And To Compost Ye Shall Return

A story from NBC News by Tafline Laylin enlightened me to a new way to enter the hereafter, converting your dead body to compost.

"When Americans die, most are buried or cremated. Washington could soon become the first state to allow another option: human composting."

They don't call it "the left coast" for nothing.

"The novel approach, known as 'recomposition,' involves placing bodies in a vessel and hastening their decomposition into a nutrient-dense soil that can then be returned to families. The aim is a less expensive way of dealing with human remains that is better for the environment than burial, which can leach chemicals into the ground, or cremation, which releases earth-warming carbon dioxide."

The process of turning a body into compost will also release carbon dioxide.

"Pedersen (Washington State Senator (Dem) Jamie Pedersen) sees recomposition as an environmental and a social justice issue. He said allowing it would particularly benefit people who can’t afford a funeral or aren’t comfortable with cremation. Recompose aims to charge $5,500 for its services, while a traditional burial generally cost more than $7,000 in 2017, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. (Cremation can cost less than $1,000, though that doesn’t include a service or an urn.)"

5,500 bucks is still expensive, but frame anything as an environmental and social justice issue and your bill is sure to pass.

"The push to allow composting of human remains originates with Katrina Spade, 41, a Seattle-based designer who started focusing on the idea in 2013 while working on her master’s in architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Spade’s initial goal was to design a system that would restore people’s connection to death and its aftermath, which she said had been severed in part by the funeral industry. A friend introduced her to the farming practice of composting livestock after they die. Called mortality composting, the practice has been shown to safely keep pathogens from contaminating the land, while creating a richer soil."

The funeral industry has severed people's connection to death and its aftermath!? Are you kidding me? That would kill their business.

“'It was like a lightbulb went off and I started to envision a system that uses the same principles as mortality composting … that would be meaningful and appropriate for human beings,' she said.
She worked with researchers at Western Carolina University and the Washington State University to turn her vision, which she dubbed 'recomposition,' into reality.

"Recomposition" sounds much nicer than "composting".

The process involves placing unembalmed human remains wrapped in a shroud in a 5-foot-by-10-foot cylindrical vessel with a bed of organic material such as wood chips, alfalfa and straw. Air is then periodically pulled into the vessel, providing oxygen to accelerate microbial activity. Within approximately one month, the remains are reduced to a cubic yard of compost that can be used to grow new plants."

I wonder what they do with the stubborn bones? So does the Roman Catholic Church,

An earlier version of Pedersen’s bill, which included alkaline hydrolysis but not recomposition, failed in Washington in 2017, which Pedersen attributed to opposition from the Roman Catholic Church.
Thomas Parker, a former lobbyist for the Washington State Catholic Conference, said the church was concerned about dissolved human remains draining into sewers.
Alkaline hydrolysis may go against Catholic doctrine that requires the human body to be respected, said James LeGrys, theological adviser to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. LeGrys was unfamiliar with recomposition, but noted that it could be problematic if body parts are separated in any way.

In a post at Crisis Magazine, John Horvat II comes down hard against this proposed practice calling it, "Human Composting: The Ultimate Denial of the Soul". Here is a taste of his argument,

"Human composting is not just a practical alternative to burial. It is an eco-religious act. Its advocates openly promote it as an expression of social justice and ecological fervor. It fits into a pantheistic worldview where everything is reduced to matter in constant transformation..."

"Some practical-minded people will find little wrong with this process. They will claim that the useless corpse is put to good use by enriching the soil and preventing the release of Earth-warming carbon dioxide. What difference does it make if the person’s final resting place is at the base of a tree rather than laying in a grave?
Indeed, it would make no difference at all if there were no soul. The great accomplishment of the ecologists who created 'recomposition' is not engineering the mechanical contraption that turns humans into compost. It is overturning those “unwritten and unchanging laws” embedded in human nature by which people have sensed the need for reverencing the dead from time immemorial."

"The seemingly harmless process of 'recomposition' is like the proclamation of an anti-metaphysical manifesto that implicitly denies the existence of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and the need for Redemption. It leads to still more radical insinuations that life is meaningless, and history is pointless."

I am not sure that his arguments will carry the day, but he is correct that the proposal fits well with a pantheistic worldview in that some people will opt for "recomposition" with faith that they will live on as a tree.

As to his argument that human composting implicitly denies the existence of the soul, I cannot agree. It may deny the sanctity of human remains by spreading your compost on unconsecrated ground, but I don't see where it denies the soul.

I do think the idea denies the laws of economics. After all, you can buy a 50 pound bag of composted cow manure from Home Depot for just $4.87.

Spread that around your fig tree but don't spread me.