Bullshit, Cow Shit and Building Houses

Indian people in rural areas just love shit :-). It’s used in ceremonies, fermented to make biogas for cooking, put it in the garden. It’s dried out and used in the fireplace for cooking and to make the fireplace itself. They plaster their walls with it, and cover the floor with it too, both inside and outside. It’s even mixed with urine and used in some medicines! Yep, people love shit. A few Indians I met were pleased to proclaim that Indian cows make the best shit and urine in the world.

When Vandana Shiva was given the Bullshit Award she was happy to receive it. Actually it’s a great, funny example of the difference between the organic mindset and the mindset of the World Bank guy who gave it to her. He didn’t mean it in a nice way, but unknowingly she took it as a complement! It depends on how much you value shit from cows and bulls :-).

People only do these things with animal dung of course. I’ll be polite and not talk about the human waste disposal issues. Cow dung, as far as I can tell isn’t used for anything irreplaceable but it sure is an omnipresent material in rural India. It turns out it’s the same in rural Nepal.

Today we spent part of our day flinging shit at the walls and smearing it around :-). We plastered the outside of a building with a mix of cow dung, rice husks and silt/clay. This is the normal plastering material for houses in rural Nepal, as in India. In India the material is being replaced by cement and some sort of low quality paint that has to be frequently re-applied. The cow dung looks much better, and the well maintained houses in this area of Nepal look quite smart with their smooth beige walls and thick strip of red paint around the bottom.

The inside of the walls in this area are often made of mud and stone, two age-old and time tested materials for building houses out of. In my travels I’ve seen a mixture of composition ranging from almost entirely stacked stone in Almora to pure mud in Bengal.




Rural Canadians are not such lovers of cow dung and I haven’t ever seen it used in this way there. I have seen a couple of people using a mud and chopped straw mix though. People call this cob, and if made and used correctly it can be quite a useful building material.

I think my favorite houses are made entirely of bamboo, thatch and coconut husk. It is possible to make the entire house (in a warm climate) out of these two materials! This is done in parts of Laos. The walls are woven bamboo strips, the floor split bamboo, and the roof is thatch although I suppose it could be bamboo shingles. Bamboo can be used to make the gutters, and used as piping and electrical conduit also. Rope made from coconut husk is used to bind it all together. This rope is soaked in water then tied. It shrinks when dry, making a solid joint. These houses are so simple they can be made by children, as shown in the photo below :-).



Good Night and Good Luck my friends!