🕯️ Composting, Consent & the Collapse of Caribbean Bureaucracy
⟡ Filed in Defence of Toilets, Children, and the Right to Not Flush Your Freshwater Down the Drain
IN THE MATTER OF: Ashley v Composting Toilet, Unannounced Visits, and the Pretence of Policy Understanding
⟡ METADATA
Filed: 27 March 2020
Reference Code: SWANK-TCI-COMPOST-ENV-EDU
Court File Name: 2020-03-27_Records_AshleyComplaintLatrineEducationEnvironmentalRights
Summary: A firm yet exquisitely civil letter responding to vague and unscientific objections to composting toilets, written by a homeschooling mother, human development scholar, and ecologically literate citizen who had the audacity to know what she was doing.
I. What Happened
The Department of Social Development in Turks and Caicos Islands took issue with the use of a dry latrine and garden composting system — seemingly unaware that these are legally permissible, environmentally superior, and educationally enriching practices. Their actions, which included unannounced site visits mid-pandemic, were met not with outrage but with a devastatingly polite dismantling of their ignorance.
II. What the Complaint Establishes
This letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern” (because clearly it didn’t concern anyone competent), establishes:
That the complainant’s sanitation system fully complies with the Public and Environmental Health Ordinance
That the use of a composting toilet is not only legal, but preferable to water-wasting flush systems
That educational horticulture is not a safeguarding issue
That it is unethical to walk onto someone’s property during COVID-19 and call it safeguarding
That unread policies, random demands, and bureaucratic visits without notice are not forms of child protection — they are a form of harassment masquerading as intervention
III. Why SWANK Logged It
Because if a compost toilet makes your social workers panic, your department needs a compost toilet of its own — for the recycling of outdated thinking. Because a woman explaining Hugelkultur to an entire government should be listened to, not monitored. Because uninvited visitors with clipboards and vague authority are not guardians of children — they are guardians of broken systems.
IV. Violations
Violation of pandemic social distancing protocols
Failure to issue written notices as required by Ordinance
Misunderstanding of sustainable sanitation under local law
Obstruction of lawful home education
Undermining of maternal environmental leadership
Pretending that mold, bugs, and chlorinated toilets are somehow better than logic
V. SWANK’s Position
We find this letter to be a surgical dissection of bureaucratic ignorance, a loving defense of child-centred ecological education, and a triumph of maternal sovereignty over state confusion. We log it as evidence that clarity, civility, and compost are more effective than meetings, memos, and mildew.
We declare:
There is nothing more dignified than a woman who knows where her waste goes
There is nothing more terrifying to a bureaucrat than an unscheduled education
And there is nothing more sustainable than a latrine that doesn’t flush away the future