A natural death
Kitchener environmentalist wants people to be able to turn their remains into soil
WATERLOO REGION — Susan Koswan doesn’t expect her death to come any time soon, but when it does, she wants to be buried near a tree. And, in a way, to come back as one.
“My interest is to compost dead people and turn them into trees,” says the Kitchener environmentalist. The idea had been with her for a while when her parents died, and after her mother was cremated and her father was buried, the longtime environmental activist wanted to find alternatives that didn’t include the use of fossil fuels during cremation and embalming chemicals in burial.
“My original idea was to do something called a bug-a-torium.” Koswan pictured a building that would house the flesh eating larva that are often used to clean bones of soft tissue in museums, but she quickly gave up on the idea.
“As soon as you mention maggots, people freak out.”
With some research, Koswan discovered The Urban Death Project, an organization run by
Katrina Spade, an American architect, who had already done work on human composting.
The public benefit company, now called Recompose, claims that bodies that are put into modular vessels, and covered with wood chips and aerated, turn into soil in about 30 days.
Inspired by Spade’s work, Koswan created the Good Green Death Project and approached Waterloo Coun. Mark Whaley and cemetery manager Bryce Crouse to begin a conversation about a composting service.
Whaley had already been pushing for a green burial section at Parkview Cemetery in Waterloo but had not thought about composting.
The city has since made 108 burial lots available for green burial, restricting interments to bodies that have not been embalmed and are contained in a shroud or biodegradable container.
The section has no traditional grave markers but will eventually have a single communal burial memorial that will list the names of those interred there. It is one of six recognized sites in Ontario.
“I think the population is going to slowly warm up to the idea of green burial,” Whaley says.
“I support the change away from filling our cemeteries full of noxious, evil stuff that lasts 1,000 years. When you cremate people there is a huge environmental cost to that.”
Despite that Whaley still isn’t on board with composting.
Current laws prohibit human composting and Whaley also sees problems with public perception.
“As a policy-maker I want to move slowly on this. How we moved from regular burial to green burial is such a gigantic leap forward,” he says.
“She’s asking us to make another leap forward. I can’t see us moving as quickly as she would like.”
Koswan also met Ellen Newman, a funeral director and a member of the Green Burial Society of Canada. She would later join the Good Green Death Project.
Newman thinks that a green burial site, where there are no individual markers may be a difficult sell to some people but thinks that the way it is explained is important.
“The feeling of being in the presence of your loved ones isn’t necessarily captured by the marker,” Newman says. “It becomes a place not only to commune with the individual who has died but to commune with nature that that person is now a part of.”
Newman says that composting takes the principles of green burial and accelerates it.
“The generation that’s dying right now, it’s not something they really want,” Newman says. “It’s the people that are younger that are saying ‘I want to become a tree.’”
Koswan’s plan to is to incorporate a hospice where people can spend their final days with loved ones and have a composting facility all on the same property.
“In the best of all worlds, once the deceased has been composted, family and friends would honour their memory by using the composted remains to plant a memorial tree or scatter in woodlands or a pollinator meadow on-site,” says a statement on the website for the Good Green Death Project.
Koswan says the land could be given a conservation easement, meaning it would be protected as if under conservation guidelines. And because it will become a cemetery, it would be protected in perpetuity.
“We’ve met with the government and they’ve given us some questions and we’re building a business plan,” she says, adding that she recently completed a Sustainable Business Management program at Conestoga College and is slowly building a team of people who want to push the concept toward reality.
“First of all, we have to change the law,” she says. “Then there may be some religious concerns about this. It’s really just an education. At one point cremation was not allowed by the Catholic Church and now it is. I think it’s a matter of process.”