By Evie English, who was a member of the Scotch Quarry community composting scheme during her time as a student in Lancaster.

NOTE FROM LOCCAL: Alongside celebrating community composting initiatives across Australia, we also enjoy learning from and sharing the work of composters around the world. This beautiful article by Evie English (UK) is republished with permission from its original home on the Lancashire Sustainable Food Network’s Food Futures website.

  

During the months when I was a member of the Scotch Quarry community composting scheme, I strongly felt that this simple act can help heal the broken relationship between humans and nature in an urban environment like Lancaster. For me, this small, sustainable act of composting our kitchen scraps together with neighbours became a symbol of giving back to the earth, transforming disposal into recovery, and fostering a meaningful connection with our local food systems. Put simply, reconnecting with dirt.
Human-nature relations: where did we go wrong?

As humans in the modern world, we are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. Urban indoor lifestyles and more screen time than ever have led to disengagement with the natural world around us.
Growing up in London, I rarely interacted with nature – at least not in a meaningful way. It felt like something external to me, rather than something I was a part of. True, I did sometimes walk to my favourite tree in Finsbury Park to feel the relief of its shade and the cool grass on my skin. However, I would too often be harassed by men, approached, catcalled, made to feel small and uncomfortable, and I often felt scared. It was an ongoing joke with my friends that you couldn’t set foot in Finsbury Park without getting harassed. We laughed, but that laughter covered the anger we felt about being young women in a city where we felt unable to sit under a tree in peace.

Living in London, nature always felt distant, something to be found on family holidays to the Cornish coast or the Lake District. It was an escape, not a presence. This distance reflects a broader cultural shift. Rather than actively engaging and reconnecting with our local flora and fauna, nature has become increasingly distant and even virtual.

Nature has been made the ‘other’ – a distant, elusive concept, positioned outside of human interaction and connection. This disconnect doesn’t just affect our personal relationships to nature, it also makes us less likely to care about wider issues of climate change and biodiversity conservation. Miller (2005, p.431) asks an important question: ‘If people no longer value nature, or see it as relevant to their lives, will they be willing to invest in its protection?’ Perhaps it is rhetorical, but the answer seems clear to me.

What is ‘Nature’ and where can we find it?

A dictionary definition of nature often separates the physical world from humans and their influence. This language is inherently anthropocentric (meaning centred on humans), separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. Perhaps the word ‘ecology’ better encapsulates the connections and relations made between all living things (Norbury, 2021). Despite discontent with the language, ‘nature’ remains the term most widely used when writing about human relations to the beyond-human world. Therefore, it is perhaps more important to question how we write about nature and who gets to write it.

Nature writing has long been dominated by men – often travel writers, documenting their adventurous expeditions through unfamiliar terrain and relaying the wonders they saw. Katherine Norbury’s book Women on Nature offers an alternative. This anthology of women writing about their experiences of ‘being outside’, rather than beneath man-made ceilings, creates an exploration of their working and interactive relationships with the natural world.

This experience is what I wish to replicate. Nature doesn’t have to be ‘found’ through grand, exploratory adventures, but can be experienced with humility and connection.

In urban landscapes, we may only be able to address issues like human health, child development and conservation if we can find a way for urban dwellers to re-connect with nature (Turner, Nakamura & Dinetti, 2004). People need opportunities to meaningfully interact with the natural world right where they live, and this would also boost wider public support for biodiversity conservation efforts (Miller, 2005). These interactions can be through the simplest natural systems, such as individual trees, and they can provide benefits to human well-being and enhance our relationship with nature (Turner, Nakamura & Dinetti, 2004).

An important and underrated example of this is what we do with our waste.

I often feel disconnected from where my food has been produced, who has produced it, or what it took to get it to my plate. When thinking about how I relate to the food system I am part of, I began to think about waste. Waste is entirely man-made; it does not exist in the natural world where every material has an immediate use to some creature. In this sense, I wish to change how I think about waste, to deepen my relationship with nature. A relationship is the connection between two or more beings, meaning when we take from the earth to grow, to consume, to discard, we must also learn to give back.

Community composting is one way that allows me to give back. In learning to compost, I found a way to give waste a new life and take part in a process of regeneration. What was once waste became an input into the composting system. It became a way for me to give back to the soil, and feeling that my actions are part of a much wider ecological web of life. The humble act of taking my food scraps to a communal composting bin became a way to not only give back to the soil, but to engage with the food system and to feel part of a wider ecological web (Turner, 2018).

My experience of community composting

Researchers have confirmed that community composting improves soils and green spaces, diverts waste from landfill, brings people together, improves skills, knowledge and self-confidence, and effectively contributes to local sustainability efforts (Slater, Frederickson & Yoxon, 2010). I began community composting with the Scotch Quarry Community Composting initiative in Lancaster as a small act of sustainability, as a modest way to reconnect with my own food system and foster a deeper sense of belonging and place in my local area. Engaging with nature in this way became an experience rather than an observation.

As local community composters, we fill our caddies with vegetable scraps, tea bags, coffee grounds and cardboard and take them to the large boxes at Scotch Quarry Park. The boxes were built by the local community around two years ago, and they are now teeming with microbial life and organic matter.
To capture this experience, I documented one of my walks to the composting site to empty my caddy, a shared experience between me and my housemate. We engaged with our senses, talking about and noting down what we could see, hear, smell, touch and feel, took photos and sat for a moment in the community garden that runs beside the composting site.

I was inspired to do this by my reading of Underhill’s book Practical Mysticism (1915), as she highlights that beyond-human nature is not something to be seen and objectified, but something to relate to, through our senses, in profound, complete and simple experiences. Important to this experience is the practice of care, shifting the focus towards a more relational perspective, deepening connections and ‘scaling-down’ our food system (Morrow & Davies, 2021). Composting requires attention, patience and participation. It’s an act of maintenance, repair and reciprocity (Morrow & Davies, 2021), and through this it becomes an act of love and appreciation.

Our experience of nature doesn’t have to be limited to virtual, charismatic and distant digital experiences (Battisti, 2016); valuable experiences can be found right around us, even in urban environments. On our walk, we saw butterflies, bees, birds, worms and wildflowers. But more importantly, we went beyond what we could see: We felt the sun and the breeze on our skin, smelt the flowers, leaves and compost, heard bird song, people, and cars in the distance, and felt a sense of peace, happiness and connection (Figure 1). Engaging with community composting has encouraged me to be active in my own food system, and reconsider my relationship to waste, and nature. Starting off as a small, sustainable act to reduce my food waste, community composting became so much more than this and taught me to notice and appreciate the ecosystem that surrounds and sustains me.

Learning from compost

Community composting allows us to relate to waste differently, providing an alternative way of connecting with organic waste, rather than allowing it to be managed beyond our own experience (Morrow & Davies, 2021). Before I began composting, waste just disappeared: It was out of sight, out of mind. The invisibility of waste management mirrors the invisibility of ecological processes in urban areas. Grimm & Schindler (2018) identify that urban nature is often hidden, as are the ecosystem services like food, shelter, recreation and enjoyment that it provides. In contrast, community composting has revealed what is usually hidden, making the process of decay, transformation and renewal visible.

Community composting offers a different relationship to time, one that is slow, cyclical and patient. It takes time to fill up your caddy with food waste, it takes time to walk it to the composting site and empty it into the bins, and it takes time for the waste to transform into rich compost. Community composting has also taught me humility. There is something beautifully simple about collecting the scraps from your kitchen in a small caddy, and once a week taking it for a walk to incorporate it into the compost bins, where microbial communities reveal their powers of transformation.

In this sense, community compost is not just about people working together, but also about the communities within the compost that transform, regenerate, and repurpose our waste. Simard et al (1997) wrote a pioneering paper about mycorrhizal fungi, and the ‘social network’ of trees and plants where, through symbiosis, the forest becomes a community of resource distribution, cooperation, nurturing and connection. I think we can learn from this symbiosis happening beneath our feet and from the microbial communities working in the compost. We can learn that we are all connected in the web of life, and how to be humble, generous, and loving in this relationship with all living things.

Composting has renewed my sense of place and connection to nature in my local area. It is a quiet relationship, one in which Underhill’s (1915) idea of ‘communion with life’ resonates. I become one with the flora and fauna I encounter on my weekly walk to the composting site, through this humble act of sustainability. Humans have limited their conceptualisation of the world, confining nature and ignoring the richness beyond our fenced reality (Underhill, 1915). This notion is especially important for those of us living in urban environments. If nature is only what is pristine, untouched, or rural, then most of us are permanently alienated from it. But if we understand nature as a process, a relationship, as embedded in the rhythms of everyday life, then we can begin to reconnect right where we are.

Returning to my earlier memories of Finsbury Park, I see now that those uncomfortable, negative experiences shaped my sense of nature as something inaccessible and unsafe. Community composting has helped shift this narrative. It’s about creating new spaces where connection feels possible, safe, and sustaining. Where nature is not something to be endured or performed, but something to be in relation with. In a culture obsessed with speed, productivity and efficiency, composting invites us to slow down, pay attention and get our hands dirty. It is a quiet act of resistance against waste and the illusion that we are separate from the natural systems that sustain us. Through composting, we can remember that we are a part of the cycle, not outside it. In this remembering, there is the beginning of repair, by reconnecting with dirt.

References

• Battisti, C. (2016) Experiential key species for the nature-disconnected generation. Animal Conservation, 19(6), 485-487.
• Grimm, N.B. & Schindler, S. (2018) ‘Nature of Cities and Nature in Cities’. In: Grimm, N.B. (ed) Rethinking Environmentalism: Linking Justice, Sustainability and Diversity. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 99-125.
• Miller, J.R. (2005) Biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20(8), 430-434.
• Morrow, D. & Davies, A. (2021) Creating careful circularities: Community composting in New York City. Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers, 47(2), 529-546.
• Norbury, K. (2021) Women on Nature. London: Unbound.
• Simard, S.W., Perry, D.A., Jones, M.D., Myrold, D.D., Durall, D.M. & Molina, R. (1997) Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field. Nature, 388, 579-582.
• Slater, R., Frederickson, J. & Yoxon, M. (2010) Unlocking the potential of community composting: Full project report. London: Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.
• Turner, B. (2018) Food waste, intimacy and compost: the stirring of a new ecology?
• Turner, W.R., Nakamura, T., Dinetti, M. (2004) Global urbanisation and the separation of humans from nature. BioScience, 54(6), 585-590.
• Underhill, E. (1915) Practical Mysticism. New York: Dutton.