The Necessity of Composting

April 18, 1935, Stratford, Texas.



In the midst of our heartland, in the midst of our Great Depression, America suffered one of its most devastating environmental, economic and human losses. The Dust Bowl ruined 50 million acres of what had been fertile, verdant grassland. Over 850,000,000 tons of topsoil were lost in 1935 alone. The systematic plowing under of the prairie sod destroyed an ecosystem that had developed over tens of thousands of years, and loosened billions of tons of topsoil so that, in the drought, it simply dried up and blew away.

By 1940, over 2 million people were displaced. Having lost farms, livelihood and sometimes children to the ever-present dirt, they abandoned their homes, becoming a wave of "environmental refugees".

And the greatest tragedy was that it was all human-induced, predictable and avoidable.

Today, we are witnessing something similar, and equally avoidable in the very same place.

In his 2007 book called "dirt: the erosion of civilizations," David Montgomery reminds us of what we know but often ignore: the essence of life resides in dirt. Dirt is the earth's placenta, the womb that incubates the life that sustains us. It needs constant refreshment to remain fertile and productive.

No amount of sunshine, no amount of water, no amount of hard work or money can sustain our civilization if we don't have good dirt for our plants and trees and produce to grow in.

I am beginning to think that we are living through a second, mostly invisible Dust Bowl. That is, the riches of the mid-west soil are being shipped to us in east and around the world in the form of food, whose waste - from our kitchens and restaurants and stores - is then being dumped in our landfills. This one-way process of food to trash is siphoning off the best of our mid-country's land just like the winds and drought did in the 1930's. Only this time, we can't see it. (And we are not even talking about the farmers that have been displaced in the name of efficiency and technological development.)

True, some of us compost, a little. But mostly we are treating composting as a gentleman's leisure, something to do if we garden and want enriched soil to make our geraniums bright.

But composting is serious business. It is part of the essential cycle of life, giving back to the soil the good stuff that helps it grow the food we eat. We should compost not so that we will have lovely decorative gardens but so that the earth doesn't lose the goodness it so desperately needs, the goodness it loaned us in the guise of food but that it must get back in the form of organic waste.

What if, I am wondering... instead of making all those chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and shipping them cross state lines to artificially boost this year's harvest, while damaging the soil for next year's... what if we systematically collected our compost, much of which is the leftovers from the harvest that came from the mid-west, and haul it back to the mid-west (and, eventually, to the increasing local farms we hope to create and support) so the farmers could spread it on their fields and return it to whence it came? An added bonus would be for us to use it to power the very trucks that would haul the compost.

Right now, in many places, including most synagogues, half our garbage is organic. Instead of throwing it into a dead-end pit, what if we returned it to its source, and used it for the very purpose nature intended, to replenish the goodness of our fields.

So instead of contributing to the invisible Dust Bowl, we become part of the re-greening of the plains.

I am thinking that in 20 years or so, as part of the return-to-the-farm movement we are witnessing today, we will all have weekly municipal organic waste pick-up, just like we have recycling and garbage pick up today. Our fields will be healthier, our food will be healthier and our bodies will be healthier.