civilized" man. We must go beyond all fear-inspiring methods and connect the new convention with the wilderness user's own self-interest.