Will tours a garden where placentas have been buried beneath trees.

The placenta (for those of you who’ve forgotten 8th grade biology) is involved in fetal development.
It’s where a mother’s blood passes nutrients and oxygen to the blood of a fetus inside her.

With the help of the umbilical cord, it’s how a mother nourishes a developing baby.

For these, it’s how a baby can nourish a young tree.

Press play to listen

Thanks to Molly Graves & Chris Hamilton for letting Will explore the sounds, tastes, and implications of their garden; thanks to Charlie Mintz for editorial advice.

Music by Kevin MacLeod

Featured voices are producer Will, brother Michael, mother Jane, tour guide Kenneth, daddy Rick, and neighbor Matthew.

Press play to listen.

When plants exhibit apical dominance, they climb upward and outward to increase access to (solar) power.

Humans often also exhibit apical dominance.

This video on pinch pruning can remind us to focus energy toward bearing fruit in our lives: de-emphasizing upward mobility in order to increase cultural prosperity.

Let’s branch out a little.

For months, compostmodernist has been stewing on a list of half-baked ideas, none of which is quite yet golden-brown. Many will never become blog/podcast morsels, including some of the “best” ones. That’s just how things develop sometimes…

So instead of trying to flesh out all of our own ideas, we want to collect from a larger pool. And we want to help you flesh out your ideas – at least, the ones that lend themselves to being fleshed-out.

So share your idea, as rough or as polished as it comes to you.
Post it here, as a comment to this blog post,
or add it to the index of half-baked ideas,
or use this form to tell us the most fundamental aspects of what’s moving you these days.

This is the first page of the next chapter.

The refrigerator is like a holy of holies that each household holds in its kitchen. These images are the result of a 2-day, door-to-door adventure in which about 150 families gave two compostmodernists permission to photograph theirs.

Project 1.0 was a silent slideshow of the reefers themselves, with no voiceover. This version features the voices of Teva Kohavi and Will Rogers.

With Kroc’s quote in mind, this episode’s podcast invokes Sigmund Freud to obliquely answer the question of how best to deal with a ripe banana.

…The symbolism is not subtle. In many ways, this is an attempt to answer a larger and more pertinent question: how best to deal with a ripe patriarchy.

Compostmodernist recommends the audio version of this podcast, featuring music from JF Archer. Press play above or use the provided links.

For those interested in a transcript, read on:

You’ve probably heard of penis envy. It’s Sigmund Freud’s idea that all females are born with a secret jealousy that they carry for their entire lives. Freud claims that, regardless of whether they acknowledge it or not, women desperately wish that they were born with a penis. It’s a crazy idea that has implanted itself into our collective consciousness, so that when we think of Sigmeund Freud, we think of penis envy.

Well, penis envy has a counterpart that is slightly less well-known. It’s called Vagina Dentata, or “the toothed vagina.” Vagina Dentata is a secret fear that men carry throughout their lives. According to Freud, every man alive is subconsciously worried that some day he’ll encounter a vagina with teeth, a vagina that will eat his penis.

Even though modern psychoanalysis has all but forgotten these Freudian theories, the symbols still survive. It’s easy to find them everywhere in everyday life, if you only look for them.

Take the disposal, for example. Here’s one example of Vagina Dentata that we encounter in about half of all US households. It has a soft exterior hole, and anything you put into it, anything, is mechanically masticated at the flip of a switch. There’s a bit of banana on your plate that you didn’t eat during breakfast. So you take it to the disposeal and grind it into bits that will travel down the drain and far away.

Well, what you put down the drain goes to a wastewater treatment plant, an energy intensive facility that deals with the downstream effects of everything you pour down the drain or flush down the toilet. Tax dollars and fossil fuels are spent in the process of separating your tiny banana bits from the water that you used to wash it away.

So think twice before putting your banana into the disposal. There is an alternative. Yes, you don’t have to grind it into bits to send it away, and I’m not just talking about the trash can. Even though sending your banana to a landfill would be more energy-conscious than to send it down the drain, there is an even more luscious option.

I’m talking about burying your banana in a dark, moist and warm space, right at home. I’m talking about putting your banana in a compost bin. This way, the banana will still be broken into tiny molecular pieces, but in a process of love. Your banana will give itself freely to the compost pile, and the compost pile will receive it with tender care, giving new meaning to the life that it once carried.

Your banana will be taken up by a beautiful culture of microbial diversity, a culture of earth and rebirth.

So don’t put your banana in a place where it will be “dealt with” by mechanical devices. Put it into a warm, moist compost bin to be deconstructed with love.

Snowpocalypse! in DC

Today’s episode takes us to Washington DC, where compostmodernist and Worldwatch Institute fellow, John Mulrow, brings us an unexpected story of snow. Press play to listen.

“It’s Monday. This past weekend the Washington DC metropolitan area was hit by over 2 feet of snow. Federal agencies as well as most businesses and NGOs cancelled work today as much of the snow still hasn’t been cleared from the roads. Another five to ten inches is expected for tomorrow. It’s being called the SNOWPOCALYPSE.

Caught up in the elements, my neighbors and I enjoyed a weekend outdoors together. Neighbors I never knew I had, or rather, never thought to meet. As it turns out, the harsh winter weather struck us all with a refreshing sense of… community.

“It was an apocalypse after all.”

Lisa Colton’s backyard chicken coop has not been uncontroversial, but it has provided a unique educational experience for friends and neighbors. These chickens do not provide enough eggs to fill the demands of the families who care for them, but they help re-establish a link between the food and the fed: participants in CLUCK (the Charlottesville League of Urban Chicken Keepers) are gaining valuable insights into the nature of food production and animal husbandry, so that now when Eli Colton eats eggs for breakfast, he has a better picture of how that egg came to be.

Many many thanks to the Colton Family for hosting 3 compostmodernists for the weekend in which this video was made. The video is narrated by john and phil, shot and edited by will.

Some of us get off on living the sustainable life.

We self-righteously ride around town in home-sewn eco-jumpsuits on our salvaged bicycles, laden with local seasonal organic bio-dynamic farmer’s market veggies and a solar panel, peddle-charging our batteries to run our laptops so we can post unassailably awesome blog posts like this one.

We look down our noses at the people/slugs we pass in SUVs. In the backseat, behind two more planet-hogging rug rats in car-seats, the car is stuffed with ten more plastic Safeway bags full of over-packaged, over-processed, animal torturing, earth-murdering muggle slop: cases of coke, frozen vegetables, plastic-wrapped kid-sized snack packs chock full of high-fructose-corn-heroin.

And as we roll past this four-wheeled suburban toxic waste dump, we think privately to ourselves: “Damn, I am so freakin’ good. My carbon footprint is about as big as a dandelion’s. Someone should give me the Nobel peace prize.”

You get the picture.

Fact is, though, if even if you do live as green as the caricature above, you’re not sustainable. Not even close.

No. Wait. I’m not going to tell you yet another thing you can do to refuse/re-use/reduce/recycle. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already doing just fine by yourself. The thing is, though, the lady in the SUV isn’t. Your neighbor probably isn’t. Your mom probably isn’t.

Look. Let’s break it down. Imagine that you in your ultra-green way eat 25 lbs. of local seasonal organic produce in a month while each of your 10 nearest neighbors each eat 25 lbs. of conventional produce shipped from far-away places. If instead of your usual self-congratulating you got down off your high horse and organized a CSA (community supported agriculture) delivery to your block, you could get those 10 neighbors eating (let’s be conservative) half their produce from the CSA box. That amounts to 125 lbs. less conventional food getting shipped around the globe.

The key idea here is, of course, dialogue – with your peers, friends, relatives and neighbors – about the million things every one of us can do to live a more sustainable life; things you might be rocking out on amidst an ocean of others who just don’t know any better.

This is where you come in.

[Music: Mi Glitch by Urtzi]

Following on the heels of our scientific exploration of dirty dishes, this week’s episode is a second installment from the Stanford Storytelling Project‘s recent look at “Community”.

This time we zoom out from the kitchen sink to a larger case study of the people who use it. It’s the story of a few idealistic students, a couple of frat boys, and their shared project of creating a common household together. Listen in as their dream delicately goes to $#!%.