Note: This is a companion piece to the earlier “The Anthropocene is Haunted.” Don’t want to miss any posts? Get them delivered to your inbox by subscribing now.
The world rots, and this is not a bad thing. Decay is essential to life. Good organic gardeners know how to stoke a compost pile, how to generate heat by which to speed the breakdown of organisms they lovingly nourished only months before. In November, tomato vines may do more good hacked into bits and fed to a frenzy of bacteria than left to stiffen on a trellis. The post-harvest season, filled with decomposition, asks us: what do we need to lay to rest? What is better when buried than when withering and exposed to the oncoming winds of winter? Death comes to that vine either way, but one option sees us as passive avoiders of death, the others as active collaborators in the transformation of the world.
Last year, in late winter, I went to volunteer on a farm in far northern California. The ‘why’ of that is a different story, to be told some other time. The short version is, I had the chance to help at a moment it might be needed, while reengaging my curiosity about what life might be like if work wasn’t all screens and meetings, Slack channels and texts, but something fundamentally different.
My farming knowledge was minimal, so I was given basic tasks. A CSA farm, we had a set of winter shareholders who came to pick what could still be gathered of dark greens and cabbages persisting through the temperate coastal winter. We supplemented their pickings from stores of items harvested late in the fall—apples, onions, potatoes. Much of this supply was headed into its final days, however. And so one of the first tasks given to me was to sort between the living and the dead.
The bins of yellow apples were full of fruit reflecting all the stages between good health and those who had long passed on. Portions of the bin held many still firm, medium-sized apples with no hint of softness or give. In corners were leaky messes that I quickly chucked into the wheelbarrow destined for the compost heap. Everything else was in between, and my job was to quickly sort through and find those good enough to be eaten, tossing out all others.
It's the type of simple assignment that can freeze people with indecision, the owner of the farm told me; people take a long time, worried that they're making the wrong choice, holding a given apple and obsessing over its merits and flaws. Wanting to prove that I wasn't a hapless city kid meant I did a hard stop on my perfectionist tendencies and began quickly sorting. Standing in the unexpected winter sunshine, I declared the means by which each apple would see its end, and how soon.
I finished the job in an acceptable time frame and was set to my next task: cleaning up a box of the last of our red onions, removing the top layer of skin, dusty and mottled in dark colors, molds of various kinds trying to take hold on the surface. I would never buy onions in such a state, and wondered that we would give them to others. Yet as I worked I learned what any farmer, of course, would have already known: the outer layer was hardly the whole story. This bit peeled away, the surface wiped down with a cloth, and the onion presented not only as edible, but desirably so. Those who stopped by the farm in the coming days would pause to admire their sheen and bold color.
There’s something to be learned from such small tasks, something about knowing not to be afraid of the signs of death, and how to find and maintain life within, essential skills for living in the material world. This working at the edge of decay is a defining feature of living, yet one we have sought to reject in recent times. It is the art of maintenance, of “keeping things up.” The art of repair. But a culture obsessed on the novel and shiny is more likely to tear down or throw away that which needs fixing rather than invest the time and effort to wipe away the patina of death’s attempted entrance. Our desire to write death out of the storyline means we create a world full of objects that can’t decay, and end up with oceans full of plastic. It’s not that everything is worth saving; we need the apple sorting wisdom alongside our onion cleaning know-how. We need to know when we ought let death come claim some for its keeping, recognizing that such loss may even generate new life down the line, after all the good rot does its work; we must also learn when some simple care allows us to access a hidden abundance.
This week I learned the word “morticulture.” In forestry, it is the companion to “silviculture.” Culture is to cultivate, to grow; “silva” is from the Latin for “wood,” so “silviculture” is the growing of the wood. “Morticulture,” then, is the growing of death. The study of morticulture, as it happens, has led to greater understanding of the extent to which trees in a forest, previously written off as uselessly deceased, are some of the most prodigious life-giving entities there are.
Any kid in the Pacific Northwest learns about nurse logs as part of the basic science curriculum, but our understanding of the importance of dead trees in old growth forests comes from a specific set of intentions to research the full life-and-death cycle of forests. The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, on the western slopes of the Cascades in central Oregon (territory of the Confederated Tribes of both the Grand Ronde and Siletz Indians, as well as the Molalla), was set up with the express intention to study decomposition. It is the site of the 200-year Log Decomposition Study (yes, you read that correctly: the study is intended to last for 200 years), and it is here that much of our knowledge about the cycling of nitrogen and carbon through trees–fallen trees, in particular–came to be formalized. Forest ecologist Mark Harmon, an Oregon State University professor who has been part of the research at the Andrews Forest since the 1980s, coined the term “morticulture” to help describe activities that encourage decomposition in the forest.
I may have sketched nurse logs on field trips to the banks of the Sandy River as an 11-year-old, learning about their importance for old growth ecosystems–how not just moss and mushrooms but entirely new trees could be born and nourished upon their decaying trunks–but here’s an historical fact omitted from those lessons: for years, many foresters once intentionally removed dead trees from the forests. They did so even when the trees were of no commercial use and even though the removal process was quite costly, thinking they were aiding the forest in doing so. It’s only in recent decades that foresters have let the dead trees be, that they might fulfill their role of becoming both home and food for other organisms.
Those old-time foresters would have tossed the onions, never understanding the beauty hiding underneath. As it turns out, their inability to see the potential for creative, life-generating collaboration with forces of decay and death in a forest has wrought more destruction than they could ever have imagined. I am talking, of course, about the fear of wildfire that held sway in forest management for much of the 20th century. As many of us are now aware, it’s not just the changing climate but a history of fire suppression policies that have led to the explosively hot and much larger fires of recent years. Somewhat belatedly, the Forest Service began to allow wildfires to burn, rather than immediately extinguishing them. Even more belatedly, public lands managers are beginning to turn to Indigenous practitioners of what is sometimes called “cultural fire,” in the hope of learning the well-established techniques for burns that were practiced before many of the original peoples in the Western forests were displaced and banned from continuing these practices.
Cultural fire differs from other forms of prescribed burns in that it is often linked to promoting the growth of useful plants or browsing space for animals critical to place-specific cultural practices. One might burn land to create habitat for certain oak trees and so increase the acorn harvest; with the intent of sparking new growth on existing trees, to later collect those new, thin branches for basketry; or you might venture up into the mountains to burn manzanita thickets and create better browse for deer. Cultural fire is a practice that demonstrates precisely how partnering with forces that seem intensely autonomous and harmful, such as fire, can create not just life, but lifeways. (A big thank you to NDN Collective, who offered sessions on cultural fire through their LANDBACK U program earlier this year. You can still sign up and access the recordings to learn more about cultural fire and how to support the work of Indigenous practitioners.)1
“The dead in a real forest belong,
they are beautiful there.
They die in each other’s arms”
-Joan Maloof, “Log Decomposition,” in The Forest Log
Forestry offers vivid examples of how our impulse to either deny death’s generative place in life (strenuously removing all fallen and decomposing trees) or to seek absolute control over what dies and when (claiming sole privilege over choosing which trees to cut, and letting no natural fire burn) results, ironically, in greater destruction, a greater number of individual lives lost. Are we surprised that trees would tell us that rigidity is never the answer? They, of course, know: bend, don’t break. Don’t run from death, but come walk alongside it softly in the forest, and see what you might make together.
We can reject such an invitation, and pretend there is no place for us to work at the active edge of life and death. We can let all the rotting apples spoil the rest of the bin. We can refuse our role as collaborators with forces that clear out whole swaths of life in the forest understory, and let that power grow until it has cleared out miles of towns and farmland as well. We can deny that even death sometimes needs a doula, and that humans are inherently primed for this role.
Or we can take hold of our fear, and learn the gardener’s lesson: we can know that a plant sown and harvested in earlier seasons need not be tended and nourished forever, and that decomposition has its joys. We can begin to see how practices like silviculture and morticulture are really twins, or see how the deceased are sometimes the most generous to the living. We can keep creating the conditions for dead trees to become nurse logs, for small losses to spark new growth. We can trust that sometimes speeding up death fosters future life.
And if such trust feels hard to nurture in ourselves—how could it not, in these recent years?—we can stay grounded in knowing that what sometimes seems beyond salvation still lives and glows within. That even the most inexperienced hand, with just a flick of the wrist, can shake away the threat of death to reveal worlds of bright potential.
The big ask from LANDBACK U presenters on this topic: Go tell the Forest Service to collaborate with Indigenous land stewards! Right now default procedures still lead to dismissal of Native participation in forest and fire policy, and an overreliance on the growing “fire industrial complex”--like all the various industrial complexes, you can bet this one is also problematic.