Dear Darwin: Yours in Compost and Curiosity

Dear Mr Darwin,

I am a woman from 21st-century southern India. For over a decade and a half, I have thought about you and spoken of your work on public platforms whenever the chance arose.

You might assume that it’s to do with your monumental The Origin of the Species. It isn’t. It’s something humbler: earthworms.

There’s a reason for writing this letter to you now. I hope its purpose will reveal itself as you read. 

Have you ever cried over dead earthworms? I did. A whole tankful. Thousands, maybe more, of pink, soft-skinned, earnest creatures. I saw them squirm in pain, trying to escape through the mesh lid I had placed over the large cement vermicomposting tank. Others floated motionless in the waterlogged bed of my failed compost experiment.

They were not killed by predators. They did not die of starvation, either. All it took was a wrong recipe, a shut tap. And overenthusiasm.

In those moments, I thought of you. Not for your monumental theories that still help us as we navigate our lives through this world’s complexities. But for something else, something far more innocent and quieter. Something that I read between the lines you have written in your The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.

This book of yours—published in 1881, six months before you passed on, and sold more copies than The Origin of Species—landed on my desk like a quiet instruction. Not the dry kind that tells you what to do or what not to do, but something more enduring. One line struck me then and has stayed with me since:

“For the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of worms.”

It took me some time to understand how your words have since been summarised using modern phraseology:

“All the fertile areas of this planet have at least once passed through the bodies of earthworms.”

Initially, I found your devotion to earthworms, which you kept sacred for forty years, a bit quaint.

This is not to judge those worms unworthy of your attention, but just oddly tender for a genius like you to spend decades experimenting, observing, and being in constant conversation with them. But only when my life began composting itself—undergoing changes which were unfamiliar to me till then, shifting under the weight of failed projects which were funded by public money in my gated community—did I find myself turning to the very same creatures you once so patiently watched.

I don't know how it began with you. But in my case, it was not reverence. Not even curiosity to understand them. But as a solution to a problem that needed urgent attention.

In 2011–12, while helping set up a scientific waste management system for my 202-flat apartment complex, I ran into all kinds of problems. Our kitchens were leaking peels, bones, coffee grounds—and complaints. Waste piled up faster than conversations. Black plastic bags stuffed with garbage, tied and dumped in corners, looked ready to explode.

We got segregation going. Contrary to our fears, the system fell into place within days. Hundreds of kilos of neatly sorted kitchen waste entered the compost unit each day. But the composting system we had couldn't keep up, and hence, the search for a better system began.

Since I had prior experience in waste segregation, the community asked me to lead this initiative. Despite my farming background, I soon discovered that composting with my own hands meant something else altogether. The mystery lay wrapped in fear of smell, effort, and even touch.

After a few failed attempts, someone suggested vermicomposting. The method sounded elegant, manageable. More importantly, cost-effective and efficient. The worms would do the job while we kept generating waste. Or so we thought.

As a child, I remember digging out earthworms in our coconut farm. The soil was thick with them, especially after the rains. I would dig into the jasmine beds with bare hands, hold them up with a stick, and then release them back, watching them wriggle into the dark. I didn’t know they were blind or deaf. No one told me. But the workers said that if one got cut into two, the other half would soon grow a head.

In my Standard IV Kannada textbook, they were simply called Raithana Mithra—a farmer’s friend. I took it at face value.

But now, older, more foolish, and in charge of a community composting initiative, I returned to worms with a kind of desperation masquerading as curiosity. Among other things, I turned to your book. It felt good to know I had developed an interest in something that had kept you engrossed for four decades. I often pictured you at your desk in Down House, surrounded by boxes filled with waste and worms, peering at their castings, scribbling in the margins of your notebooks. Above all, I found you humble before what most would never care to see.

I wanted to be humble too.

I got three cement tanks built in our composting unit—long beds slanted toward drainage outlets. We fastened steel mesh lids to keep out predators, especially snakes, since recent sightings had the community on edge. We hired an expert and got a pilot going in one tank. 

We readied the first layer with semi-decomposed organic matter and sprinkled red wigglers, ideal for warm climates. Children from the community joined us. Some giggled, others shrieked. I remember one little boy saying, “They look like noodles but alive.” It was a joyous occasion for the community. It took off well.

Then came the heat.

It was April, and the roof trapped the heat beyond our expectations. Moisture evaporated too fast. I instructed the staff to moisten the beds and keep the tanks lidded to prevent drying. One staff member, unknowingly, poured buckets of water and shut the drainage valve. The excess moisture had nowhere to go. The worms couldn’t escape through the mesh.

A couple of days later, after a few residents complained of a stink coming from the unit, I visited the room.

Most of the worms had drowned. Thousands of them. A few had managed to escape and curl up underneath the lid. Others, bloated, were still trying to find their way out. By the time I opened the lid, they were floating belly-up. Their soft, unseeing bodies bobbed gently in the water-logged bed. It was a painful sight.

I thought of you.

You wrote:

"Worms are poorly provided with sense-organs; they cannot be said to see, though they can just distinguish between light and darkness; they are completely deaf and have only a feeble power of smell; the sense of touch alone is well developed."

And yet, somehow, in their sensory silence, they knew how to persist. How to remake the world through digestion.

You also wrote:

“Archæologists are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects. Coins, gold ornaments, stone implements, &c., if dropped on the surface of the ground, will infallibly be buried by the castings of worms in a few years, and will thus be safely preserved, until the land at some future time is turned up.”

In a sense, not just the “fertile areas of this planet,” but civilisational successes and failures, dreams and defeats, ego and hubris, loves and losses—all have passed through the gentle bodies of worms once nurtured by the earth’s green mantle.

You believed archaeologists owed a debt to worms.

I owed them an apology.

When the expert we had hired came to inspect, he asked for moisture readings. In a panic, I lied. I said we hadn’t overwatered the tank. I didn’t want to admit that the entire experiment had failed because of human error. But failure smells. In this case, it was undeniable. I went home, heartbroken.

We called in a truck to haul away the rotting mass. It took days to clean and for the stink to vanish. For days afterward, I refused to step out of my home. When I finally did, I avoided eye contact with even my friends. Some gently suggested we give up the composting idea altogether. Others muttered about “snakes” or “health risks.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t stop thinking about the worms. I nodded politely to everything people had to say and then revisited the composting unit. Tankfuls of emptiness gave a thousand pieces of advice. Giving up wasn’t one of them.

I didn’t know if it was the tanks speaking, or whether the absence of those dead worms held its own kind of wisdom. For a moment, I wanted to be like them. Not the ones that died, but the very idea of being an earthworm. The way they live in darkness, digest decay without judgment, and yet nourish life. The way they persist through all seasons, refusing to give up on even the toughest of waste.

I wanted that kind of faith. I wanted to believe in the process once again. To find wisdom in darkness. To trust in quiet transformation just as they do even when I could not clearly see the outcome. I wanted to believe in the possibility that failure, too, can be generative.

So I got permission from the community's management committee to try again.

This time, we simplified everything. Only garden clippings mixed with cow dung, no kitchen scraps that might harm them. We let the mixture darken for weeks before introducing the worms. No fanfare this time. No community sprinkling ceremony. I locked the door myself and gave access to only one trusted staff member.

The work began again. Just quiet labour, slow munching, and moving. The worms, bred in captivity, went at their own pace. They stayed where they should: just a layer below the semi-composted mass—in darkness.

I realised the worms did not particularly like the spotlight. So I offered none. The idea was to work alongside them on their terms. Not mine anymore. Perhaps that’s what humility is. And the best part is, it can be learnt.

Within ten days, the surface began to shift. The semi-processed leaves lost their identity and transformed into black granules. The worms multiplied. I gently brushed away the upper layer and saw them everywhere, wriggling deeper. Some days later, the smell turned from dung to earth. And after about forty days, I dug my hands in and pulled out compost that crumbled like cake. That moment—fingers sunk into black gold with a pleasant earthy smell—it felt like redemption.

I imagine you might have felt the same after years of dedication. It might not have been a sense of triumph for you. Perhaps just quiet awe. In my case, it was both.

My daughter, then four, would follow me into the compost room. She had no fear of the worms. Once she picked them up gently and smiled: "Such lovely pink skin! So beautiful, no?" A few weeks later, during a school show-and-tell demo, she showed the entire vermicomposting process. At the end, she held out a handful of worms and invited her classmates to touch and feel them. The entire classroom ran out screaming, including her teachers. She didn't flinch. She placed them back carefully. Later, when I asked her about it, she just shrugged. I realised then that what felt symbolic to me was simply Tuesday afternoon to her. Her tenderness—and the ease with which she handled worms—amazed me.

Many in the community volunteered to harvest the compost, gently separating the worms and placing them in newly prepared tanks. Several said it was the first time they’d touched worms. And on August 15th, India’s Independence Day, our community celebrated the success by buying vermicompost for their home gardens. Such moments don't come often. When they do, they feel like homecoming.

You understood that, I think. That feeling of homecoming made us bold enough to complete the original mission that prompted these experiments in the first place. From the second batch onwards, we confidently added uncooked kitchen scraps: vegetable peels, coffee grounds, organic matter, and even egg shells that had overwhelmed us initially.

When you wrote about how worms buried grand architectural wonders, were you hinting at something larger? Yes, they could bury entire Colosseums under their castings. They even buried Cleopatra, who loved them so much that she sentenced anyone who harmed them to death.

Maybe you were trying to say that transformation happens below the surface. Slowly. Through repetition. Through unseen work. Because you had witnessed their quiet labour for so long—and in it, a kind of truth no human society was keen to hear.

And yet here I am, a woman in 21st-century India, chasing worms through compost beds and finding in their wake the same truths you found in 19th-century England. History repeats. On different scales. And it shows that decay doesn't mean the end, nor does silence mean absence as the worms have shown. Finally, waste is actually a resource if properly understood.

Failure, too.

The worms taught me something that goes far beyond composting. Without any grand theory, they helped me see that first tank not as a disaster but an initiation. A slow unlearning. They taught me to pay attention—to not measure success through perfection, but through persistence and perseverance.

I no longer run the compost unit in the same way. Another team of volunteers took over. Then another. And one day, some of them felt there was no need for those tanks. They demolished them and set up a different system. I didn’t know for a long time. One day, I happened to visit the unit, hoping to at least see the empty tanks.

But the room was empty.

Something jabbed at my heart. This emptiness hurt. This time, it was pure absence—beyond redemption. It showed how even successful experiments can be ephemeral. That sacred space, which taught me to see the world differently, was erased forever. "At least they could have told me before they razed the tanks," I muttered.

I went back home and cried.

And yet, I recall my association with earthworms since childhood—through textbooks, failure, triumph. I don’t know what your final thoughts were about them, or if you had time to scribble them down. But you showed me that simply watching something closely was also its own kind of devotion.

Thank you for showing me that science could be patient, even reverent toward the subject. That even in those creatures whose existence is taken for granted, there is room for wonder, tenderness, and love.

Yours in compost and curiosity, 

Savita