The Great Compost — why composting what dies is more radical than saving the planet

Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

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Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

— Le dernier territoire souverain. On y entre par les plantes, par le silence, par le retour aux songes des anciens.

§0 — The Fissure

Why « saving the planet » is a colonized phrase

The phrase has been in every mouth for twenty years: we must save the planet. It appears on placards, in presidential speeches, on cereal boxes, in campaign slogans, in companies' end-of-year messages. It has become a courtesy formula — the green version of « happy holidays. » And precisely for that, it has stopped meaning anything at all.

Bayo Akomolafe — a Yoruba postactivist, a Nigerian philosopher who has spent his life questioning the structures of Western activist discourse — frames the question differently. What if « saving the planet » were precisely the phrase that prevents us from acting with lucidity? What if the grammar of the saviour — the one who knows, who decides, who steps in to set things right — were exactly what has, over five hundred years, led industrial civilization to ravage the ecosystems it claimed to administer?

The planet does not need to be saved by us. The planet is four and a half billion years old. It has survived five mass extinctions. It will survive the sixth — the one we are orchestrating right now — as it survived the four before. What will not survive is the present version of humanity that believes itself central. « We must save the planet » is therefore, looked at closely, a narcissistic projection. What we want to save is ourselves. Not the planet. Us, in the civilizational form we inhabit. And it is precisely this confusion that prevents the right gesture.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and the house that dies

To understand what it means to hospice modernity, Machado de Oliveira offers a precise metaphor: the House of Modernity. This house has foundations, a roof, and a hidden backyard. The foundations are material: fossil fuels, colonial genocides, the transatlantic slave trade, mining extraction, industrial monoculture. The roof is ideological: liberal individualism, belief in linear progress, the Nature-Culture split, the myth of the sovereign subject. The hidden backyard — this is the part that unsettles — is what the house conceals in order to stand: all the colonized peoples whose lands and bodies enabled the comfort of the people in the drawing room, all the non-human species reduced to resources, all the dead whose memory was erased so the story would stay coherent.

The house is collapsing. This is not an opinion, it is an observation. The climate is unravelling. Ecosystems are collapsing. Democracies are fissuring. Institutions are losing their legitimacy. Children can no longer imagine their future. The house is collapsing — and the first reaction of its inhabitants is to look for how to save it. How to reform. How to transition. How to electrify the roof, insulate the walls, optimize consumption. What Machado de Oliveira calls « modernist reformism »: trying to save the house without touching its foundations.

To hospice modernity is to do the reverse. It is to accept that the house will fall. It is to accompany its fall with dignity — without hastening its destruction (that would be eco-fascism), without keeping it alive artificially (that would be greenwashing). It is to open the doors of the hidden backyard: to acknowledge what was buried, to listen to the voices that were never heard, to grieve the version of ourselves that believed itself at the centre.

And it is in this humus — the humus of modernity composting itself — that something else can begin to germinate. Not a step backward. Not a nostalgic primitivism. Another cosmology, a thousand other cosmologies, that have always been there, beneath the feet of the people in the drawing room, in the languages they did not care to learn, in the peoples they colonized, in the forests they cut without hearing what they said.

To hospice is neither to euthanize nor to put on a respirator

The nuance is crucial. The modern grammar can only think of death in two modes: prolonging it artificially (intensive medicine, futile life-extension, the respirator) or hastening it (euthanasia, abandonment). The hospice — an institution born in the 1960s, under the impulse of Cicely Saunders in London — offers a third way. To hold the hand. To ease the suffering. Not to seek control over what comes. To make room for the grief of the dying person and their loved ones. To honour the transition.

Transposed to modernity as a system: not to keep it alive artificially through greenwashing, electric SUVs, green capitalism that pretends everything will go on more or less as before. And not to hasten it through revolutionary violence that would, in reality, make even more dead in the hidden backyard. But: to hold the hand. To accompany. To do less harm. To reduce the collateral damage. To make room for what wants to be born through the fissure.

This posture is radical. Not radical in the militant sense — radical in the etymological sense: it goes to the root. It refuses the two false choices that dominate public discourse — either we carry on as before while painting everything green, or we hasten the collapse. It offers a third way that asks, in reality, far more courage than the other two: to stay present to what is dying, without turning away from it, without hastening it, without saving it at all costs.

Anna Tsing in the capitalist ruins

Anna Tsing — an American anthropologist of Chinese descent, long a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz — published in 2015 a book that became a pivot for contemporary thought on collapse. Her subject: the matsutake, a Japanese mushroom that grows precisely in forests ravaged by industrial exploitation. Tsing follows the matsutake from the devastated forests of Oregon to the luxury markets of Tokyo. And she discovers something that changes everything: multispecies life does not resemble the hippie paradise. It includes compost, predation, disease, asymmetry, extinction. And it is precisely in the ruins that unforeseen collaborations become possible.

The matsutake is not a plant of paradise. It is a plant of ruins. It grows where the primary forest has been cut and where secondary pines colonize a poor soil. It colonizes alongside them in a precise mycorrhizal symbiosis. It then becomes the most expensive food in Japan — a single kilo can reach a thousand euros on the Tokyo wholesale market. It is gathered by Hmong, Mexican and Cambodian immigrants in the public forests of Oregon, without contract, at dawn, in an informal economy that escapes the structures of conventional capitalism entirely.

What Tsing draws from this is powerful. Life continues in the ruins. Not the life from before the ruin — something else. A life that did not wait to be saved in order to grow. A life that is multispecies, asymmetrical, contaminated — in the strong sense, biological, ecological: a being always contains several others. And it is this contamination that makes life possible. Purity is a fantasy. Symbiosis is the rule. And the ruins are not the end — they are the condition of other lives.

Joanna Macy and Active Hope

Joanna Macy — an American eco-philosopher, a translator of Rilke, formed in Buddhism and systems theory — offers a concept that completes Machado de Oliveira and Tsing. She calls it Active Hope. And she begins by saying what it is not: Active Hope is not the hope-as-optimism that bets on a positive outcome. Nor is it the hope-as-faith that believes some providence will set things right. It is something else. It is the hope that does not depend on the outcome.

Active Hope, in Macy's grammar, is a practice. Not a feeling. Three steps. First step: to face reality as it is, without denial or romanticism. The planet is warming. Ecosystems are collapsing. The sixth extinction is under way. Inequalities are exploding. Democratic institutions are fissuring. No avoidance. No positive thinking. The truth, raw, looked in the face.

Second step: to choose the direction one wants to serve. Not the goal one wants to reach — the direction one wants to serve. A crucial nuance. If you attach your meaning to a goal (saving such a species, winning such an election, reaching such a figure), you will live in permanent fear of not getting there. If you attach your meaning to a direction (serving the living, honouring the ancestors, passing something just to your children), you can hold even when the results do not follow.

Third step: to act from that direction, day after day, without waiting for the guarantee of the outcome. To compost what dies. To re-plaster what crumbles. To weave bonds where modernity has cut. To learn the languages that modernity has devalued. To cook with what the earth has given. To walk without an app counting the steps. To weep when one must weep, to celebrate when one must celebrate, in the rhythm the Tzutujil call grief-praise — biis and yuk'in interwoven.

Active Hope does not ask you to believe that everything will end well. Active Hope asks you to serve, unconditionally, what you know to be just — even knowing you will not see the result. Like a tree-planter who plants oaks whose shade he knows he will never see. Like a grandparent who passes a language to a grandchild without knowing whether the language will survive. Like a composter who turns his heap, day after day, knowing that the black earth that comes of it will feed a garden he may never tend.

Compose + compost — why INFUSE's Accords 5 and 6 coexist

INFUSE's Cosmogony V3 explicitly doubles the 5th Accord. Not out of theoretical vagueness. Out of ontological discipline. Accord 5 — Value Fulfillment, taken from the Sethian thinker Jane Roberts — says: every consciousness seeks to fully accomplish its creative capacities. This is the verb to compose. To build. To weave. To give form to what wants to be born through you. Accord 6 — The Great Compost, taken from Machado de Oliveira — says: one must accompany the death of what must die, to make room. This is the verb to compost. To decompose. To let rot. To honour what passes.

Without Accord 6, Accord 5 becomes spiritual escapism. The « I create my reality » without looking at what is dying around. The magnificent wellness while the planet burns. The celebration of life without the grief of what is going out. It is unbearable in its blindness — and precisely what Western New Age spirituality has produced for fifty years.

Without Accord 5, Accord 6 becomes nihilism. The « everything dies, what's the point » that justifies inaction. The doomerism that wallows in collapse without taking part in what wants to be born. It is the other trap — the trap that lies in wait when one has read too much Machado de Oliveira without having read Macy.

With both: you compose what wants to be accomplished through you, in the direction you feel to be just, without waiting for the guarantee of the outcome. AND at the same time you compost what must die in you, around you, in your practices, in your paradigms, in your old certainties. That is Active Hope. That is the WIE gesture applied at civilizational scale. Compose + compost. Build + let go. Dream + grieve. Both hands.

Naming the source as an act of everyday hospicing

Accord 6 has an application that may seem far from the Great Compost — and that is, in reality, the most everyday practice for INFUSE. It is the naming of the source of plants and lineages. Not « Indigenous people say that… ». Not « ancestral medicine has proven that… ». Not « ancient wisdom teaches us… ». The name of the people. The century. The ritual context. The transmitter when they are not Indigenous.

Why? Because modernity colonized Indigenous knowledge by making it anonymous. By saying « Indigenous people, » it erased the work of generations of named persons who, through their courage, their resistance and their precise transmission, kept alive what colonial extraction wanted to extinguish. María Sabina, Mazatec, who transmitted the ritual use of psilocybin mushrooms to the Western world in the 1950s. Black Elk, Lakota, whose visions were transcribed by John Neihardt in 1931. Don Carlos Perez, Shipibo, transmitter of the Amazonian icaros to several Western apprentices. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass to make legible to English-speaking readers a grammar of animacy her grandmother still spoke.

COM-POSITION — the cosmos-word

The pivot word of this pillar is composition. Break it apart phonetically, as Fulcanelli did with the old words: COM — with, together — POSITION — to place. Composition is to place together. Not to create ex nihilo. Not to invent alone. To place, with, together. It is exactly the verb the INFUSE cosmogony has been seeking all along.

And the phonetic miracle: composition contains compost. The same root. POS, the Latin ponere, to place. To compose is to place together. To compost is to let things place themselves together in decomposition so that they become humus. The composter creates nothing. He lets things place themselves, mingle, ferment, decompose in one another's presence. And the humus that comes of it is what will make the next life possible.

INFUSE does not create a cosmology. INFUSE composes and composts. It composes words alongside those of Kimmerer, Akomolafe, Machado, Tsing, Strand, Prechtel. It composts the old grammars of wellness, of new age, of modernist progressivism. It places together — with its readers, its allies, its producers — a humus from which other practices can germinate. It is more modest than « saving the planet. » It is also infinitely more serious.

What this pillar changes for INFUSE — and for you

INFUSE will no longer say « saving the planet. » INFUSE will say composting modernity, hospicing what dies, composing with what wants to be born. The nuance changes everything. It changes the words used in a newsletter. It changes the grammar of a product page. It changes the way one speaks to a B2B partner. It changes the posture in which one shows up at a festival. Not militant in the warlike sense — composting in the patient sense.

And for you, reading this pillar in a bedroom, on a train, on a beach, in some waiting somewhere, what it changes is simpler and harder. You can stop asking yourself each morning whether you are doing enough for the planet. That grammar is exhausting and sterile. You can ask instead: what am I composting today in my life? What old certainty have I agreed to let rot? What toxic relationship have I agreed to let die with dignity, without drama? What practice have I begun to let go, because it served me only out of habit?

And alongside it: what am I composing today? Nothing grand. Nothing heroic. A difficult conversation I dared to have. A letter I wrote to someone who did not expect it. A plant I put in the ground. A meal I prepared thinking of the lineage of kitchens that came before me. A silence I held instead of filling. A forgiveness I offered without asking anything in return.

These are the two hands. Compost what dies. Compose what wants to be born. Without waiting for someone to give you the guarantee that it will work. Active Hope, as Macy would say. Or, in the grammar of the Tzutujil that Prechtel transmits: grief-praise interwoven. The biis and the yuk'in in the same mouth, the same day, the same hand.