9. 21. 2024

Welcome the Transformers

Thomas McKechnie

Since mid-2020, I have been composting with worms, watching them transform food scraps in a Rubbermaid bin in the back of my coat closet. I got into this practice because my apartment building wasn’t sorting garbage, recycling, and compost, and I wanted to ensure my compost was disposed of properly. Organic matter sent to a landfill doesn’t decompose but instead slowly transforms into methane, a greenhouse gas. 

Watching worms transform old rotten garbage into new life has been a wonderful, enlightening experience. It offers insights into what transformation requires – insights from which those of us committed to political struggle could benefit.

Crafting an environment

You’ll start with two Rubbermaid bins or two five-gallon pails or similar. The first step is to drill holes for drainage and ventilation in one of the bins and set it inside the other. Drainage and ventilation have a significant impact on the health of the bin. Ventilation holes are essential because worms, like other living things, need oxygen. Drainage holes are important because of the nature of worm decomposition. 

Moulds, which are constantly circulating invisibly in the air, land on food and begin breaking it down by secreting digestive enzymes. These enzymes dissolve the solid fibres of living things, allowing the mould to draw out nutrients, leaving behind a liquid goo. The worms then come along and slurp up this liquid and the enzymes inside it. Doing so exposes more of the food for the mould to break down and digest. Symbiosis. This process can go wrong, though. When there’s too much food, the worms can’t drink the liquid as fast as it’s being produced, and the excess liquid becomes toxic when left unprocessed. The drainage holes allow any excess liquid to escape, ensuring the worms have a healthy environment. We are consciously creating the context under which transformation can best occur. 

When we seek to make transformation personally and politically, it behooves us to ask: what kind of environment is the change taking place in? How will this environment impact the transformation we’re trying to make? 

I’ve learned a lot about worm composting from doing things the wrong way. I had a bin made from two five-gallon buckets and noticed it had developed a population of springtails. Like worms, springtails eat decaying material. They won’t harm your bin, but worms are preferable for composting because their waste products are beneficial for plants whereas springtails’ wastes are not. I read online that springtails are a sign that a bin may be too wet, so I added dry bedding, hoping it would suck up moisture. 

When I checked the next week, the springtails were still there, but the worm population seemed healthy. It looked like there were more worms than ever despite the bin conditions still looking very wet. I threw another bundle of dry bedding in and left it for another week. When I came back, all the worms were dead and rotting at the top of the bin. I discovered the bottom of the bin was full of toxic liquid: the worm population had seemed bountiful only because they were all at the surface trying to escape the toxicity. New to all this, I hadn’t yet learned to routinely empty the bottom bin. Adding dry bedding was a band-aid solution. To make deep transformation, we must seek the root of a problem.

Laying foundations 

The next step is adding soil to our worm bin. The ground is a foundation to build from, and different foundations allow for different types of buildings.

The ideological foundation of capitalism is that growth is the most important part of life. We must perpetually be growing and innovating to avoid being swallowed up by larger and/or newer competitors. This belief structure has had significant, lasting impacts on the biosphere and the people who are part of it. We are already facing the absolute limits of growth that the planet can tolerate, even while much of the world’s human population remains trapped in a deep poverty that means they can’t and don’t participate in ecologically destructive levels of consumption. On an individual level, many of us are constantly fearful of what will happen if we become unproductive. The threat of eviction, starvation, and prison may hang over us when we consider refusing to be productive, which can make us fearful and compliant. There is no room for weakness, sickness, or death in a world that prioritizes growth at all costs.

Caring for worms requires that I be with the revolting garbage on its way to transformation. We can hold the world in its wholeness only if we are present not just for life and vibrancy, but for death and decay as well. The more we’re willing to let things die, decay, and transform, the freer we are. There are practices in many worldviews that help us grapple with the recognition that change is inevitable. In Buddhism, for example, the Five Remembrances are five facts about life that the Buddha recognized and thought everyone should keep in mind:

1. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
   
   
2. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
   
   
3. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
   
   
4. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
   
   
5. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Rotten luck

Worms will eat most things that were once alive, but given that they drink their food, they are going to prefer soft, wet foods. Rotten cucumbers, old spinach, a bit of melon. They particularly like bananas and avocado. They don’t like strong, spicy, or citrusy things, so avoid onions, peppers, and oranges. I would also avoid meats, baked goods, and food cooked in oil, as worms wouldn’t encounter those in the wild. 

Before I made my first worm composter bin, I would get a feeling at the back of my skull that throbbed and hurt. I don’t think it’s specific to working-class millennials, but I think we experience it profoundly. It’s the feeling of fresh produce you bought going bad. That bag of spinach you barely started, that avocado, yesterday too hard, today brown and rancid. The potato that sprouts eyes before you can even make soup out of it. It feels horrible. It feels horrible in my heart, to reach down for what should be springy and crisp and green and, instead, feel something like hair in the drain.

When that happens, what you are feeling is nature, mid-transformation. The Lakotayapi phrase Mni Wiconi –  Water is Life – was popularized during the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline concentrated around Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota. It is not a metaphor. We are made mostly of water and to water we return. 

If you’ve found a disgusting handful of semi-liquid spinach, it’s beginning a new transformation. It’s also in an ideal state for your worms. This recognition cured me of the angst that used to follow the discovery of rotting vegetables. I realized that the vegetables haven’t gone bad. They can’t go bad. They’re vegetables. They’re just for someone else. They’re for the worms. The worms don’t want food as I prefer it. My food would be too tough, too dry, too hard to consume. So vegetables are people’s food or they’re worm food. Either way, the food is good. 

Could we look at our lives that way? These are times of great transformation. The Anglo-American empire that has been the dominant power in the world for the last 500 years is rapidly collapsing. The climate is changing, and we’ll see far-reaching transformation to avert that reality’s worst effects or far-reaching transformation because we fail to avert them, or both. This is to say nothing of the emerging neofascism seeking to deny, prevent, and undo all the good transformation we’ve managed to create for ourselves in the last hundred years. Amidst all this, might we nevertheless consider ourselves inestimably blessed to live in a time of so much change? The world is rotten, yes, but rottenness is ready for transformation. It’s ready for the worms.

Both space and time 

In the wild, red wiggler worms live in the layer of leaf litter on the forest floor. In our bins, we’re going to replicate the layer of leaf litter with shredded, moistened cardboard and paper. Bedding is important because bedding is where the eggs get laid and the next generation grows up. We lay the seeds of change where we hope they will be safe till they’re ready to sprout. Transformation needs room to hatch and grow.

When we are attempting to transform, it can be tempting to look for immediate change, but most change takes time. Old neuropathways have to be rewired, old infrastructure repurposed, old centres of power remade. There can be a pressure to show fast results. Yet there will inevitably be missteps and failures while we rehearse new ways of being. Worm babies, like all babies, need time to grow before they can fully take their place in the process of transformation. Time to develop and space to develop are deeply interrelated. A long time spent in a poisonous context won’t necessarily bring about transformation. A short time in a perfect context may not either. That’s why both a healthy context and time to grow are essential for good transformation.

In our thousands, in our millions

Food will rot even without worms. You could leave your food scraps in a bin by themselves and they would eventually completely transform. That process would be smelly and toxic, and it wouldn’t make beautiful, life-giving byproducts. This applies to all transformations. We are constantly changing, the world is constantly changing. Change is inevitable; good change is not. To make good change, you need to go down into the mess, into the muck, into the rot and decay. You need to take it into you and compost it into something else. 

Transformation requires transformers. It requires people who are ready to transform and facilitate transformation. It requires you. It needs you to find the spots that stink of rot and decay and seek to help those struggling there. The key is that we do not do this alone. We do it together, leaning on each other. If you want to make a transformation in your life, you might seek the help of friends, family, healthcare workers, spiritual guides, or ancestral wisdom. I’ve found a worm composting Facebook group to be of endless help as I’ve tried to make transformation with worms. You can make transformation on your own, but there is a reason I start people with 50 worms and not one.

My mom is a palliative care nurse. I asked her once how she dealt with the fact that all of her clients were there to die. She said that everyone has to die and giving people comfort and dignity through that process is worthwhile. 

So much has to die, to decay. How do we be palliative nurses to a decaying empire? How do we transform that which is rotten? How do we compost dystopia? 

I think the worms can show us.