At the age of 50, Nina Schoen expects to have a long life ahead of her, but has thought a lot about death- and why people are so reluctant to talk about it: "It's going to happen to all of us," she says, "but it should be a more positive experience than the fear we put into it.'
When she first heard about a new end-of-life process that turns the body into compost (堆肥)," I was really moved by the idea," says Schoen, who became one of the first to reserve a spot with a Seattle-based company called Recompose, the country's first funeral home to offer human composting.
Last year Recompose began transforming bodies to soil, more formally known as natural organic reduction. Before that, end-of-life options in the U. S. were limited to burial or cremation (火化), both of which come with environmental costs- U. S. cremations alone dump 1. 7 billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.
Katrina Spade pioneering the composting movement has spent a decade developing the process in hopes of offering people a greener option for death care." I wondered,' What if we had a choice that helps the planet rather than harms it?'" Spade tells PEOPLE." To know that the last gesture you'll make will be gentle and beneficial and it just feels like the right thing to do."
After she had her own two sons, she began to wonder what she might do with her body after death. A friend who knew her interest in the topic reminded her that farmers sometimes compost the body of cows, and that sparked an idea for her theory: "If you can compost a cow, you can probably compost a human," she thought, and she set about designing a facility to do just that.
"This is about giving people another choice," Spade says." At first, people react with shock一'You really can do that?' But so many people today are looking at their impact on the Earth. This is a popular thing because when you die, you can give back to the planet."
