Paydirt: Transforming the Economy, 2009
1 pound of worms + $5000 over six months in compost bin = Pay Dirt!
Troubled by the world-wide financial crisis that began at the end of 2008, I decided to try composting US currency in a worm bin as a way to meditate on the economy and the gap between what money represents and what it actually is.
I acquired one pound of worms and about $5000 worth of shredded currency. I put them together in an aerated container to which I added our daily kitchen scraps. With written approval from the US Treasury, the worms consumed, digested, and transformed the paper into dirt. During the course of the project several worms protested, fleeing the toxic assets, only to end up dead on my kitchen floor.
At the end of April I harvested the compost, also known to gardeners as “black gold” and I left it in a ceramic pot in our community garden. By June the pot was showing “green sprouts”*. Every year the New York Federal Reserve deposits three million pounds of destroyed currency in landfill. Landfills are the second largest human generated source of methane emissions in the USA. We’d only need about 17,000 New Yorkers with worm bins to keep pace with the Fed’s garbage. How’s that for Green Jobs? For more visit the blog As The Worms Turn
* In the spring of 2009 both Ben Bernake and Larry Summers used the terms sprouts of green and green sprouts to describe the initial signs of recovery in the economy.
Installation and Drawings of the Recovery Plan
