Riding through the California State University campus at Chico, I stop in at the “compost garden” and strike up a conversation with Katie, a friendly student who runs the operation. The next thing I know we’re both planting milkweed seeds in the garden. We delineated the waystation with some golden hay. She said she’d send me pictures of the milkweed in the spring. Sweet!
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway writes that “we are humus, not Homo, not Anthropos, we are compost” (p. 55). It is a reminder that us humans are with and of the earth. In the next geological epoch, she writes that we’ll be collecting up the trash of the Anthropocene, “chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener” (p. 57). She takes up Beth Stevens’ and Annie Sprinkle’s ecosexual slogan: “composting is so hot.” MWS casts itself in this hot compost pile of ideas too: “We are humus!”
