On Compost

Fraser MacDonald waxes lyrical about the magic of composting for the London Review of Books. He surveys various methods and reveals what goes into his compost pile, which includes everything from seaweed to beard shavings. In looking at his heap, he sees it as a slightly messy response to the “dispiriting cleanness of modern life,” one full of one-use wet wipes and sanitizers, a pile which “stands in productive contrast to domestic disorder.”

I make my own compost so that I can convince myself that even when the world seems socially and ecologically broken there are still mechanisms for recovery: it shows that change is possible. Composting is a simple habit of composition or gathering together that integrates past fragments into a future whole, so that what matters is not the individual ingredients but the fertile new thing they can become.