Mother Earth’s Garden

Some thoughts on compost…

by Margaret on December 1st, 2006

Conventional wisdom used to dictate that there were two topics that should not be the subject of polite conversation if conflict was to be avoided. I doubt whether this stricture was ever really obeyed. Surely people have always argued, debated and visited their views on others. As one of my friends remarked “What else is there to talk about?” Or as the singer Paul Kelly remarked once when told he only sung about sex and death: “What else is there?”
 

Well, there is compost.
 

Try raising the topic of compost at a dinner party, and you will find the conversation is sustained for hours. As well as the wailing and the gnashing of teeth over compost failures, there will be bores who can tell you the precise method – the only method – by which compost should be made. There will be moralists who will sneer at you if you don’t compost. There will be greenies who go starry-eyed about the wonderfulness of it all. There will be tales of worm farms and steam, of smell and vermin, and of vegetables big, bigger and biggest. Compost is the ultimate conversation piece. It leads everywhere. No field of human activity is immune from its reach. These days almost everyone has an opinion and an experience about compost.
 

I am going to make a bold assertion. The reason compost is such an endless topic is because it is to do with the things that matter. It is to do with life and death. Therefore it is also to do with sex.
 

And it is also to do with religion and politics.
 

The word politics, of course, is not confined to the things that happen in the spectator sport of public life. Compost politics is direct, personal and sometimes smelly. The compost heap is one very old and also very modern manifestation of how human beings organise themselves in relation to the land, and in relation to each other. The word politics comes from the Greek word polis, meaning “city” and polites, meaning citizen. The growth in composting, and the emergence of broad new sensibility that accompanies is a political change – a change in our understanding of the waste generated by our societies, and our responsibility towards the planet and each other.
 

Hand in hand with this new sensibility, there is a growing sense of connection with the earth. Not all conservationists feel it – some are driven by logic and science alone, and are embarrassed by the vague spiritual yearnings of the Mother Earth worshippers. Nevertheless, there is what the e author Richard Lowry has described as the “new religicology” in which “the collective religious commitment to cleaning up the environment creates a kind of therapeutic community in which all can pure themselves of personal guilt by simple and immediate acts of penitence”
 

This has been one of the great strengths of the conservation movement – that by giving ordinary people something direct to do, such as sorting rubbish for recycling and owning a compost bin – it has succeeded in welding thousands of people to big political objectives. Everyone who composts can feel involved in a kind of direct political action. They can also, if they are so inclined, feel they are caring for the earth in a way that is not only pragmatic, but also spiritual/
 

None of this is surprising. Throughout modern times, the question of our relationship with the natural world has been at the centre of both religion and politics. Gardening itself has always been a profound statement of these relationships.  A garden, like a compost heap, is both a natural and a manufactured thing. Gardens and compost heaps represent a human bringing together of elements, guided by science and yet not entirely explainable by science. We are meddling, when we compost, with the stuff of life and death.

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