A compost anniversary

I realized, belatedly, that December marks one year since I started volunteering at a small, somewhat indistinguishable-from-the-street garden a few blocks from my house— and inadvertently changed my entire life.

One year! It seems surreal.

I got into compost by such a chance mixture of timing, nihilism, and recent skill accrual. In December of 2021, I was finishing out a few years of distributed schooling and apprenticeship in soil science, I had just quit a job that I absolutely hated, and I was existentially aching from the tenor of “the discourse” amongst my peers (particularly on social media). Things had never felt so anxious and noisy; I had never had more information available to me that I knew less what to do with. Compost was just a footnote in the deafening onslaught. So when I got a call from my neighbor, inquiring if I would help the local church restart their compost program (“I think you know about that stuff, right?” she said), I was ready to take it—but had no expectations. I was too depressed for expectations. I thought I would spend an hour explaining to them how compost worked, and that would be that.

But I showed up on the same day as a classroom of kids who had been brought there to tour the church grounds, and I ended up teaching them about compost. They were riveted and horrified, they got right up in the pile and my face, they wanted to hold grubs and talk about insects, they asked questions and they screamed stuff, and I loved every minute of it. Seeing the kid’s curiosity at play, and seeing them learn and be affected by information that I could share with them… well, I went back to the garden every week after that. Sometimes more. It was helpful that I didn’t have a job to worry about.

Eventually, myself and the other person who was helping out at the garden convinced the church to open their garden up to neighbors who wanted to contribute food scraps to our compost. We roped local businesses into giving us their waste. We gathered a team of volunteers. I bought myself a used pickup for hauling food scraps and mulch. The project grew and grew. Pretty soon, I was working across a handful of the church’s many gardens, in addition to a local women’s shelter. I was teaching weekly classes. I was helping grow food and sharing it with my community. There was so much giving.

For the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely happy.

There’s still not a day that goes by where a small voice in the back of my head doesn’t remind me how weird it is that I got into compost, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the last twelve months thinking about why this particular fascination stuck. What I think it came down to is that I needed to localize at least some of the problems with which I engaged. I couldn’t just spend all my time sucking on the firehose of toxicity that is “what’s happening” in the world, as refracted through my Twitter feed. Even if the work I was doing with compost didn’t matter in the grand scheme (and believe me, I know that it doesn’t), it mattered to my sense of hope. I was working on a small problem, which allowed me to have a big impact—and I was doing it with a bunch of my neighbors.

A volunteer-made compost sign at our garden.

I was also relieved to discover that compost wasn’t even remotely brandable. It just wasn’t photogenic and it wasn’t cool. There was no way to turn it into a marketing scheme, and the internet wasn’t particularly interested in what I was doing. I felt like I had found the eye of the digital storm. That was something, I realized, I also desperately needed. I felt relocated by the sensory minutiae of a tactile life; furnished with a physical sense of weight and substance. I do like writing this Substack, though, because I’ve always liked writing letters. I’ve experimented with trying to formalize things here (using headers, trying to establish subject line conventions) but I always fall back into letter-writing. It may constrain the audience I can reach, but it might also just be who I am.

I do have a lot of fun stuff planned for The Rot in 2023, though, including short snapshot interviews with different composters from all over the world (some who would not even consider themselves composters, but are!). I have some interesting link round-ups and some more philosophical reflections on the place and meaning of decay. I have more work with artists and galleries that I’ve done to tell you about. I also have tons and tons of information about the science and spirit of compost. I hope you enjoy it all.

People sometimes ask for my advice: what can they do for the environment? How can they help? You can’t “help.” Not in the way that our world is structured to make you think you need to help, which amounts to “be a hero or go home.” That idea, I think, amounts to nihilism—because we are, and will be, helpless in the face of so much structurally inflicted pain and injustice in this world. Forget about being a hero, which is a concept invented by schlubby movie executives to sell you stuff. Real change and real meaning are established collectively, sometimes quietly, but always relationally, in tandem with others—not millions of others, but a noble few. Noble because they are your neighbors, whether in purpose or geography. I think a good first step for anybody is to just go find your few.

That’s the only time I’ll lecture you here, I promise. :)

Love,

Cass