[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A Theology of Compost

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (February 21 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


The Druid order I head hosts an email list for its members and friends,
and the conversations there cover a dizzying range of topics. Some
months ago, as I recall, composting became the subject du jour. In the
course of the discussion, one listmember reminisced about the day she
decided to marry the man who is now her husband. It was Valentine's day,
romantically enough, and he arrived with a very special gift: a new
compost bin. Anyone might have brought flowers or chocolates, she
explained, but the fact that he realized how much a compost bin would
mean to her defined him, in her eyes, as Mr Right.

Nobody on the list laughed, because it made perfect sense to the rest of
us, too. Composting is a curious thing; people get very passionate about
it. In one of its dimensions, of course, it's a simple, practical, and
ecologically elegant way of boosting and maintaining soil fertility.
Still, as I suggested toward the end of last week's Archdruid Report
post, it has other dimensions that go well beyond that comfortably
pragmatic focus. I'd like to explore a few of those in this week's post,
because they offer a useful guide to some of the core elements of the
ecotechnic society that could well be our species' best bet in the
postpetroleum future.

What makes composting such a useful template for an ecotechnic society
is precisely that it highlights the ways such a society would have to
differ from the way things are done in today's industrial civilization.
Some of the crucial points of difference that come to mind are these:

First, where industrial civilization converts resources into waste,
composting converts waste into resources. The core dynamic of today's
industrial economies is a one-way process in which fossil fuels, other
energy sources, mineral deposits, soil, water, air, and human beings,
among many other things, are transformed into waste products - directly,
in the form of pollution, or indirectly, in the form of goods and
services that go into the waste stream after the briefest possible
useful life. This same dynamic drives the emerging crisis of industrial
civilization; no matter how much lipstick you put on this particular
pig, a society that burns through its supply of necessary resources
while heaping up progressively larger volumes of toxic wastes is going
to run into trouble sooner or later. Composting reverses the equation by
turning waste into a resource and meeting crucial needs - and there are
few needs more crucial to a human society than food production - using
wastes that would otherwise be part of the problem.

Second, where industrial civilization works against natural processes,
composting works with them. At the center of contemporary Western
ideology is the vision of progress as the conquest of nature, and this
way of thinking has backed industrial societies into an approach to
natural processes that sees them as obstacles to be overcome - or even
enemies to be crushed. The result is the sort of massive misuse of
resources visible in, say, modern agriculture, where conventional
farming methods convert soil into something approaching a sterile
mineral medium, and farmers then have to buy and apply an
ever-increasing volume of fertilizers and soil additives to make up for
the fertility that natural cycles in healthy soil provide all by
themselves. Composting, by contrast, works because it fosters the
natural processes that break down organic matter into healthy humus.
There's no need to add anything extra, or to go shopping for the lively
mix of bacteria, fungi, and soil fauna that makes the miracle of compost
happen. To borrow a Hollywood slogan, if you build it, they will come.

Third, where industrial civilization requires complex, delicate, and
expensive technologies to function at all, composting - because it
relies on natural processes that have evolved over countless millions of
years - thrives on a much simpler and sturdier technological basis. Once
again, industrial agriculture is the poster child for this comparison.
Set the factory complexes, energy inputs, and resource flows needed to
manufacture NPK fertilizer using conventional methods with the simple
bin and shovel needed to produce compost from kitchen and garden waste,
and the difference is hard to miss. Imagine that your small town or
urban neighborhood had to build and provide energy and raw materials for
one or the other from scratch, using the resources available locally
right now, and the difference becomes even more noticeable.

Fourth, where industrial civilization is inherently centralized, and
thus can only function on a geographic and political scale large enough
to make its infrastructure economically viable, composting is inherently
decentralized and can function on any scale from a backyard to a
continent. Among the many reasons why a small town or an urban
neighborhood would be stark staring nuts to try to build a factory to
produce NPK fertilizer is that the investment demanded by the factory
equipment, energy supply, and raw materials would be far greater than
the return. A backyard fertilizer factory for every home would be even
more absurd, but a backyard compost bin for every home is arguably the
most efficient way to put composting technology to use.

Fifth, where industrial civilization degrades exactly those factors in
its environment that support its existence, composting increases the
factors in its environment that support its existence. In a finite
environment, the more of a nonrenewable resource you extract, the more
energy and raw materials you have to invest in order to extract the
remaining resource, and the more of a persistent pollutant you dump into
the environment, the more energy and raw materials you have to invest in
order to keep the pollutant from interfering with economic activities.
Thus industrial civilization, in the course of its history, has to climb
a steepening slope of its own making, until it finally falls off and
crashes back to earth. By contrast, the closed loop that runs from
composting bin to garden plot to kitchen and back around to composting
bin again becomes more effective, not less, as the cycle turns: rising
nutrient levels and soil biota in the garden plot lead to increased
harvest, and thus to increased input to the compost bin.

Finally, all these factors mean that where industrial civilization is
brittle, composting - and future ecotechnic societies modeled on the
composting process - are resilient. One of the lessons of deep time
opened up by geologists and paleontologists over the last decade or two
is that the Earth is not a safe place. One of the lessons that
historians have been pointing out for centuries, usually in vain, is
that history is not particularly safe, either. It's a common lesson
taught by all these fields of study, and more, that the intricate
arrangements made possible by periods of stability tend to shred like
cobwebs in a gale once stability breaks down and the environment
(natural, social, or both) lurches its way unsteadily to a new
equilibrium. In a time of turbulence, systems that are dependent on
uninterrupted access to concentrated resources, unimpeded maintenance of
intricate technologies, and undisturbed control over geographical areas
of the necessary scale to make them economical face a much higher risk
of collapse than systems that have none of these vulnerabilities.

Now of course many other sustainable technologies embrace one or more of
these same factors. As yet, however, not many of them embrace all of
them. Even technologies as promising as metal recycling - a crucial
ingredient in any ecotechnic society, especially now that current
industrial societies have extracted most of the world's easily
accessible metal ores from within the Earth - have a long way to go
before they become as scalable, self-sustaining, and resilient as
composting. Comparisons of this sort point up the way that such highly
sustainable techniques as composting can be used as touchstones and
sources of inspiration for a much wider range of approaches. Equally, of
course, other technologies that achieve particular types of ecological
harmony composting can't yet manage - and some of those will be explored
here later on - can become a resource for refining the composting
process as well.

Still, as ecotechnic methods go, composting deserves a distinguished
place, and as a source of inspiration and fruitful comparison, its uses
are by no means limited to the purely technical. In Druid circles, at
least, talk about composting almost always seems to blend practicalities
with deeper issues. So far, at least, the romantic dimension of
composting seems to be limited to stories like the one with which I
began this post, but the philosophical dimension is always close by - as
is the theological.

>From the contrast between the monumental absurdity of industrial
society's linear transformation of resource to waste, on the one hand,
and the elegant cycle of resource to resource manifested in the humble
compost bin on the other, it's hard to avoid moving on to challenging
questions about the nature of human existence, the shape of history, the
meaning of the cycles of life and death, and the relationship of
humanity to the source of its existence, however that may be defined.
The practicalities of composting can't be neglected in any sense - nor,
of course, should the romantic dimension, when that shows up! - but the
insights made available by a philosophy and a theology of compost may
yet turn out to be at least as valuable as either.
_____

The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA),
John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/02/theology-of-compost.html#links

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