New Internationalist

August 2008

Features:

• 4 We need to talk about .. toilets 2008 is the International Year of Sanitation. Or, asks Maggie Black, is it the International Year of Silence and Embarrassment?
• 8 Toilets: the facts
• A lifetime in muck Unbelievably, people still exist whose task in life is shovelling shit, as Mari Marcel hekaekara explains. I E d M
• To sewer or not to sewer David Satterthwaite speaks out in praise of sewers, and Mayling Simpson-Hébert retaliates on behalf of pits.
• sPeCIAL FeATURe DeBATe Technofixes: climate solution or corporate scam? Science is coming up with ever more extraordinary proposals for combating climate change, from laying white plastic over deserts to locking up carbon dioxide in the oceans or shooting it into space. Should we take any of this seriously? Jim Thomas and Paul Fitzgerald have very different takes on this, as their exchange of letters reveals.
• stand up, stand up for toilets Toilet champions are not so rare a breed as you’d think. Here are some distinguished exemplars.
• Dignity and the decent facility Women desperately want toilets – but not as a health aid. Libby Plumb reports. U N C E F / M A G G E B L A C K
• For our convenience Toilets have been around since the days of Elizabeth I. Systems old and new.
• Letters
• Currents
• Big Bad World
• Worldbeaters
• Mixed Media
• View from Montevideo
• Making Waves
• Southern Exposure
• Country Proile: Dominica
• What about us?