Rethinking (De)growth: the politics of compost

Document Type

Journal Article

Role

Author

Published In

Contemporary Political Theory

Volume

25

Article Number

45

Publication Date

6-16-2026

Abstract

Moving beyond economic analyses of degrowth, growth and consumption are reframed through decomposition as a vital process through which life, value, and politics are continually re-composed. Against dominant imaginaries that cast decay as waste or ruination, this article turns to composting and carrion ecologies to articulate decomposition as a generative undoing and a mode of transformation that binds waste to worth. Drawing on multispecies examples from vultures in India to the Baltimore Compost Collective, the article situates decomposition as both material process and political metaphor to enact a revaluation of growth, decay, and consumption that unsettles capitalist logics of extraction and accumulation. It traces how practices of decay can cultivate livability and collective flourishing in the very sites marked by abandonment and disgust. In doing so, it challenges growth’s moral hegemony, recasts the ‘de-’ of decline, decay, and decomposition as a source of ecological vitality, and re-embeds growth within more-than-human cycles of breakdown and flourishing.

Keywords

anthropocene, compost, consumption, decomposition, degrowth, multispecies

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