San Francisco will begin mandatory composting this fall, including every residence (single homes and apartment buildings) and businesses. The idea is to limit the amount of waste wasting away in expensive landfills. One third of the city’s garbage is compostable, and another third recyclable. That seems typical of most municipalities. With just a bit of due diligence, then, we can reduce our garbage, and our taxes, easing local government’s burden of tending and monitoring our waste, while selling off the good stuff that can be reused.

I recently read a wrenching retelling of the Dust Bowl years, by Timothy Egan. Particularly striking was his description of the times tons of dust from the mid-section of the country rolled across the skies to blot out the sun of the mid-Atlantic and southern New England cities. The soil of the plains, where it had been created and lain, nourishing the vast grasslands for hundreds of thousands of years, had come to the Atlantic. The loss to the plains was incalculable.

It seems to me that we are in the midst of another version of the Dust Bowl. The nutrients, benefits and even small dirt particles of the plain’s soil comes east in droves, in the body and on the surface of our produce. We buy it, eat it and then toss it away, to waste, largely inert and unusable, in our eastern landfills. To replace these nutrients, farmers rely on artificial fertilizer, which, under current practices, is neither good for the land nor for the water it runs off into. Hence, not good for us.

By composting at our homes, however, as many of us do today, we break this non-cycle. We return the blessings of foreign soil to our local soil here.  The law of local return might not be in play here, but at least the fruits of the land get returned to land somewhere.

But I am thinking that with wholesale composting, it may just be possible for the east to capture the plain’s lost nutrients, cook them for a while under our eastern care, and truck them back home (fueled by the very compost the trucks are carting?), to nourish and produce next year’s bounty.

I would imagine that with more people than farmed land along the eastern coast, we will consume more compostables than we can readily use. What a great symbiosis - the plains feed us and we in turn feed the plains. It is far better than tossing into dead-end landfills irreplaceable, renewable fertilizer that can fuel our harvests for generations to come.