The Dish

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As of yesterday, residents of Bath in southwest England have the exciting opportunity to ride a bus powered entirely by their own garbage and excrement:

The 40-seat “Bio-Bus” runs on biomethane gas, generated through the treatment of sewage and food waste. It can travel up to 186 miles on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of around five people to produce. The bus is run by Bath Bus Company and will transport passengers between Bath and Bristol Airport. Engineers believe the bus could provide a sustainable way of fuelling public transport while improving urban air quality.

The gas is generated at Bristol sewage treatment works, run by GENeco, a subsidiary of Wessex Water. It produces fewer emissions than traditional diesel engines and is both renewable and sustainable. This week, the company also became the first in the UK to inject gas generated from human and food waste into the national gas grid network.

Fittingly, the Bio-Bus rolled out on the heels of World Toilet Day. But this is not the only poo-based technology to come out recently. As Becky Ferreira points out, we are in the midst of a veritable golden age of human-waste recycling:

True to its rich history, poop-based energy has now evolved into a multifaceted and diverse set of industries. In 2004, a waste management facility in Renton, Washington received a $22,000,000 gr​ant to build a power plant that could turn sewage into electricity. The same year, a rancher figured out how to power his dairy far​m with cow patties and an engineering professor turned pig crap into​ crude oil.

These examples illustrate that by the 21st century, sophisticated poop-based power had been accepted as a real possibility by the public, business, and academic spheres. It was further launched to new heights in 2011, when the Gates Foundation launched the ReInvent the ​Toilet Challenge in 2011. … And it’s not just human poop, either. Manure-fueled biogas facilities are becoming more common, and one mas​sive new project in Missouri points to the future. The $80 million facility involves covering some 88 hog waste lagoons—poop lagoons, yeah—and capturing waste gas for processing in biogas digesters.

The essayist and critic George Scialabba has produced an absorbing account of his long struggle with severe depression – simply by reproducing selected intake reports and treatment notes from four decades of therapy and medication, adorned only with a very short introduction. It’s a granular, intimate look at what it is like to live with depression, made all the more notable by the place of religious faith in his story. As one psychologist put it, after Scialabba lost his faith as a young man, “the pieces of his life never came back together.” Here’s an excerpt from a 1987 entry from the document:

Mr. Scialabba dates his psychiatric symptoms back to age 17 when he developed incapacitating anxiety when he had any sexual impulse and he would have guilty ruminations that disrupted his usual activities.

He went to a priest who told him he would be responsible to God for the patient’s sexual impulses, and the anxiety episodes stopped. Mr. Scialabba also joined a very devout all-male Catholic organization called Opus Dei, and he became very involved in that organization during his undergraduate years at Harvard. He felt a missionary zeal about converting others and involving them in Opus Dei. Mr. Scialabba describes his commitment as “intense, demanding, and lifelong.” After four years of college he “lost all belief in Catholicism.”

Mr. Scialabba describes his leaving the church and Opus Dei as extremely difficult, and he described an episode of confusion and perhaps of depersonalization in which he didn’t know what he was going to do, but he went into a meeting of Opus Dei and tried to speak about his loss of faith. Instead he became agitated and had to be led from the room. Mr. Scialabba feels he has never recovered from this emotional upset. He describes the time leading up to his departure from Opus Dei as the most intensely meaningful, exciting time in his life, when he felt that all of life and intellectual and philosophical pursuits were open to him.

Damon Linker riffs on Scialabba’s story, thinking through what faith can mean for a person – and what happens when that faith is lost. The despair Scialabba endures seems to complicate our secular-religious divide, drawing attention to those “who are unceasingly restless for God, whose deepest and highest hopes point toward transcendence of the merely mortal world, but who either never manage to acquire faith — or, perhaps even worse, enjoy it for time but then lose it”:

For someone like that, unable to reconcile himself to the disenchantment of his own world, faith — its promise, its withdrawal, its absence — can become a source of the purest misery. Even a curse.

Worse, a curse backed up by a taunt, echoing continually in the former believer’s mind: “You’ve seen the Truth. If you now reject it and turn your back on God, the fault is yours alone, and you will suffer for your sins. Indeed, your depression is merely a finite taste of the agony you will reap in a hellish afterlife of eternal punishment.”

Against these existential-spiritual agonies, modern medicine deploys talk therapy and Prozac. No wonder the results are mixed.

As for the rest of us, secularists seemingly so much more content than George Scialabba with our lack of faith, we are left with a puzzle worth pondering: Was Augustine deluded about the ultimate source and aim of our unceasing, anxious restlessness?

Or are we?