The world-changing potential of hot composting

Photo courtesy of Wikicommons.

As long as there have been humans, we have taken the parts of plants we don’t eat and thrown them back onto the soil again, knowing they would turn back into soil to create more plants. Until historically yesterday.

Now many modern people take their food and seal it away in plastic, so that the only bacteria that can work on them are anoxic bacteria that generate methane – a greenhouse gas about 35 times worse than carbon dioxide. Some of us compost our organic waste – food, paper, lawn clippings --  to let the proper critters munch away and let it alchemically turn into soil again.

Ordinary composting, however, has some disadvantages that every gardener knows well. One can’t simply add bones or meat – and some gardeners even avoid eggshells – for fear of attracting vermin. Also, plants that have gone to seed cannot be added, or the resulting soil will be peppered with the beginning of next year’s weeds. You can’t add diseased plants, or the diseases might remain in the resulting soil, ready to infect next year’s crops. Also, it takes a long time, and one loses much of the kitchen waste volume in the process of rotting down.

Imagine, then, a new kind of composting, one that avoids all these problems at once – no more weed seeds, no more disease, no more vermin. Imagine being able to compost almost everything, and keep the majority of the biomass. Imagine, finally, that it only takes a matter of weeks and not months.

What makes hot composting, or Berkeley composting, work is bacteria; instead of the usual variety of bacteria that breaks down over several months, hot composters find the right balance of materials – more on this in a moment -- to attract aerobic, heat-generating bacteria. The bacteria generate heat just as your body does -- between 55 and 65 degrees Centigrade, hot enough to kill any weed seeds and diseases.

In order for this method to be effective for you, you need the right balance of materials to compost; if the carbon/nitrogen ratio is too high in carbon, the compost will not get hot enough or break down quickly enough, and one must add something like manure or grass clippings. If the mix has too much nitrogen, rather smelly bacteria will take over, and the mix might get slimy.

the ratio one looks for is between 25 and 30 parts carbon-rich waste to one part nitrogen-rich waste, proportioned by weight. Carbon-rich materials are typically dry and brown, like sawdust, cardboard, paper, dried leaves, straw and other, similar things. Nitrogen-rich materials are typically moist and fresh, like kitchen waste, fresh lawn clippings and vegetable scraps. Sometimes carbon-rich materials are called “browns” and nitrogen-rich materials “greens” for simplicity, but these terms can be misleading: coffee grounds and animal manure, whatever their colour, would also be nitrogen-rich.

To get the right C/N ratio, keep in mind that all plants have more carbon than nitrogen, so virtually all materials have a ratio of at least 1/1. Wood chips have a ratio of 400/1, newspaper has 175/1, and straw has 75/1. Vegetable scraps are about 25/1, fresh grass clippings 20/1, and chicken manure  about 12/1. Urine has a ratio of about 1/1, and is excellent to add to soil in whatever way does not violate your social anxieties or local ordinances.

It is a bit awkward to weigh things before adding them and then doing the math, but you quickly get a feel for the practical effects of your most common additions and see how they affect the whole, in the same way that you do with cooking. You can adjust the ratio of certain additions; for example, by letting some of your lawn clippings dry and then raking them up, while mowing another section into a bag and depositing while still green, to get the ratios you want.

To experiment with this yourself, first fill a cubic area about 1.5 metres across each way with kitchen waste. Leave the compost for four days with no turning. Then, turn the compost every second day for the next 14 days to oxygenate it, making sure to turn it thoroughly from the outside in to get everything well mixed. By the 18^th day, it should look like soil – but you still need to let it rest for several more weeks before planting in it.

Not everyone has the amount of organic waste to try this, but you could get your neighbours to participate by getting them to recycle and reducing their trash bill, or doing the same for local shops that have produce they throw away. If you live near a park, you could see if the city wants somewhere to put their lawn clippings.

Composting this way generates heat that some people can use to heat their homes or water supply – I’ve taken a very hot shower outside on a very cold Irish morning, using no electricity or fossil fuels. I just snaked the hose up through the compost, and the heat from the bacteria heated the water by itself.

Households in northerly climates could spend perhaps $2,000 a year on heating. Imagine homes with hot composters attached, which can use their heat -- perhaps in conjunction with an attached greenhouse. Such simple innovations, if handled rightly by the households, would turn their waste into soil quickly at a time when we need more soil to plant in. It would cut their emissions from garbage and at the same time cut their emissions from fossil fuels, since they would not have to burn as much gas or oil. It would reduce their debt, and their dependence on government and corporations, all at the same time. Few simple, at-home innovations could have a wider impact if widely embraced.

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The Literary Foundations of America

This summer has seen a flurry of videos and tweets on what sets the USA apart from other countries, with the usual political sniping and grandstanding, but no one has mentioned the most remarkable and fundamental aspect of American history: it was founded as a nation of avid readers. 

No other world power was ever founded by, and for, such a highly literate population, on the idea that the common citizen could and must read and evaluate complex ideas in town halls, on juries and in judging the affairs of their country.

Aztec, Muslim, Chinese, Bantu and many other empires had armies and lands, but none had small towns where everyone read the newspaper, or bookstores or coffee shops where everyone gathered to debate the latest book. European Empires like Britain, France and Spain began in the Dark Ages  -- but developed a literate culture eventually, and when they found the New World, it was passionately literate sects like the Puritans that most often made the voyage.

Even in the middle of a dangerous wilderness, settlers quickly built printing presses, libraries and colleges; just 16 years after the first Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and 15 years after they almost died of starvation, they founded Harvard University. Even with a less-literate Native population and a constant influx of new and sometimes illiterate immigrants, colonial America still had a literacy rate upwards of 90 percent by the American Revolution. And Natives and slaves were more literate than people imagine; in 1764 explorer Thomas Morris, venturing into what is now Illinois and thinking that the Native tribes had never met an English speaker before, instead met a local chief and was presented with a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. (1)

Booksellers and printers did a brisk business in every city and town of colonial America, coffee-shops hosted vibrant debates on all manner of subjects, and wandering preachers paid their way through the countryside by selling books to rural homesteaders. They often read multiple languages as well, many books sold were in Ancient Greek and Latin, and newspapers were shipped in from various European countries – months late, of course, but still prized – in their native languages.

Thomas Paine’s book Common Sense sold half a million copies in its first year, reaching 20 percent of the population – only the Harry Potter books come close today. And despite its homespun title, its long and complex sentences, subtle philosophical distinctions and references to John Milton and classical literature flummox many a college student today. Take this sample paragraph:

“It is repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things to all examples from former ages, to suppose, that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine in Britain does not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time, compass a plan short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year’s security. Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connexion, and Art cannot supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, ‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.’”(2)

By 1831, French author Alexis de Toqueville wrote that “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.” (3) English politician Richard Cobden, who toured the USA in 1835, estimated that there was six times more newspaper reading in the young America than in his own country – more than 1,200 newspapers publishing 90 million copies, in a country that had only 17 million inhabitants, implying that every adult read perhaps eight newspapers a day. (4)

When I point this out to people today, most retort, “If they were so much better than we are, how could they oppress Native Americans? How could they keep slaves?” One could answer in a number of different ways; for example, that we don’t need slaves, as we use fossil fuels, and leave the burden to our grandchildren. Or that we contribute to atrocities as well, but through corporations and governments that commit them far away on our behalf, leaving us with the illusion of moral superiority. The best answer, though, might be: Why do you think those things ended?

Paine’s writings, and many less famous texts, galvanised a population of fence-sitters to join the Revolution; nothing like this would have happened if Americans were not a people who would buy and read such a book enthusiastically and follow its sophisticated arguments. Lincoln spoke against slavery in masterful speeches, with extended sentences, expansive vocabulary and logical constructions. They were also, obviously, spoken, so his audience had to follow them by ear in real time – sometimes a long time, as the Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted for three hours, with each speaker lasting up to 90 minutes at a stretch, all to an audience of frontier farmers. Suffragettes gave extended, sophisticated arguments to crowds in their day, quoting Plato and Tacitus, and Martin Luther King quoted Ovid and St. Augustine. 

All these people had been introduced to a breadth of ideas by the Greek and Roman classics, from Aristotle to Xenophon, all able to reference the same cultural standards. Most of the writers we remember for their original works – Alexander Pope or John Dryden, for example – actually put most of their time and energy into magnificent translations of Greek and Roman classics. It was for this reason that by 1600 Shakespeare could write about Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus, confident that the audience would understand who these people were and would care.

A classical education involved more than merely reading ancient texts: it meant learning to think critically and debate logically, in the way pioneered by the Greeks. The legal, political and scientific infrastructures of the West continue to assume such training. It is no coincidence that much of our legal and scientific terminology comes from Greek and Latin. Obligations like jury duty and voting assume that ordinary citizens have an ability to assess logical arguments; science assumes the ability to test theories. 

Once I began to read Greek and Roman classics as an adult, I suddenly understood many of the paintings in art galleries and the writings of Jefferson or Lincoln, as most of them reference Greek and Roman works. I used to think the famous sculpture of George Washington in a Roman toga was a bit of pretentious glorification; now I understand, as Americans at the time surely did, that it was the opposite. It portrayed Washington as Cincinnatus, the farmer who did his duty to his country and then peacefully stepped away from unlimited power. As my daughter put it after reading Tolkien, “he put down the Ring.”

Even into the mid-20^th century American novels, black-and-white films, newspaper articles, popular songs and even children’s rhymes referenced Horatius or Croesus or the Gospels, assuming everyone would understand the reference. When I casually read books or magazine articles written a  mere few generations ago, written not for professors but for regular mailmen, farmhands or construction workers, I’m struck by how liberally they are peppered with references to the classics, lost on anyone reading today.

People had a literate culture not because they went to school for more years than we do – many children only went to formal school for a few years -- but because they read almost constantly, at home and at work, to themselves and each other. They had a democracy not because a document said so, but because they debated what they had read in coffee shops and town halls and churches. Our institutions – science, local government, jury trials – all depend on the assumption that we are still a people who can do this .. and until recently, we were. Only in recent decades have we abandoned this most fundamental characteristic of Americana, and without it our institutions remain only in name.  

As recently as 1940 literacy stood at 96 percent for white Americans and 80 percent for black Americans, and those were not just people who could read but did. Older Americans can still remember a time when people read books and newspapers on the bus, on the train, waiting for the dentist. Nor were these celebrity gossip magazines or children’s books; the runaway best-seller of 1927 was Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. Over the last century, however, this literate culture bled out with astonishing swiftness – all the more because so few have ever remarked on it. Not only do we no longer know any of the things for centuries we knew as a people, but we no longer know that we once knew them.

If you’re like many people I know, you might be surprised how much phones and television have eroded your attention span, how your very brain isn’t responding to your will the way it used to. Retrain it by reading a bit each day – not scanning text as screens train us to do, but actual reading. Do it for perhaps half an hour every morning before you've looked at a phone or a screen -- if you have to, start with material for children and work your way up.

On the Fourth we all enjoyed the usual barbecues and explosions, and that’s fine. Our test as a nation depends on what we do next, and I’d like us all resolve that we will rise above the sniping of the moment, and transform our country one person at a time, starting with ourselves … that we will become a nation of readers again.

 

1 – “Let Him Be Caesar!,” London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 15 · 2 August 2007

2 -  Common Sense

3 - Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Chapter XIII

4 - The Political Writings of Richard Cobden p. 90