Darwin's Earthworms in the Anthropocene

Charles darwin's The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881) was the last book he published before his death the following year. The conjunction of worms and the author's death seems almost too on the nose. Yet, as a number of critics have observed, Worms is a surprisingly joyful book. Jonathan Smith, for example, writes that Darwin found the work of worms in reshaping landscapes "a cause for marvel and celebration rather than despair" (245). The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips makes the case even more strongly, declaring that Darwin looked to earthworms for "spiritual nourishment: for consolation, for inspiration, and even for the joy that for Wordsworth was nature's greatest boon" (46). Worms is no funereal valediction. It is "counter-elegaic" (Phillips 55), full of enthusiasm for the strange, teeming life beneath the ground we walk.

Since reading Worms, I have begun to perceive the world around me differently. When I walk through my neighbourhood, I no longer see just the trees and the birds; I have also started to cast my gaze down at the ground and to notice tiny holes in the earth, often marked by a small mound of pebbly black earth. These are worm burrows and worm castings, and, as Darwin points out, they may be small, but their impact is vast. Earthworms, Darwin shows, exist in great numbers—one of his sources estimates 53,767 to an acre in rural England—and they digest enormous quantities of soil, enough to plow the land, smooth out uneven terrain, and bury ancient ruins (159). "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world," Darwin concludes, "as have these lowly organised creatures" (313).

The worm book is mostly remembered now as one of the first scientific works to recognize and describe soil bioturbation. And a few animal-studies critics have latched onto the book for its innovative argument that worms are intelligent—Darwin contended that their efficient ways of dragging leaves into their burrows attested to something more than instinct.¹ But, as this essay will argue, Worms can also be read as a work that digests the Victorian virtues of didacticism, self-cultivation, and domesticity for the Anthropocene.² It teaches readers who might always have found worms slimy, unpleasant, or uninteresting to feel differently about these creatures. Earthworms, in Darwin's writing, figure as good gardeners and good housekeepers, making the earth into a home for themselves and, inadvertently, for us. His worm-keeping enacts and makes visible forms of interspecies hospitality that are more valuable than ever today.

Victorians' embrace of self-cultivation and domesticity has come to seem staid to many readers. The latter makes critics rightly suspicious because of its role in patriarchal ideology; the former is premised on a liberal humanist model of the subject that is outmoded these days. But I would argue that it is precisely these most Victorian elements that, with a little creative reading, are the most useful contributions Darwin's worm book can make to the environmental movement. The sort of self-fashioning I have in mind is less about Bildung and more about a sensory, affective pedagogy that transforms us on the level of feeling and habit rather than on that of conscious thought. Likewise, the sort of domesticity I have in mind is less about enforcing bourgeois norms and separate spheres, and more about accepting and offering hospitality, even across species. Living well in the Anthropocene is not just a matter of right thinking; it is also about cultivating affects and practices that can sustain us with the others we depend on. We might well despair at the abundant, biodiverse lifeways we are losing, but if we are willing to learn from Darwin and his worm-keeping successors, we can find ways to make, on this damaged planet, good homes for ourselves and others.

"These Lowly Organised Creatures"

In turning my focus to earthworms, I join a recent shift in animal studies that pays new attention to animals that...