In December, New York state passed a vital law that’s important to me and mine even though I live across the country: natural organic reduction, also known as human composting or terramation, is now legal in New York. Terramation is the process of putting a body in a biodegradable shroud with wood chippings and other organic matter like straw, and putting all of this into a pod or receptacle where the natural microbes in that matter and in your own body will break down the body over the course of about a month. At the end, voila, you are approximately a cubic yard of dirt. This is a process that’s been happening in a less-timely form since humans have existed—an ashes-to-ashes speedrun, if you will. The only difference between terramation and what happens when you just dump an unembalmed body in the ground is that terramation is quicker (and guaranteed be complete, unlike the rare burials we still find of Neanderthals and whatnot who somehow after thousands of years are still there).
The organization that pioneered terramation, Recompose, will donate your earthy earthly remains to a conservation project trying to help ravaged and nutrient-stripped forests, if your family doesn’t want them. Remember being a kid and saying when you died you wanted to be a tree? Congratulations, that’s terramation. It’s better for the environment—soil aside, there’s no release of greenhouse gases like there is in cremation and no toxic chemicals pumped into your body or giant use of land like in traditional burial—and also, you get to become a tree. Actually become a tree. Cremains are inorganic matter that can’t grow anything, while terramation produces soil that can grow whatever you want. For me, as a Jew, this feels like the ultimate form of burial—we’re not supposed to embalm, or use expensive caskets, or even be buried in clothes (you wear a shroud and that’s it), you just go back to the earth G-d made you from. Terramation? Just a way of doing that without the going-into-the-ground part.
And Fox News. Is pissed about it.
Death-positive movement leader Caitlyn Doughty of Ask a Mortician put together a video showcasing the reactions of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Weirdly, Glenn Beck ends up coming down on the side of “I think it’s cheap but if you want to do it go for it I guess,” which is...at least better than Hannity? But that’s a very low bar to cross. He spend his entire segment reading off the description of terramation in a mocking voice and suggesting it’s done via maggots, which is...impossible because there are no flies in with the remains. He also makes this weird jump of “become dirt, plant food in dirt, make Soylent Green,” which...hate to break it to you, Hannity, but 1) that’s not how Soylent Green worked, watch the fucking movie and 2) all food is grown in worm poop. All of it. And some of that poop is human remains, because embalming as we know it has only been around since the Civil War and there are a lot of pre-Confederate bodies buried across this nation, and a lot of postwar people for whom embalming is religiously or spiritually unacceptable. Meat is also reliant on poop because the stuff the meat eats when it’s still on the hoof is grown in worm poop. If you want to be weird about how nutrients get into our crops, I can be weirder. Or, you know...I can accept the lessons taught to me by Hans Zimmer and Elton John when I was, uh...six, and take my place in the circle of life.
(I was going to put a Lion King meme here, but DKos wouldn’t let me, so just imagine it for me instead and laugh.)
…..and then there’s Sean Hannity. Who claimed, repeatedly, that human composting means throwing a body in with your old potato peels and carrot tops. Which, I mean. A dead body wouldn’t fit in my vermiform bucket and also my worms really prefer onions over any other food I give them, but nice try. He and his guest, Lynda-who’s-a-producer-on-his-show-I-guess, start obsessing over growing food in terramated remains, because all of Fox News is weirdly fixated on the idea of cannibalism, apparently. Also, when did Fox News start approving so much of backyard gardens? Aren’t they supposed to be allergic to all that eco-friendly stuff? Can I get them to take on my HOA so I can finally put good use to my front porch and get some sugar pumpkins going?
Anyway: it’s good for the environment, and no, it isn’t “cheapening life.” It’s nothing more than what we’ve done for millions of years. So of course, the right-wing news cycle has to lose their damn minds about it.
In the meantime, if you want to support the nationwide legalization of terramation—which is currently only available in six states—you can support the organization The Order of the Good Death, which is working on legalization, here. And if you happen to be the one who somehow ends up responsible for my post-corpse life: terramate me, dump me along the monarch butterfly migration corridor, and plant some milkweed in me. It’s what I want.