In this episode, I talk to compost practitioner and writer Cassandra Marketos about how composting can radically transform the way we look at the world. We get into the stigma around waste, why compost seems to scare so many people, the joy of learning from our intuition, the resilience and magic of a well-tended pile, and what it really means when we say that we’ve thrown something “away.”

We also talk a bit about my own experiment composting dog poop (it works, I promise!) plus get into lots of practical advice about composting, including how to do it in a small space when you don’t have access to land.

Cass has a composting guide coming out soon called Compost This Book, published by Apogee Graphics, but the release date is TBD, so subscribe to her newsletter The Rot for more info! I’ve included a selection of her writing below.

Notes and links:

* Episode transcript

* Compost 101 collection [The Rot]

* The bloody, urine-soaked, poop-filled history of compost [The Rot]

* A gentle meditation on compost, love, and grief [The Rot]

* On fungus and how to compost slowly [The Rot]

* My essay on unexpected low-effort compost success

* The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins [note: I strongly disagree with Jenkins’ statement about autism in this book, but there is a lot of helpful information otherwise]

* USDA pdf on compost methods for working dog kennels

* For more on my claim about floods causing sewage pollution, see this story about California and this one about Florida, or this fun fact from the book Disposable City about how often septic tanks fail when there’s even just a high tide in Miami!

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