This piece is a part of our series Metabolic Systems which looks into the cycles that underpin our cultures of consumption, from decay to digestion.
The modern undertaking of death and dying has always been about control. Control over the land, over decay, over what we leave behind, over whether we leave at all. It is a system that mirrors how we live: extract, enclose, consume, discard.
We talk about carbon footprints while we live, but rarely think of the ones we leave behind in death. A so-called “traditional burial” requires embalming, a process that fills the body with formaldehyde and arsenic, preservatives meant to hold time still. Pausing the show before the end credits run, so it never really ends. A chemical delusion. Every year, American cemeteries absorb over 4 million gallons of embalming fluid, 1.6 million tons of concrete, 20 million feet of wood, and 64,500 tons of steel. Cremation, though more compact, burns natural gas in a blaze hot enough to release 550 pounds of carbon dioxide per body.
In the face of climate collapse, we’ve been forced to think of alternative ways of doing things, a paradigmatic shift that is now changing our approach to death as well. A few methods are catching steam as we collectively reorient death toward a culture of return rather than resistance. There are mushroom suits, designed to decompose the body through mycelium networks. Human composting, where microbes and oxygen break the body over thirty days produces soil rich enough to nourish a garden. Craftswomen have revived the tradition of biodegradable, woven willow caskets. There’s aquamation, which uses lye and water to dissolve the flesh, leaving only soft bone. And then an alternative that is actually the oldest method of them all; simple, old-fashioned burial—without the chemicals or the steel—allows the body to fold back into the ground, slowly, dictated by the timelines of nature itself.
Degrowth thinkers have long argued that endless expansion—of markets, of infrastructure, of material accumulation—is a dead end. That we cannot consume our way out of crisis, that sustainability is not about doing the same thing with greener materials but about doing less. The industrial funeral economy, like every industry, demands growth. More land for cemeteries. More energy for crematoriums. More elaborate ways to hold death at bay. But what if the answer is to step away from all of it? To recognize that our bodies, like everything else, are already part of a cycle?
In the end, what we are talking about is metabolism. The body, in life, is a machine of conversion—turning food into movement, oxygen into thought, matter into energy. We metabolize the world, and then the world metabolizes us. The green alternatives to burial are not just methods of disposal but a return to the natural metabolic process, the same one that sustains forests, rivers, and entire ecosystems.
Of course, it’s reasonable to want a headstone to turn to, a place to ritualize your memorial of a person. There is comfort in the tactile motions of memory, a place to kneel, to trace a name in stone. But what if, instead of one place, they were everywhere? What if, rather than sealed off from the world, they were woven back into it? There is something more complete in that kind of return. Not a disappearance, but a dispersal.
For millennia, we’ve struggled to agree on or be sure of what happens to us when we die. It seems to me that a green death, at the very least, affords us some certainty about our existential itinerary. An afterlife assured, and plain for all to see.
For this installment of MOLD’s series on Metabolism, I spoke with two pioneers in this field. Michael Judd, is the co-founder of Morris Orchard Natural Burial Park in Maryland, where people can bury their loved ones in natural materials, directly into the soil, on a plot of their own in the vast acreage of the orchard.
I also spoke with Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, the world’s first human composting company, which turns remains into soil. While ‘natural burial’ is legal everywhere, human composting is only currently legal in twelve states, with several other states putting forward legislation to make it a reality.
The following conversations have been lightly edited for content and length.
Ludwig Hurtado:
What sort of work were you doing before you got into green burial?
Michael Judd:
Well, green or natural burial has been a natural extension of what I do. My work, my life, has been about working with permaculture design, holistic landscape design, and regenerative ways of working with the earth. Mostly, this has been through fruits, nuts, orchards, and food forests.
And 10 years ago, my father was diagnosed with mesothelioma and went through about a year and a half of transitioning toward death, which really gave us a lot of time to think about it. During that time we found out about the possibility of creating a home burial site where we live.
So that began the process of creating our own home burial site, which was surprisingly easy. I think in many states across the country, creating your own home burial site is actually straightforward and very legal.
To have that experience and have that time and intimacy with my father’s passing and then his final disposition into our natural burial ground really just kept us connected in the sense that he never left our hands. The experience profoundly changed me.
It fit into my life’s work, which is trying to work with the full cycle of being human on the planet, and thinking about how we can do it in a way that stays regenerative. I’ve gotten to see and live the potential for how we as humans can live regeneratively with our environment by living with the last of the Lacandon Mayans down in Chiapas. [While there, I] got to actually work with a huge food forest and realize that, yes, this is not just something that I’m reading about or that I’m hypothesizing about. This is something that we can do.
LH:
Green burial is still not the mainstream approach, but it’s growing in popularity. Why do you think that is?
MJ:
People are not so aware that there is another option in natural burial. I think a lot of people are only familiar with the conventional process and it turns them off. You know, the whole scene, being embalmed, having a viewing where you’ve got this makeup and you look like you’re almost alive. Sometimes the places those are held in, the whole shebang, the cost of all that, is a turnoff. And that might be the main reason that cremation is on the rise, you know, it’s surpassing, or already surpassed, you know, full body burial.
[With natural burial] it’s almost like this tide is rising now more than it ever has. That’s encouraging, but there are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions. People ask, “Can the bodies be dug up? Are bears and wolves gonna… you know, are we going to have cholera again?”
But most of the people I’m talking to actually, I find there’s already a sort of subconscious understanding, as if it was already understood by them somewhere. And it just needed to kind of be brought out.
LH:
It’s interesting how what are thought of as these radical or “new” ideas are really sometimes just the oldest ideas we could have.
MJ:
Yes. It’s not just an alternative. It’s a return to timeless traditions practiced by cultures worldwide for centuries. It’s like with permaculture and a lot of these other practices. It’s like, this is indigenous knowledge. This is an understanding of humans and being human that we’ve just sort of lost the practice of.
I think there’s a misconception that people think cremation is an environmental improvement. And potentially it could be to conventional full body burial. But it’s really wasteful, too.
So at the Morris Orchard, we also cremated internments around some of our trees and in the new orchard to help facilitate that closure while also helping balance the carbon footprint of cremations.
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Ludwig Hurtado:
What was your journey like going from Architecture school to building Recompose?
Katrina Spade:
I was in grad school for architecture studying design and I was feeling mortal because I had turned 30 a few years prior. I latched onto the idea of researching the funeral industry because it felt like a system that was, first of all, fascinating from a cultural perspective, but also from an environmental perspective. The funeral industry is this system that humans have designed, which is kind of what architecture is, broadly speaking.
Each of us has one body and each of us needs something to do with that body after we’ve died. And so I was especially interested in that physical body and how it has been cared for traditionally and over time and what the possibilities were.
LH:
A lot of people think of burial as the go-to tradition. Do you see yourself as completely upending that tradition?
KS:
Actually, if you live in the US, it’s pretty likely you will choose cremation. So, cremation, not recompose and human composting, has actually been what’s kind of upended tradition, because for a long time, burial was the most common way that someone living in the US was going to care for a body.
Back in the day, though, that also came with the family taking care of the person’s body that turned into, around 1860 as modern embalming practices were kind of invented, that turned into a very professionalized concept, like the care of the dead. The idea that you can’t possibly do that as a lay person.
That’s very similar, by the way, to home birth and then the medicalization of having a baby. But for 30 to 40 years now, cremation ––the consumer-driven choice of cremation has risen really rapidly. So today almost 60 percent of Americans are cremated.
And in a city like New York, San Francisco or Seattle, any of the big cities, that number is much higher. So then if you look at cremation, it’s like, okay, well, it’s certainly, you know, simpler than burial with embalming and all the bells and whistles of the casket and the headstone.
Obviously, it takes quite a bit of energy to cremate a body. Fossil fuels are used to do that burning. And for me, back when I started the work, it was even more than that environmental footprint. It just felt a little wasteful, like. This is something I leave at the end of my life. Couldn’t I give that back? Couldn’t I fold back into the natural ecosystem.
LH:
I imagine people come to you already aligned with at least the environmental mission of human composting. But what kind of challenges do you have, walking people through this new approach to the end of life?
KS:
Well, there are two types of clients for us, really. There’s the person that is pre-planning, 20, 30, 40-somethings who are like, “I know I want this. I’m going to sign up today.” That experience is often inspirational.
And then we have the folks who are coming to us because either they’re soon to die–they’ve had a diagnosis–or a person that they love or are close to has died, and that’s a different thing, right?
So they’re often quite vulnerable because there’s a lot of emotions going on. The grief can be very confusing and befuddling. And so our approach there is to be as crystal clear as we can be with people. We’re stripping away euphemisms. Looking for clarity is how we approach that conversation.
LH:
Right. So what does the service look like?
KS:
So most of our services have the body present, before we’ve placed the body into their composting vessel. If a family chooses, they can come to the funeral home. We have the body laid out, wrapped in the linen shroud, covered, usually with straw and flowers.
There are a lot of aspects that are familiar. There may be music, there may be prayer and there might be people speaking. So a little bit like what you’ve maybe even experienced in traditional services. But it’s in a space where the imagery, rather than being, say, a church, is forest, soil, and nature.
At the end of the service, the body is placed into what we call the threshold vessel. It’s a vessel that’s between the gathering space where the service is held and the operation space where people are composted.
And so we actually physically pass the person’s body through that vessel and that becomes kind of the closure, the last goodbye, the ritual of closure, if you will.
LH:
What’s the chemical process that happens next?
KS:
So, composting humans happens inside of a vessel, in a large container which we are aerating.
If you’ve composted at home, you know that composting is taking the right mixture of carbon materials, nitrogen materials, and a little bit of moisture, and letting microbial activity break down that organic material over time. So at Recompose we’ve placed a mixture of wood chips, straw and alfalfa into that vessel. Like a bed that smells like a meadow that’s just been cut. Then, we place the person’s body on top of it and cover the person’s body with more of the same. So, inside of this vessel, there’s a person’s body cocooned in plant material and then over the next so, the only thing that’s happening is we’re pulling air through the vessel to make sure there’s oxygen for those microbes.
The microbes begin to break down the body and the plant material right away. And we know that’s happening because heat is created through microbial activity. So on day one, we’re placing a body that’s been typically cool in cooled storage. So it’s like 50 degrees Fahrenheit. We see six hours later, 150 degrees Fahrenheit inside the vessel.
So that incredible spike in temperature is microbial activity beginning because all of the component parts are there. The carbon material, nitrogen material, we’ve, we’ve dampened all of that plant material, giving it a little air and that’s what we’re looking at. It’s off to the races, really. As a side note, someone once described that shoot in temperature as being the moment when the soul left the body, which I liked.
So, after about a week, when the temperatures start to fall, we rotate the vessel slowly. And that makes sure everything is mixed up. Anyone who’s composting knows mixing is a big part of composting; you’re getting the air to reach all parts of the material, and you’re exposing more organic material to the microbes. So we rotate about once a week after that. All right, so inside the vessel, all this is breaking down. One month passes, just about. And our team removes what now looks like mulch.
There is also bone. So the bone doesn’t break down in that month’s time. And we do, um, reduce the bone mechanically, like with a machine that’s pretty similar to what’s used in cremation at that point. You can come back to the cremation part if you want, but Once the bone’s reduced, we, that’s when we’re also sorting for like, is there any metal, um, hips or joints or dental implants?
That’s when we remove those non-organics. The soil and the bone, the reduced bone, which is kind of like sand at this point, gets placed now in a cure bin. Which is a large box that’s also aerated, and then it sits there and cures for about two to four weeks. After that, we can give the soil back to the family, or if they choose, we donate it to conservation efforts.
LH:
With the bone grinding, it’s an organic material, so can it just go right into soil? Or is that toxic?
KS:
Well, it continues to break down. It looks and feels like sand once we’ve rounded it down, and that is what’s essentially bonemeal that is placed back into the soil, mixed well, and keeps breaking down once it’s put in the cure bin. It’s actually really great for plant life.
LH:
What were the design challenges that you faced as you were coming up with this idea?
KS:
We’re now on iteration number five of our vessel. We use a hexagonal framework, which I love because number one: it kind of reminds you of bees and nature. Number two: hexagons are an extremely efficient use of space. They’re more efficient structurally than rectangles or squares. But inside of the hexagonal frame, the vessels themselves are cylindrical. So a question of how are we gently placing a body into that cylinder? It’s not obvious, right?
LH:
You faced a legal challenge, right? And still do?
KS:
That was almost as challenging as the design. The first question was, could we get around the law as it stands? And so finding the right person again was key. I found this amazing law professor who’s an expert in cemetery and funeral law, and she [liked] what we were trying to do, but it’s completely illegal. Then the question was, how do you legalize it?
And the first answer is every state is different. Like funeral laws, state by state. That’s both a challenge and also a benefit because it’s easier to tackle a state than federal law. Luckily, I was based in Washington state which has reasonable, straightforward funeral law.
And so we started here, and I found my senator. We drafted a bill with his office and actually passed it in the first session, which is pretty wild.
LH:
Why do you think that it’s been illegal in the first place?
KS:
So it’s not illegal. It was just not legal. The way almost every state has their funeral law is they list the allowable methods of human disposition. Usually, it’s burial, cremation, donation of your body to science. Those are the typical three.
Alkaline hydrolysis is another process that’s legal in 17 or 18 states. So, we were saying: “okay great, there’s the list, we want to add human composting to that list.”
