Ethics, Compost, and the Big Bang

I survey the paddock, hemmed by a thin strand of polywire, concentrating urine and manure. The remnants of flakes of hay are spread in long arcs, following the contour of the fence line. Nearby, the ground is dusted in black, the rich compost covering all but the gopher mounds. Carbon has been brought to this land in many forms with much effort, by many hands and hooves. I smile at the thought of the green tips that will soon surface by the millions, to revel in the fertility we have brought here. At the thought of native perennial grasses taking root and flourishing; at the thought of all the life this pasture will support.

But that thought is followed by an all too familiar twinge. What was the cost to other lands far away to return carbon to this one? My eyes land on the knotted and piled strands of plastic baling twine, slowly fraying into small microplastics. The sunlight transformed and pressed into squares of grass, taken from one place and brought to this one. The oil burned, once green growing things itself, to bring it here. I think of what three quarters of a million pounds of compost means, to cover 20 acres. Seventeen semi trucks. The energy it took to gather the food scraps to build this rich black earth, to turn the piles. I’m sure one could attempt a true cost accounting of emission and sequestration, but this land is more than the sum of a profit and loss sheet; the moral calculus feels more complex than subtracting column A from column B and seeing if there is anything left over.

The closer I get to the basic underpinnings of what it takes to uphold the civilization we are all tethered to, whether or not we want to be, the more uncertain I become as to what constitutes a truly ethical action. By this I mean, when you get down to it, it is so hard to know whether one is doing more harm than good, even in our most sincere efforts to care for the places we love.

So where do we draw the line? At the risk of oversimplifying a topic I only have a tenuous grasp of, here is a broad proposition: A defining characteristic of the universe is entropy. There was an Event, a “Big Bang”, which generated everything, maybe everything that will ever be. Since then everything has been spreading outward, into an infinite universe towards an unattainable equilibrium. Another way to put this might be that everything is constantly moving towards disorder. Everything is expanding away from everything else, as energy dissipates, and the pieces disconnect and dissolve into their component parts. Life at the most basic level is the antithesis of the unavoidable eventuality of entropy. Life is syntropic: it is self organizing, self replicating, and it increases in complexity and diversity over time. All that we are and all that we love conforms to that truth. Our very existence is defined by syntropy, and there is a quixotic beauty to the fact that it is a doomed struggle. Our sun will die, our world will grow cold, our species will go extinct. Yet we -the broadest “we” possible;: leaves and hoofs, feathers and hands- continue to procreate, evolve, grow. It is who we are.

If this is true, then any action which supports, enhances, and creates the conditions for more life, more syntropy, is good; is aligned with our truest nature. That which does otherwise; which simplifies, disintegrates, removes biodiversity and complexity, is not.

Aldo Leopold said this more simply stating “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” But how in a globalized world, where cause and effect become disentangled, does one determine which is which.The problem is that there is a both a temporal and spatial disconnect between one's action and its consequences. Ecological change often happens at a timescale far greater than a human lifetime and we are so adaptable to change that we don’t notice what we’ve lost, as our perception of ecological baselines slowly adapt: we become accustomed to rivers you can’t drink from, grasslands turned to deserts, oceans without fish. The emissions from my truck will take over 20 years to have an impact on the climate.

Spatially, the problem is even more pronounced. You would stop buying cheap T-shirts in a minute if you lived next to the sweat shop that produced them, if you lived in community with the people who were exploited. You would stop buying single use plastic if instead of ending up in the middle of the pacific or in enormous piles in the global south, they began to accumulate on your front lawn. We evolved to make decisions in a localized context where the impacts of our decisions have direct feedback, in the absence of that feedback we behave in ways that are both morally unconscionable and painfully mundane.

The illusion of affluent urbanity, that so many have succumbed to, is that you can pay someone else, not just to provide for all of your basic material needs, but to hold the burden of their impact on the world around us. The urban conscious consumer, wants so badly to believe they can substitute one consumer good for another with a higher price tag and compellingly reductive sustainable marketing slogan (“buy a hat, plant a tree, save the planet”). But voting with one's dollar (or fork) is the beginning, not the conclusion of a solution.

Then again what choice do they have? They are, like myself, choosing the best they can out of a spectrum of imperfect options. Often, the more expensive the option, the closer it aligns with the morals we hold. This is true for producers and consumers alike. Perhaps I could find organic hay tied with hemp string, perhaps there will soon be fully electric semi-trucks to deliver it; that would be marginally better, but undoubtedly more expensive. These costs, passed on to the consumer put the product further and further out of reach of the majority of people.

This is the paradox. In order to function at a scale commensurate with the scale of land regeneration needed in the short timeline we have before us to avoid environmental catastrophe, producers must in some ways, tailor our choices to the contours of the market. The very system that has created this race to the bottom which is late stage capitalism.

So I am left with the question I started with, how do I know if what I am doing is truly making the world I love better? I see meadow larks picking through the fresh compost as dung beetles scuttle purposefully through the cow pie next to me, slowly incorporating it into the soil. After yesterday's rain it all smells so complexly alive. I am happy to know that, in some small way, my efforts have made this so. This happiness is the closest I have come to an answer, and despite being the most subjective assessment I can imagine.