Composting
Solveig Gade
Related terms: agroecology, eco-feminism, more-than-human worlds, soil care.
Over the past decade, the concept of ‘composting’ has garnered increasing attention across multiple disciplines. Within fields such as agroecology, environmental humanities, and the arts, the term has been utilized not only to denote tangible, material practices but also as a philosophical framework through which to interrogate and destabilize ontological and epistemological hierarchies inherited from Western Modernity. This entry will emphasize the political potential of ‘composting’ when understood as an embodied, situated practice, as well as discuss some of the limitations of the term when used in a metaphorical, abstract sense of entanglement and seamless metabolism.
Etymologically, the term ‘compost’ derives from the Latin compositum, meaning “something put together” (ODWO). As a verb, ‘to compost’ refers to the process of assembling various organic materials, such as plant matter and food waste, intending to transform them into humus, a nutrient-rich amendment for soil. This transformation occurs over time, as organic material is metabolized and decomposed by the activities of worms, fungi, bacteria, and other microorganisms.
Composting practices date back to ancient Mesopotamia and recur throughout history, appearing in traditional agricultural systems and continuing into the movement of agroecology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Contemporary agroecology encompasses a range of agricultural approaches, including organic farming, regenerative agriculture, and permaculture, and is recognized as both a scientific discipline and a social-political movement. It positions itself as an alternative to modern industrial agriculture, aiming to cultivate systems of food production that are self-sufficient, sustainable, and resilient. Emphasizing biodiversity, ecological interdependence, and the communal exchange of knowledge and resources, agroecology explicitly rejects the monocultural methods of industrial agriculture as well as its systemic dependence on chemical inputs from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides (Altieri 1995, 2002; Gliessman 2007; Shiva 2008, 2022). Grounded in an ecological worldview and dependent on cyclical decomposition processes, composting plays a central role in agroecological practices. It functions as a regenerative mechanism: through the build-up of humus, it helps restore soil health, support soil microorganisms, and improve the growth conditions of plants and, in effect, other species. As environmental activist Vandana Shiva has it: “Compost is the ideal way to improve soil quality, build soil organic matter levels, and correct mineral imbalances” (Shiva 2022, 95). By the same token, environmental humanist scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa posits that composting may be understood as a form of soil care, which represents an entirely different temporality and approach to soil than the “progress-oriented, productionist, restless futurity” (Bellacasa 2017, 206) associated with technoscientific agriculture. While Bellacasa extends the notion of ‘care’ from the human realm to more-than-human worlds to offer a speculative ethics concerning the multispecies communities that make up “the living webs of care” (Bellacasa 2017, 203), Shiva emphasizes the ‘hands-on’ activist potential of composting. Indeed, she argues that as a local, low-cost method of securing soil fertility, composting offers a potential political tool for liberating small farmers and communities in the Global South from their dependency on synthetic fertilizers created by dominant Western agribusiness corporations (Shiva 2008). Grounded in an ecofeminist theoretical framework, Shiva and Bellacasa both insist that ‘composting’ must necessarily be viewed in relation to the specific social, political, gendered, and speciesist power structures in which it is situated.
When employed in an ontological sense, ‘composting’ often becomes synonymous with notions of multispecies entanglement and efforts to displace the human from the center of ontology. Donna Haraway’s claim that “[w]e are humus, not Homo (…); we are compost, not posthuman” (Haraway 2016, 57) is instructive in this regard. For Haraway, being is necessarily relational; it is about “becoming-with each other,” about “making oddkin,” playing “string-figures,” and engaging in “sympoietic tangling,” rather than upholding notions of discrete, autonomous subjectivities. Given the compost pile’s association with transformative decomposition processes as well as its destabilization of binaries such as self/other, inside/outside, life/death, it becomes a potent metaphor for the relational ontology Haraway envisions. However, in contrast to the organic composting processes emphasized by Shiva and Bellacasa, Haraway articulates a more biotechnological and hybrid approach. In The Camille Stories, for example, she offers a speculative fabulation in which securing the ongoingness of non-human species involves genetically pairing human babies with animal symbionts from endangered species. Set in a future world amidst the ruins of the destructive epochs of the Plantationcene, the Anthropocene, and the Capitalocene, The Camille Stories depict how so-called ‘communities of compost’ strive to nurture multi-species flourishing and to repair damaged landscapes by engaging in kin-making practices that allow for “unexpected collaborations and combinations” (Haraway 2016, 4). ‘Composting,’ in this sense, involves cultivating embodied relations between humans and other critters as well as with the places in which these critters dwell and through which they travel. Equally important, composting raises questions of how to inherit and inhabit damaged lands in ways that acknowledge and remember their layered and destructive histories, rather than turning to abstract utopias or colonial settler fantasies of moving to ‘empty lands.’
Haraway’s notion of ‘composting’ offers the promise of a more just future for all earthly beings. However, a de-situated application of the concept may result in an overly optimistic celebration of the “unexpected collaborations and combinations” that sympoietic tangling and odd-kin making afford. This tendency is evident in certain curatorial discourses and artistic practices, where Haraway’s notion of relational ontologies is sometimes invoked in ways that risk turning them into “‘cozy’ versions of conviviality” (Abrahamson and Bertoni 2014, 125). The fact that the relation between companion species is not necessarily unproblematic, but may indeed be full of conflicts, even violence, is conveniently brushed aside. By the same token, the “irreparable rift” in social and natural metabolism identified by Karl Marx (Marx 1976, 949) – i.e. the rupture in the interdependent processes between human society and nature caused by industrial capitalism and agrarian capitalism – is left aside in favor of a vision of composting as seamless metabolism, even if the “metabolic rift” has only deepened in relevance since the nineteenth century. In this way, troubling issues – such as the persistence of non-decomposable waste or the fact that global populations are disproportionally affected by toxic waste through environmental, class-based, and racialized injustice – are overlooked or even neglected. However, as Juliana Spahr reminds us in her poem “Tradition,” in the present times of living on a damaged planet, there is no need to romanticize processes of sympoietic tangling per se. The poem vividly portrays how a mother passes on, indeed entangles, her newborn baby in all sorts of toxic synthetic materials and, in effect, capitalist political systems, through the sheer act of breastfeeding it:
I make a milk like nectar,
A honeyed nectar of capacitator dielectrics, dyes, and
Electrical insulation
and I pass it on every two hours to not really me.
On an epistemological level, ‘composting’ can be invoked as a methodological metaphor, proposing that, like organic matter, knowledge must break down and intermingle to become fertile ground for new ideas. A compost-based approach to knowledge foregrounds entanglement and circularity over the differentiated, linear knowledge systems associated with the Modern paradigm. Such an approach may open up possibilities for a more paratactic arrangement of epistemologies, rather than reinforcing the hierarchical privileging of Western, so-called ‘scientific’ knowledge over, for example, Indigenous knowledges and subaltern/oral epistemologies. On the other hand, a compost-based approach to knowledge can also obscure important differences, erase uncomfortable histories, and end up appropriating elements from formerly marginalized epistemologies – thereby establishing yet another repressive hierarchy. Indeed, composting may turn into a parasitic activity. For the same reason, in their call for a feminist composting and “storying” of the field of environmental humanities, feminist and cultural theory scholars Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis warn against the “lure of homogeneity” (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 521) when engaging in composting practices. Specifically, they argue that while the field of environmental humanities is grounded in a feminist commitment towards social justice, it is crucial that the differences of the multiple worlds and social justice paradigms which come together in the compost pile are tended to and not simply collapsed when composting. As they have it: “Calling for more inclusive feminist composting in environmental humanities does not mean destroying all bonds or limits between traditions, disciplines, and methodologies, but invites careful attention to how myriad environmental and social injustices, violences, and power asymmetries intersect (…) while just as carefully working to see which stories and concepts can help grow others into being.” (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 523). Indeed, composting is an activity that must be done with great care and close attention to what is being composted, how, and under what conditions, by whom, and why.
Within the realm of art, composting involves (re)creating worlds through the practice of combining, transforming, and renewing existing matter. On a tangible, material level, this is evident in what is known as green production art, where environmental sustainability is prioritized – through, for example, the use of found, recycled, or biodegradable materials for sets, props, costumes, and installations; the use of renewable energy sources; or the adaptation of slow production processes that emphasize local, low-impact materials. Sometimes, the materials and the production processes themselves are foregrounded and integrated into the conceptual frame of the work, thereby destabilizing conventional binaries such as art product/process and frontstage/backstage. While so-called ‘compost aesthetics’ typically highlights the use of waste materials, eco-theatre and interspecies performance often emphasize kin-making and the ontological relationality between humans and other critters. Over the past decade, there has been a surge in performances featuring an array of non-human actors – from ants, bees, and mealworms, to fungi, plants, and trees. In such performances, human spectators are usually invited to sense the world from the perspective of the involved non-human agents and to enter into all sorts of ‘unexpected collaborations’ with them. For example, in the durational choreographic performance Mass-Bloom Explorations (2018) by the Copenhagen-based company Recoil Performance, a human dancer fed a colony of mealworms placed inside a plastic tent with plastic waste. Sharing the same habitat, the audience was invited to smell, listen to, and sense the presence of the worms, while a narrative voice speculated on whether the mealworms might save the planet or instead outlive humankind. Composting and decomposing processes played a key role in the performance, which quite literally explored the ability of mealworms to decompose and transform certain plastics into soil. Over time, I came to experience the performance space as a kind of compost-pile where human and non-human materialities merged and interacted, and where attention was directed towards the “ecological connectivity” (Eckersall et al, 2015) between human and more-than-human worlds. However, when engaging with such composting performances, it is crucial to remember that, ultimately, they are staged by and for humans. The non-human agents involved most likely did not consent to being removed from their habitats and placed before a watching crowd. This raises further ethical, political, and perhaps even juridical questions: How did the artists collaborate with their non-human performers during the rehearsal process? And what did they do with them after the performance run? Did they simply dispose of them, or were efforts made to reintegrate them into the ecological cycle, for example, by composting them in a literal, not metaphorical, compost pile? In other words, if the composting artist is to treat non-human critters not merely as thematic props, but as vibrant agents, they must confront a range of considerations – including speciesism, power asymmetries, and what might be called ‘artist exceptionalism.’
In conclusion, whether the concept of ‘composting’ is used in a tangible material, ontological, or epistemological sense, it must be employed with care and attentiveness – considering what is being composted, how it is done, and why it is done. If the concept is to retain its political potential, the temptation to gloss over differences and power asymmetries in favor of a ‘happy-go-lucky’ version of entanglement must be resisted. Composting reminds us that it is never possible to begin anew. Yet, working with and through inherited matter can transform it and help pave the way towards more socially and ecologically sustainable worlds and past-futures.
References
Abrahamsson, Sebastian, and Filippo Bertoni. 2014. “Compost Politics: Experimenting with Togetherness in Vermicomposting” Environmental Humanities 4 (1): 125-148.
Altieri, Miguel A. 1995. Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. Boulder: Westview Press.
Altieri, Miguel A. 2002. “Agroecology: The Science of Natural Resource Management for Poor Farmers in Marginal Environments.” Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 93 (1): 1-24.
Bellacasa, Puig De La. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eckersall, Peter, Paul Monaghan, and Melanie Beddie. 2014. “Dramaturgy as Ecology: A Report from the Dramaturgies Project.” In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, edited by Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 18-35. London: Bloomsbury.
Gliessman S.R. 2007. Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems. New York: CRC Press.
Hamilton, Jennifer Mae, and Astrida Neimanis. 2018. “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities” Environmental Humanities 10 (2): 501-527.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. Vol 1. London: Penguin Books.
Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. N.d. “Compost.” Accessed June 8, 2025.
Shiva, Vandana. 2008. Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana. 2022. Agroecology & Regenerative Agriculture. London: Synergetic Press.
Spahr, Juliana. 2015. “Tradition.” In That Winter the Wolf Came. Oakland: Commune Editions, 53-58.