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 book coming out through Apogee Graphics called Compost This Book, which you can preorder here!
You can also listen to this on Spotify or Apple Podcasts now. Pls leave a five-star rating or a nice review if you like it and want more people to hear it!
Notes and links:
Compost 101 collection [The Rot]
The bloody, urine-soaked, poop-filled history of compost [The Rot]
On fungus and how to compost slowly [The Rot]
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]
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!
Getting to Know Rot with Cassandra Marketos