The Urban Death Project

In 2011, artist Jae Rhim Lee presented a TED Talk entitled: “My mushroom burial suit.” The video now has more than a million views on TED’s website, and in it Lee details a startling new technology she has developed: a body bag used for burial that decomposes the corpse within it. I was immediately excited to hear of Lee’s work. While the suit is certainly unconventional, it is appealing in nearly every other sense.

Human bodies are chock-full of toxins that would pollute the earth were we to place them directly into the ground. They would pollute our soil and waterways, so Lee’s suit uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies. The mushrooms grow off of human organic material, sprouting from a specific body’s very veins. There is no need for the creation of a coffin or the energy used to cremate a body in this system. The body gives back, very directly, to the earth. It completes the cycle of life in a way that the finality of a wooden box or incinerated flesh does not. There is no end to its fruit; it is cyclical in the purest sense.

But like Lee’s suit, my reaction to her proposal may have been unconventional, either. Not all viewers agreed with her method like I did. Lee’s “Infinity Burial Project” never really took off. It hasn’t fully reached mainstream media, and popularity, following its initial soar, has dipped.

Now in 2015, a new proposal has come out, with motives similar to the mushroom burial suit. Named the “Urban Death Project,” it proposed the creation of a facility in major cities for bodies to decompose and be transformed into fertile soil, which in turn would help grow trees that would memorialize loved ones. Posted on Kickstarter, the project is near—but has not yet met—its goal to raise $75,000.

Perhaps the Urban Death Project is even more ideal than the body suit Lee presented four years ago. It marries the sacredness and rituality of death with a model that does not seriously harm the earth like all current popular burial practices do.

But for many, the idea of composting and reusing the nutrients in our bodies is, if not appealing, disgusting, and many have again reacted negatively. After the 70s sci-fi classic Soylent Green (in which food is made from dead bodies), reactions seem  to be typically negative.

Condemnatory headlines read “Urban Death Project Wants to Compost Your Loved Ones.” And others oppose it for religious reasons. Some religions mandate embalming the dead or cremating them, and the Urban Death Project clearly does neither. But its creator, architect Katrina Spade, assured critics that her aim is not to disrupt religious tradition; rather, it is to provide an alternative burial for those who may seek it.

Death and burial are, by nature, sensitive subjects. And while our current burial practices may have seemed impractical or strange in the past, they are the currently accepted norm. Wide-scale changes to those practices will take more than a mushroom suit or a $75,000 Kickstarter campaign, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t to come in the near future. Both Lee and Spade’s creations manage burial peacefully and environmentally. Neither has malicious intentions. All they ask is an open mind at the end of life. ♥