The Architect Who Wants to Redesign Being Dead
What if We Composted Our Bodies Instead of Burying or Cremating Them? The Revolutionary Idea Behind the
If you happen to die in
After that, unless you've planned ahead for something exotic-donating your body to a university, burial at sea-you're headed in one of two directions: a casket or a furnace.
The American dead, like American voters, fall roughly into two camps. In this rough analogy, the conventional burial industry is like the
Many funeral homes offer both burial and cremation services, to be fair, but they tend to emphasize one or the other, depending on the kind of business they run and what part of the country they're in. The burial/cremation divide folSeattle-based lows an uncanny red-state/blue-state pattern. According to the
A small but growing constituency has been advocating for a broader spectrum of options, giving rise to the "green burial" and "alt-death" movements. This crowd advocates for home funerals, nontoxic embalming, natural burial grounds that don't require vaults (conventional cemeteries insist on concrete vaults so the ground won't sink as caskets decompose, which can make it more difficult to mow the lawn), an end to price gouging from predatory funeral homes, and so on.
All of which seems pretty modest compared to what
The
She calls her plan the
Spade alternately describes this process as "cremation by carbon."
Most importantly, no single body would undergo the process alone. Every body would have company on its way down. This is the
Compost is collective.
If you go to pick up the remains of a loved one at the
Spade's idea is being hotly discussed throughout the alt-death world, and funeral directors from around the country-especially those interested in consumer advocacy and green burial-have taken notice.
"She's struck a chord, no question," says
Two inspirations have been guiding Spade as she tries to bring the
Spade's second inspiration has been the research of soil scientists like
Years ago, if a cow or horse or pig died, a farmer could call someone from the local rendering plant to come by, give him or her a few bucks, and haul the carcass away to be turned into lard or soap or dog food. "Rendering is no longer economically feasible," says Carpenter-Boggs. "Partially because of the yuck factor, but mostly because petroleum and synthetic products started taking the place of all those materials." By 2005, she says, there were four or fewer registered renderers in
Carpenter-Boggs, a crop and soil scientist, first encountered mortality composting while working as a researcher for the
Many of the
Just about everything composts well, according to Carpenter-Boggs. An animal's soft tissue goes first, of course. Bones degrade not based on their size but their density. "Femurs break down easily because of the marrow," she says. "The microorganisms can work both the inside and the outside. But the scapula, the pelvis-where there's not as much marrow inside and the actual bone is thicker-can take longer." Bones react particularly strongly to air exposure. If they remain completely covered, they become soft. But if they are in contact with the air, they become hard and brittle. Wool is also slow to break down, perhaps because its protective oils impede the microbial process.
"That has been a little surprising," Carpenter-Boggs says. "There's so much protein in wool and hair."
And what about the odor? "It would smell a little different than a manure pile, but not unpleasant," she says. "Sort of a cooked odor. It didn't smell like rotting flesh. It didn't smell like meat... I was really surprised by how well it worked." Sometimes she'd climb onto a large pile that might contain several decomposing carcasses to measure the temperature and not smell or see any evidence that she was standing on rotting animals until she hit a bone with her thermometer, just six inches below the surface.
"There was no shortage of jokes about working for the mafia when I was doing this research," Price Youngquist says.
Nobody yet knows exactly what will happen to human bodies in this process. Earlier this year, Spade took a trip to
Spade is currently in talks with WCU to build some smaller prototypes of the
Of course, the nutrient value of human beings as soil is only a small component of the
She also has a connection to the greenburial world. From the age of 11, Price Youngquist spent every summer at
Price Youngquist has assisted one ceremony at White Eagle, helping bury a woman in a simple basket. "It was a very intense and strangely intimate experience with someone I've never met," she says. "The intimacy surprised me."
Spade's proposal, the
Rich soil is a disappearing resource: According to the
Who better to do it than us? While Spade's cultural proposal-that we can and should wake up from the illusion that our corpses are still individual persons-is the ambitious intellectual component of the
"We're humans," Spade adds. "We can do better."
When I visited Spade last October in temporary rented offices in
Cremation heat, ash, ephemeral Burial static, permanence
Chipper and slender, with short brown hair and a face that radiates good health and optimism, Spade is the opposite of the dour-faced undertaker cliché. But the arc of her life seems eerily suited to have produced this startlingly simple idea at the junction of bodies, decomposition, and aesthetics. She grew up on a dead-end dirt road in rural
Spade studied anthropology at a tiny liberal arts college in
After her grandfather was diagnosed with dementia, Spade and her partner moved in with her grandmother in rural
When asked for a specific example of what that means, she talked about "Pain mounds," named after French inventor and innovator Jean Pain, who discovered a way to harness the energy from compost piles to heat water and generate enough methane to run generators and trucks. Spade worked on a grantfunded project to build one and found it was a way of "powering a whole farm with decomposition" that, in the end, produced "a gorgeous pile of super-nutrient-rich compost." After 18 months, it would begin to cool off, and a farm would theoretically have enough organic material to build another mound.
Spade was accepted at the University of
"I thought, 'If they're growing up, I'm going down. Holy crap, I'm going to die!' Mundane, I know. But I wondered,
'What would my family do with me when I die?'"
As she began researching her postmortem options, neither conventional burial nor cremation seemed satisfactory. The former was too toxic and expensive, the latter too carbon-intensive. And neither seemed particularly meaningful to her. "I looked into natural burial," she says, referring to the handful of burial grounds in the countryside where one can be interred in a cotton shroud or simple pine box, without embalming or a concrete vault. "It's a beautiful option for rural people, but shouldn't there be some option for us in the city? What could be more natural than creating soil?"
Around that time, Spade was visiting her parents-which can always intensify a mortality crisis-and reading The World Without Us, a thought experiment about a post-human planet by journalist
"I don't want my last gesture as a human being, as I die, to be a big 'fuck you' to the earth," she says. "I'd rather have my last gesture be at the very least benign, or even beneficial. We are full of potential-our bodies are. We have nutrients in us, and there's no way we should be packed into a box that doesn't let us go into the earth."
Now that she lives in
"
But according to Doughty, the funeral industry is, in fact, screwed. The leaders of the industry are conservative and slowmoving. Many haven't begun to register the significance of the alt-death and green-burial movements. "They're so far behind, they're still talking about the threat of cremation," she says. This was echoed by a few funeral directors I talked to for this story, including one green-burial funeral director who wanted to remain anonymous but said that in 2011, "I was sitting in a big company's executive meeting and they were still talking about 'the cremation problem.'" According to the
An even more serious crisis than cremation is on the horizon for the conventional burial industry-baby boomers have never met a major life event they didn't overhaul and individualize. As boomers have moved through sex, marriage, and childbirth, they've left a trail of sex toys, birthcontrol technologies, DIY wedding ideas, doulas, alternative schools, and children who've never been spanked. "The WWII generation is called 'the silent generation' for a reason," says
The "I want it simple" ethos has also drained death of its ritual significance, Flowers argues. "We've translated simple into nothing... drained ritual out of our lives across the board." The boomers may want to bring ritual back, but if they do, it will be in their own image.
The result is a cultural climate primed for ideas like the
"It's important to undo the lockstep of embalming, undo the lockstep of cremation," Doughty says. In 2011, Doughty founded the Order of the Good Death, a loose affiliation of academics, artists, and death professionals who are the de facto R&D wing of the American death-care industry. Its members include Cassandra Yonder, a death midwife, who helps families with home funerals;
"Some people are doing big-ticket, fascinating things," Spade says. "Things that get covered in the Atlantic or Wired, and people not normally engaged in death and body-disposal technology are saying, 'That's so rad, let me think about what I want.' They're getting involved in things that are too fascinating to ignore, and not just micro-changes. You say, 'Do you know your ashes can be made into a necklace?' and its just Gasp! Shock! Awe, awe, awe!"
The conventional burial industry is unlikely to give in-and lose more of its business-without a fight. Activists like
In
"Our current laws and regulations about the disposition of remains are entirely arbitrary, entirely cultural, and historically bound," Slocum says. "Survey 10 people, and you will find someone who finds any given practice repulsive and someone else who thinks it's wonderful. We don't believe that laws should restrict individuals' options for disposition of the body unless there is a demonstrable impact of that disposition on anyone else's safety or health." But he acknowledges that Spade's project, and its quiet confrontation of our accepted death-care practices, "has an uphill battle... she's going to have to do a lot of patient and repetitive explaining."
In the course of working on this story, several death-care professionals referred to Dignity® Memorial-which has spent decades buying up mom-and-pop funeral homes and has been embroiled in legal trouble regarding its relationship with the presidential Bush family-as "the evil empire." Flowers, of Moles Farewell Tributes, says Dignity® has a virtual monopoly in some places. Dignity®'s parent company,
"They're masterful sales organizations," Flowers says. "Sometimes their funeral directors are even put on commission and say things like 'Let's choose a casket befitting his or her stature in the community.' No. Let's work with your budget. That is dignified."
Flowers points out that
Some of the industry's conservatism is profit-driven-but some is simply cultural.
"We all understand there's something horribly wrong with this merchandized form of death care, but you have to deal with the fact that it's set up that way," Sehee says. "Chemical companies founded the first mortuary schools, they worked with the casket companies, and they created long-standing, multigenerational relationships. Can you imagine if someone said everything your father, grandfather, and school told you was bullshit? Imagine what that would do to your world."
After years of trying to untie the knots in the industry, from the insurance companies to the funeral homes to the chemical and concrete manufacturers, Sehee thinks something drastic has to happen.
"It's going to have to be disrupted," he says. Projects like Spade's may play a part in that disruption, if only by getting people to talk about it.
In September, Spade convened a feedback meeting on the
It was a pun-heavy meeting. "Do you have a name for the column?" Doughty asked, referring to the core of the building where bodies would be composted. "The compostorium? The com-post-mortem?"
Later, someone suggested that Spade's ambitious vision was a "monumental undertaking."
Funeral professionals, like cops and reporters, seem to need morbid humor to keep themselves sane.
Spade outlined her vision for the way the core would work, the types of rooms and staff it would require (from funeral director to maintenance workers), potential templates for the laying-in ceremony, and her desire for each
She also outlined her often-repeated belief that death care "should be an extension of health care-if we did health care right. Then why, at death, would we turn the body over to private industry?"
The professionals asked their questions: How much compost would one person make? An estimated cubic yard, but she's still working with researchers on that question. Would it be a nonprofit? Probably.
What would happen to the compost people didn't pick up, or if they couldn't use a cubic yard? Perhaps there could be partnerships with the city or ecological nonprofits.
Would there be opportunities for volunteers? Probably.
Would people get the bones back? No, they decompose as well.
What about artificial hips and pacemakers? According to the current design, sorting out nonorganic material would happen at the end of the process.
Do you have a business manager or business plan? No, she doesn't, not yet. The professionals seemed to think she needed to work on that.
"It's not fun," Jorgenson told her. "You like design and anthropology, but you need a business manager."
They talked about how to market a project that was asking people to fundamentally rethink what they do with their dead. "Think of the cremation party line," Doughty said. "'It's simple, it's easy, it's better for the environment.' It's difficult to call it marketing or branding, but that's what it is." She suggested lines of inquiry for the
Whenever I asked anyone in the altdeath movement how they got there, they said things like "It's a bit of an odd story" or "Well, it's not a quick, sound-bite answer" or "I don't know how to answer that in a nutshell." They all-to a person-had a story that was personal and largely accidental. Often it involved the death of a young person who'd had the opportunity to take advantage of some of the newer aspects of death care (hospice, home funerals) and demonstrated how things could be done differently.
"I believe with every fiber of my being that the fear of death is our greatest enemy and has driven us to the brink of cultural destruction," he says. "We can't heal our relationship with the world until we heal our relationship with death. And Katrina's project, done well, could help with that." n
THE THREE-STORY STRUCTURE for composting humans could have a circular ramp to the top, for processionals and other funeral rites.
"She's struck a chord, no question," says one funeral-home director. "You go anywhere, and people are talking about it."
WITHIN THE DECOMPOSITION CHAMBER, each body would be separated from bodies above and below it by several feet of wood chips, straw, and other organic material.
An animal's soft tissue goes first, of course. Bones degrade not based on their size but their density.
THE MOST RADICAL PART of the design is that it dispenses with the idea of individuation in death. When you go to pick up the remains of a loved one, you would also get a little bit of whomever decomposed next to them.
It takes between 500 and a few thousand years to form an inch of topsoil, but only a year or two of farming and erosion to lose it. Our dead bodies could help the planet.
"I believe with every fiber of my being that the fear of death is our greatest enemy and has driven us to the brink of cultural destruction."
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