Vote for a Simpler Life

This week, South Africans head to the polls. On Wednesday 4 November, millions of us will stand in queues outside school halls and community centres, make our little cross, and come home with an inky thumb.

These are local government elections. They decide who runs our municipalities, the people responsible for the taps, the drains and the rubbish trucks. Whoever you choose, it is a vote worth making, and you only get to make it once every five years.

But there is another vote you cast far more often. You cast it at home, several times a day, usually without thinking. No queue, no ink, no ballot paper. Just a handle, a whoosh, and a choice.

Every Flush Is a Vote

Every time we flush, we vote for something. We vote for clean drinking water to carry our waste away. We vote for pipes, pumps and treatment works that run day and night. We vote to send the nutrients our gardens need out of sight, out of mind, and often out to sea.

None of this makes anyone a bad person. It is simply the system most of us were born into. But in a dry country, where rivers struggle and dams empty in a bad summer, it is worth asking whether it is the system we would choose.

A compost toilet is a different kind of vote. It is a vote for:

• Less water. Not a single drop leaves the house.
• Less dependence. No sewer line, no electricity, no worrying about what happens downstream.
• More soil. With a cup of sawdust and a little patience, waste becomes rich compost for trees and gardens.
• A simpler life. Fewer moving parts, fewer bills, fewer things to go wrong.

Simplicity, it turns out, is a quiet kind of freedom. The fewer things we depend on, the lighter we walk on the Earth.

Three New Voters This Week

Here is some happy news from our valley. This week, three more households placed orders for compost toilets. Three more families, quite literally, voting with their bottoms.

We never tire of this moment. Every new toilet means thousands of litres of water saved each year, and a new little pile of compost quietly turning back into soil. It also means three more people who, the next time a friend wrinkles their nose and asks “but doesn’t it smell?”, can smile and say “come and see.”

There is no campaign, no poster on a lamppost, no promise we cannot keep. Just a wooden box, a bag of sawdust, and a better way of doing an ordinary thing. To our three newest voters: welcome. You are in good company.

The Whole World Is Voting

The votes do not stop on Wednesday. Next Monday, 9 November, world leaders and negotiators gather in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31, the United Nations climate conference. For two weeks, nearly every country on Earth will argue, bargain and, we hope, agree on how to look after our shared home.

Those are big votes, made in big halls, by people we will never meet. We cannot sit at their table. But we can sit somewhere else.

The great journeys, the old stories tell us, often begin with the smallest step. Changing the world may start in parliaments and conference centres. But it also starts at home, in the smallest room of the house, with a choice nobody else will ever see.

So this week, make your mark on the ballot paper if you can. And then come home and cast your other vote, for a simpler life.