X is a citizen who selects household garbage, has installed solar panels in his home, flees from air conditioning like the plague, travels by bike and has given up eating beef (or pork or other animals that humans have consumed since they are hungry) and, instead, gobbles down tofu burgers without question.
From an ecological point of view, X is a model citizen, doing everything he can to reduce greenhouse gases and protect the planet. Well, maybe X doesn't do everything he can, because his life commitment may continue postmortem, and he doesn't know it yet.
Gone are the times when my friend R. said that, after death, they could throw their mortal remains into the nearest container, and air. It was a way of showing his disdain for funeral pageantry, often inappropriate to the beliefs—or lack thereof—of the deceased, and almost always very onerous. But what before would have been an idea in conflict with public health rules would now also be an affront to environmentalism.
A few days ago, the BBC published a report in which, after stating that usual funeral practices produce a high carbon footprint, it proposed alternative systems for disposing of corpses. The matter is tricky, but it is worth knowing, for example, that a gas-fueled incineration generates as many emissions as a car that travels 600 kilometers. And that a conventional burial is not much better: the tombs and niches require concrete (in the production of which many gases are emitted), and certain coffin materials or embalming products are persistent pollutants.
Among the alternatives to these traditional methods are burials, let's say, light, without a box or any other impediment for the deceased than a linen or cotton shroud. The problem is that the corpses already contain microplastics or metals that will hardly disappear. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is fungal coffins, in which decay is accelerated and intensified. And, for the really demanding, there is another option: the conversion of the corpse into compost. To do this, it is enough to place the cold meat in a metallic container with microorganisms and an ad hoc temperature and, in a few weeks, its soft parts will be reduced to compost, ready to fertilize the garden at home. Bones and teeth are ground apart.
Citizen X may already be counting down the hours until he becomes compost. Others will not find it a seductive idea, because it is equivalent to rivaling the 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 become). But Genesis did not say anything about compost, which is the same as manure or fertilizer. In his sonnet Constant love, beyond death, Quevedo glossed the immortality of love and seemed to reply to Genesis: "Dust they will be, more dust in love." He would say that it would have been a little more difficult for him to write “compost will be, more compost in love”.
We'll see what our corpses end up fertilizing. In the meantime, while we're still alive, let's see what our lives can pay for. All in good time.
