Composting 2.0

It's about time our society grew out of some harmful myths we have been living under. We have been making some very bad decisions and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Now that people are no longer in denial about how dire the world situation is, maybe there will be sufficient open-mindedness to look back in history and see where we've gone wrong.

There have always been radical critiques of the direction we're going, warning that if we keep on going down this path we'll be in trouble. There has always been the temptation to - by ignoring what you don't want to see - make short-term decisions which temporarily solved problems by kicking the can down the road to someone else. "Do what's really in your heart" has become "If it feels good, do it." Trillions of this quick-and-dirty type of decision has taken humanity blindly to the point of endangering life on Earth. If we don't awaken from this self-destructive nightmare, continuing ecosystem collapse will deliver the most painful judgement on our species.

A central myth, built on the logic of fear, shows itself in our culture's dominant attitude toward other species. So many times we see only plants, animals, and microbes as things - to be either used or gotten out of the way. Being both predator and prey, and liable to be host to a myriad of parasites and disease organisms, it's understandable that we have gone to war with the rest of Nature. Successfully mastering many other species, we have become some 7 billion now, and we're reproducing a mile a minute. But the extinction event we're playing a central role in is making life extremely dicey for all of us now.

Germs are bad. That's what we tend to think. I'm old enough to remember that at one time composting in the city was a no-no. Neighbors would get the municipality or the health department after you. The average city-dweller's irrational fear of insects and microbes borders on the insane, and has tragic consequences. I remember a little girl coming home from school panicking at the sight of a grasshopper, afraid to go up the steps to her own house. "It's just a grasshopper," I said, and chased it away. Many of us don't think we can function without constant (usually chemical) warfare against molds, bacteria, viruses, and insects. But the more thoughtful of us Earth citizens are learning to appreciate the value of - and even see the beauty of and love - these tiny fellow creatures. Most microbes - molds, bacteria, and viruses - are directly or indirectly beneficial to humans. Shortages of honeybees and other insects that pollinate plants are making gardening in some neighborhoods of the city more difficult. The loss of biological diversity on Earth is yielding an increase in diseases, because the normal checks and balances, such as predator/prey relationships, that exist in a more complex ecosystem are breaking down. Millions of people taking antibiotics has stress-bred resistant microbes now being spread by industrial agriculture. So the logic of fear - targeting microbes (most of which are directly or indirectly actually our friends) - has boomeranged back on us with even worse diseases.

Many city people think country people are ignorant. We're so hip to what's going on in the world we don't know what was lost in the creation of our cities. We drive and fly around and don't see what we're passing. Just one time walk to your usual destination rather than drive or take public transit and you'll see what I mean - there's a whole world in the small and the slow you've lost contact with. Real country people, like the miner-farmer I worked for many years ago, do often move more slowly, but it's not because they're dumb. How many Pittsburghers can even name (let alone tell you what they're good for), all these "weeds" that grow in "waste" places? Stop to smell the flowers and you might learn something. Farmers and other ecosystem managers are considering a whole lot of factors few of us city slickers know about. They have better sense than to try to kill off every living thing that's not salable. Country people are more mature about the facts of life and death. They're familiar with the smell of manure, and not unduly afraid of it. They know that what feeds the life in the soil - the dead bodies and manure of plants and animals - feeds us people.

Nature - the community of life that provides us with the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe, and consumes our waste products for us - has an incredible ability to heal the destructive impacts of industrialization. The first entrants into an area damaged by radiation are microbes and fungi; this is why composting is a pollution-cleaning technology. The web of life slowly re-establishes itself, and (though the genetic damage will take many generations to restore the site) life will re-establish itself. But don't kid yourself - the myth of clean, safe nuclear power, unquestioning belief in which was nurtured by the military-industrial establishment to continue the nuclear industry and manufacture bombs after World War II, is genetically destabilizing the planet.

The Bahai faith believes that humanity as a whole is on a path of maturation, like growing from childhood to adulthood. And our current stage is adolescence. We're running around inventing and manufacturing enormous numbers of new things, not thinking of the consequences. Should we make it through to maturity as a species, it will be because our lover side has won over our warrior side. The Catholic philosopher Father Thomas Berry said, "The Universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." Though this mystical attitude - that, as American Indians believe, even plants and rocks are alive - seems illogical, the most advanced modern science is confirming that there is no real separation between anything. When you hurt another creature you're hurting yourself. The most productive gardens and farms are those in which ALL species are welcome. The way to win a war is to make friends with the other side, not defeat them.