Celebrating the Least Among Us.
Is it just me? What I keep hearing, seeing and foaming at the mouth about is the cult-like adoration of the few, the ones with extreme wealth and power, the ones who hold most of our wealth in their grubby LITTLE hands. Have you seen that? Yeah.
I just read in Forbes that each person in the top 1% of the U.S. holds an average of about $14.85 million in wealth, while each in the bottom FIFTY PER CENT holds, on average, $19k. And, of course, many people have a lot less.
So, I’ve been thinking about these guys – and I’m betting that most of them, quite coincidentally, I am sure, are men with bank accounts far bigger than their hearts, assuming they still have one. I’ve been wondering what do these uber-wealthy folks really contribute to society? Do they make life better for all of us or just themselves? Take a certain electric car company CEO, for example. (PLEASE, SOMEONE TAKE HIM). Sure, his companies have transformed the EV car market and satellite technology, but did he invent any of that? Or does he just write checks and fire people who disagree with him while the real work is done by thousands of scientists and engineers, technicians and assembly line workers?
Okay, that’s likely an over exaggeration, it’s my specialty, but my point is that SCADS of workers contribute to making what we use, need, and want. I’m quite sure their collective unsung value far surpasses the oligarchs who boss them around. But do we venerate the workers? Honor the ones who show up to work, day after day, to calculate, to ideate, to test and manufacture? Not that I have seen.
Amazon spent $14.2 million on anti-union consultants in 2022 alone, and I don’t believe they did it out of concern for worker well-being. And how many workers have been summarily dismissed because DOGE thinks they are expendable? Because AI can do all of that now, anyway. Or maybe because they forgot that without farmers there is no food. I don’t know, and I do not want to be inside their heads.
I do have to give those oligarchs credit for one thing, though: they inspired today’s celebration. Revolted by all the toadyism, my contrarian streak, the “can’t-tell-me-what-to-do” inner toddler insisted upon a celebration of the (seeming) least among us. . . Compost. And the critters that make it.
I’ve long been a fan of them. I wrote in Love Earth Now:
“What do aerobic decomposers need to convert the organic remains from our kitchen into black gold for the garden, anyway? Our tiniest neighbors, the microbes and bacteria, fungi, and worms who feed on our leftover dinners and yesterday’s news, are the consummate employees. Their bazillions—a single gram of fertile soil may contain fifty million bacteria—are ever on the job, taking no coffee breaks nor personal time off. They ask for no pay, no holiday bonuses, no merit increases. All they require is what is essential for life itself: air and water. What a bargain.”
Sounds like Amazon’s ideal worker, doesn’t it?
A single gram of soil, about the size of a sugar cube, contains enough man-, er, critter-power to do the work of transforming our refuse and discards into gold. Black gold. Sure, the shiny metallic kind of gold is pretty and useful for conductivity, but the black gold of this ode provides services essential for the continuation of life on Earth. No small feat. Without decomposition, there are no fertile soils. Without fertile soils, no plants. Without plants, no salads, no bagels or baguettes, tortillas or fried rice, not for us or our feed animals like cows and pigs. That means, no bacon, no hamburgers, kids.
More from Love Earth Now:
“Decomposition happens—every day, everywhere—and may we celebrate that it does. But for decomposition, we would all be drowning in one giant trash pile, one monumentally taller than the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, rising some eighty feet above the Statue of Liberty. How mammoth a pile would the remains of every animal and plant that ever lived over the nearly four billion years of life on Earth make? It’s an impossible question, of course, because our world would not exist without the essential end process that completes the cycle of life. Yesterday’s discarded carcass provides the building blocks for tomorrow’s newborn. Nature is Earth’s first and most devoted recycler.”
Not that I’ve always been a successful compost host, I confess. More from, you guessed it, Love Earth Now:
“This time, I’m going to get it,” I vow through gritted teeth. I remember the visceral shock when I read how much food we Americans throw away each year. Five hundred pounds per person, collectively filling a football field five miles high, or something like that. And hardly any of it decomposes in the modern landfill. There’s just not enough air in those tightly sealed tombs for the decomposers to do their work. Condemning food scraps from my kitchen to sit in a big pit for an eternity, then buying bags of compost for the garden, strikes me as crazy as buying new underwear because I don’t want to do laundry. Not that I’ve ever done that. . . .
My first attempt produced a revolting mess akin to raw sewage. I would no more place that sludge on the garden that grows food for my family than I would serve it on our dinner plates. What went wrong? I had taken the free class offered by the city. I had read the how-to booklet cover to cover. I had tried to emulate the proper mix of “greens” (for nitrogen) and “browns” (for carbon). All for naught. “I’m just not a composting person,” I reasoned, chalking the epic fail up to the lack of a “brown thumb,” the way some people (also me) lack a green one.
Then, thumbing through a book that I didn’t even remember owning, I happened upon these words: “My whole life has been spent waiting for an epiphany, a manifestation of God’s presence, the kind of transcendent, magical experience that lets you see your place in the big picture. And that is what I had with my first [compost] heap.” Said by whom? Bette Midler.
Suddenly my failed composting endeavor didn’t seem like just a simple dalliance, the way you might try a new flavor of ice cream and decide it’s not for you. Nope, not only did I fail to create a hospitable environment for the critters that decompose our waste, I’ve bungled my own salvation. Well, Hoover dam it.
Bette Midler’s words haunt me like the stove I might have left on when I left the house this morning. I vow to change my whole outlook about this matter of rotting remains. Replace the word “composting” with “epiphany,” and my resolve to master composting resurges. From henceforth, our green discards shall be sent to compost in the Epiphany Pile. Then I set about learning the cause of my prior failure.”
The rest, as they say . . . is an irrational fixation. Much like the consummate wine snob turned sanctimonious abstainer that you can’t invite to parties anymore, I’m the convert driving everyone mad with the Awful Landfill statistics and touting the magical powers of the composting critters.
Which reminds me of the point of this post. Will you join me in raising your dirty martini or cup of mud in a toast to all of the Composting Critters, the earthworms and millipedes, the pillbugs and centipedes, the bacteria and fungi, the beetles and flies, the protozoa and nematodes, the Tiny Mightiest Among us?
Cheers to the Composting Critters!
What do we do with orange peels, eggshells and apple cores?
COMPOST!
What do we do with greasy pizza boxes, used paper napkins and coffee filters?
COMPOST!
What are we here to celebrate?
COMPOST!
And, if those critters haven’t felt duly feted yet, I offer one final tribute.
AN ODE TO COMPOST
From scraps and soil, decay and time,
Compost creates a lovely slime.
It is the best way to nourish
Your vegetables organically and practically
Not fanatically but with calm efficiency.
So much of what you use in your kitchen
Can go into the bin or pile
Those critters will eviscerate
With aplomb and style
We will all end up as compost one day
With our worm-eaten bodies returning to clay
The cycle of life carries on this way,
Feeding the earth where new seeds may play.
