I have a new zine out, and this one is a little bit different.
Compost Futures is the second zine I have made in collaboration with the other co-directors of the London Science Fiction Research Community (the first being Gas in the Tank), and it is different to my previous zines for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that this zine has been published academically: it’s in the online supplement of the British Science Fiction Association’s two-part special issue on ‘Zoefuturism’, or ‘a futurism of connectedness, engagement, and relationality’, in their flagship journal Vector.
The second reason this zine is different is that it was written in collaboration with soil. Once we had written and assembled and printed the zine, we buried it for three weeks in the plaggen soil of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The idea for this came, among other things, from Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis’ writing about composting as a citational practice that draws knowledge from ‘arrangement of correspondences’ and ‘quality ingredients’, allowing these ingredients agency in the process of decomposition (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018, 34-35).
The soil was no stranger to this kind of collaboration—a plaggen soil is a type of ground that only forms after years, decades, or millennia of human intervention. But for us it was a new experience, and we learnt a great deal. For instance, we learnt that paper is a ‘poorly biodegradable organic waste’ (Yen and Brune 2007 in Yuan et al. 2012). It takes other kinds of organic waste in combination to speed up this process. What did this say about the quality of the work we were asking these microbes to collaborate with us on, from their perspective? What does it say about the futures of the work we are trying to do as academics, and the ways of dreaming, creating, and writing an open, undefined future we might need to explore, together?
We reflected on these questions more in the essay we wrote to accompany the published zine:
What future does this zine gesture towards? Is it one that invites further exchange between academics and soil microbes? Or is it one that artwashes the environmental harm done by paper waste? We hope it is not the latter—during the course of this project we discovered that despite paper’s reputation as an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic, both paper and paper waste still pose significant environmental problems. The production of paper creates large amounts of toxic waste, and despite being recyclable, paper accounts for over a quarter of landfill volume worldwide (Abushammala et al. 2023). The academic article from which we took our original estimate of paper decomposition rates was asking how we might reduce the methane produced by paper in landfill (Yuan et al 2012). The paper industry also generates nearly 2% of global greenhouse gas across its lifecycle (Furszyfer Del Rio et al. 2022, 1). Did the soil microbes and other life forms receive our zine as an invitation, as sustenance, or as yet another piece of exhausting paper waste?
There is no future alone, for either party. The topsoil in the Netherlands, where the zine was buried, is effectively human-made (Wesselink et al. 2006, 5). These ‘plaggen soils’ have developed over centuries in collaboration with humans, and with the manure and sod of human agriculture (Blume and Leinweber 2004, 37). Humans rely on the Earth, but that earth would be unrecognisable (and for some species, unlivable) if human intervention were undone. How can we better understand and care for each other, both as we are now and as we want to be? It is important too to place environmental impact into its own environmental context. 5.5% of global carbon emissions come from the world’s militaries, not counting the secondary impacts of war on the environment, including the pollution of the soil (Gordienko 2025). The struggles of nonhuman others are also our struggles.
Read more about the process of making Compost Futures, as well as the full zine (pre- and post-burial), on the LSFRC website. I am also uploading a print-ready PDF of the zine here for posterity.
And do check out the other brilliant contributions to Vector‘s two special issues on Zoefuturism. You can access these by subscribing to Vector‘s print edition (digital version free), or by waiting for the unsealing of the issues as part of the British Science Fiction Association’s open access archive.