X is a citizen who separates household waste, has installed solar panels on his house, avoids air conditioning like the plague, travels by bicycle and has given up eating beef (or pork or other animals that humans have consumed since they were hungry) and instead gobbles down tofu burgers without complaint.
From an ecological point of view, X is a model citizen, who does everything he can to reduce greenhouse gases and protect the planet. Well, maybe X isn’t doing all he can, because his life commitment can be extended postmortem, and he doesn’t know it yet.
Gone are the days when my friend R. said that, after dying, they could throw their mortal remains in the nearest bin, and that’s what he did. It was a way of showing their disdain for funeral pomp, often inappropriate to the beliefs – or lack of beliefs – of the deceased, and almost always very expensive. But what would previously have been an idea in conflict with public health rules, would now be, moreover, an affront to environmentalism.
A few days ago, the BBC published a report in which, after stating that common funeral practices produce a high carbon footprint, it proposed alternative systems for disposing of corpses. The matter is truculent, but it is good to know, for example, that a gas-powered incineration generates as many emissions as a car that travels 600 kilometers. And that a conventional burial is not much better: graves and niches require concrete (the production of which emits a lot of gases), and certain coffin materials or embalming products are persistent pollutants.
Among the alternatives to these traditional methods are burials, so to speak, light, without a box or any other impediment to the deceased than a linen or cotton shroud. The problem lies in the fact that the corpses already contain microplastics or metals that will hardly disappear. One of the solutions proposed for this problem are fungal coffins, in which decomposition is accelerated and intensified. And, for the really demanding, there is another option: the conversion of the corpse into compost. For this, it is enough to place the offal in a metal container with microorganisms and an ad hoc temperature and, in a few weeks, the soft parts will be reduced to compost, ready to fertilize the home garden. Bones and teeth are ground separately.
Citizen X may already be counting the hours until he becomes compost. Others will not find it a seductive idea, because it is equivalent to competing with slurry and other organic waste with which it is usually prepared. It is true that Genesis already warned us that “pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (dust you are and dust you will turn to). But Genesis did not say anything about compost, which is the same as manure or fertilizer. In the sonnet Amor constante, más allá de la muerte, Quevedo glossed over the immortality of love and seemed to reply to Genesis: “Pulvo serán, mas polvo enamorado”. I would say that it would have been a little more difficult for him to write “compost seran, mas compos enamorado”.
We’ll see what they end up marinating our corpses. But while we’re alive, let’s see what our lives can spice up.
