Ayana Young  Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Katrina Spade.

Katrina Spade  There are more ways to care for bodies than cremation and burial. Metal caskets to embalming to the concrete box that that casket is put in—all of that is this kind of perverse-like protecting of the body because nothing will preserve a body forever. And so being able to embrace that decomposition, that beauty of that process, which is creating soil all over the globe, which means new life is created out of death.

Ayana Young  Katrina Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a public benefit corporation leading the transformation of the funeral industry. Katrina is a designer and the inventor of a system that transforms the dead into soil (aka human composting). Since founding in 2017, Katrina and Recompose have led the successful legalization of human composting in Washington State in 2019. Recompose became the first company in the world to offer the service in December of 2020. The process is now also legal in Oregon, Colorado, Vermont, California., and New York. Katrina and her team have been featured in Fast Company, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka fellow, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator.

Katrina, thank you so much for being with us today. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this conversation unfolds.

Katrina Spade  Thank you for having me.

Ayana Young  So I am thinking about how we want to open this potentially winding conversation, and I think I'd love to start with a really solid understanding of what Recompose does, and the design behind your work. So if you could offer us some insights into what the Recompose process is and the design and practice that went into making this a reality, that'd be really wonderful.

Katrina Spade  That's such a good place to start because Recompose was inspired by lots of different things, or I guess by a few very specific things. And especially without the benefit of visuals, it's really good to get into what we do and the process.

So I'll start with the inspiration. I was a little over 30, setting the scene for you. It was 10 years ago. I was in graduate school for Architecture and I had one small child… I had two small children, but one of them was just a couple years old. And so he was growing up on that very obvious day-to-day, the kid is getting older, right in front of my very eyes situation. And I just remember, and I credit him for this whole thing coming together, looking at him, his name is Kale, and just realizing that he's growing up really fast, and so am I. And someday I would be, God willing, 70 and 80, and someday I would die. So I had turned 30 and I had a small child who was growing up so fast, made me feel my mortality. And then because I was in graduate school for Architecture, I had the luxury of thinking about design, thinking about systems that humans create, and have created. And because I was feeling my mortality, I started to look into the American funeral industry, which is just a fascinating industry historically, and, and sort of systems-wise. So that was the groundwork for how Recompose came to be. 

So I started to think about my own body, and what would I want when I died. Very simple question. Very personal and, again, connected to the design, but also just like what would I like to have? And I come from a family that's not religious so I don't have faith tradition that leads me to a particular choice. And so I was looking at the two main options we have in the US: cremation and conventional burial. And they use conventional instead of traditional if you can come back to that, but very specifically. So conventional burial is where the body is embalmed and buried typically in a casket, which is then placed in a concrete grave liner, which is then in a cemetery with a headstone. And so that's when I say conventional burial that's what I mean.

And so cremation and conventional burial were, I guess, still are the two main options that are widely available in the US. And I knew I didn't want either of those, and I pretty quickly found out about a practice that is typically called natural burial or green burial. This is something that's practiced all over the world today. It's part of many faith traditions. It is different from conventional burial because you're placing the body into the ground with limited additional stuff. So typically either just a shroud or a pine box, the body goes into the ground in that shroud or that pine box. And it's a way for nature to take back that person's body. And really, it's a, I think, in a lot of ways, perfect funeral option—natural burial. So when I found out about that option, I thought, That is beautiful. I'd much prefer it to cremation or conventional burial. But I love living in cities, and so do billions of people around the globe. So, again, from a design perspective, the question I started to ask was, How can natural burial as inspiration become appropriate for those of us in urban settings, knowing that natural burial does take land? You need land for any type of burial. And so that was really the first main inspiration for Recompose was placing a body into the earth and letting nature take over. So natural burial again, it's almost a perfect system. And body goes into the ground, that piece of land may be connected to conservation easements or conservation trust or conservation work, or might not be, but either way, you're really letting nature do the work of caring for bodies. 

 And so as I was exploring that idea, my friend, Kate, we had a phone call. And she knew I was looking at the funeral industry, she also knew I was and still am, obviously, kind of a compost nerd. And she called me and asked me if I knew about the practice that farmers use to compost whole cows and horses. When if they can't be eaten, farmers for a long time have composted cows and horses. And when she told me that it was truly like a little light bulb went off, and I was like, Ah, if you can compost a cow, clearly, we're not that different biologically, you can compost a human. So that's where it all came together, again, this was just about 10... well, a little more than 10 years ago now. 

And so I started to write a thesis for Architecture school with a place in which we would compost humans, and transform them into soil. And I realize it's helpful for folks who don't know to hear that composting... you know, what happens in the ground in the soil is decomposition. But composting is human-lead natural decomposition, and it's typically a way to accelerate what would happen naturally either out in the forest or under the earth. So when you say composting, it's not just what nature would do in a burial ground, in a graveyard. It's actually putting together the materials that create the perfect environment for microbial activity to break something down. And in this case, we're using composting and plant material to break a human body down.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I want to hear more about this specifically. And there was an article called "Life After Death: What Human Burial Options Will Look Like in a Sustainable Future" by Joan Meiners, and she writes, quote, "Spade's design features human-sized honeycomb shaped vessels stacked three high in a tranquil indoor garden-like space open for family visitation. Using a balance of woodchips, alfalfa, straw, and airflow to create the optimal environment for microbial decomposition activity. She's already producing usable biohazard-free compost," end quote. So yeah, I'd love to hear more about the tangible material process of this and even if you could get into the specifics of sourcing materials, etc, that'd be really interesting to hear.

Katrina Spade  So that was actually a beautiful description of Recompose. The most tangible difference between natural burial and human composting is that human composting takes place inside of a vessel. And the Recompose vessels...my brother-in-law actually helped design the structure that holds these stainless steel vessels, and it is a honeycomb design. Hexagons, as a side note, are really great structurally, they're very strong shapes, but they're also a way to use space efficiently. If you imagine a honeycomb, it's taking making use of space in a way that a grid, like a checkerboard, does not necessarily do. If you're trying to place cylindrical vessels, which our vessels are in, on the inside cylindrical, then using hexagons as the framework is a really efficient use of that space. And of course, it makes us think of nature as well. So I just love that those hexagons have so many purposes. But inside of the Recompose vessel, the basic process is: our staff first, mixes up a blend of woodchips, straw, and alfalfa. And that's a perfect blend of carbon and nitrogen materials and it's also a mix of materials that has the right structural property so that airflow can keep happening. If you imagine that sproinginess I want to, I'm not sure that's a real word, but the sproinginess of woodchips, alfalfa, and straw in a mixture like almost like a salad, smells like a fresh cut meadow, really allows airflow to happen. And we create a bed of that material inside of the vessel, place a person's body on top of it, and then cover the person's body with more of that same material.

So the person is cocooned inside of a mix of woodchips, alfalfa, and straw, inside of a vessel. And then over the next 30 to 40 days, the vessel is doing a couple of things. Number one: We're aerating. We're providing oxygen to the microbes that are doing the work inside, we're constantly pulling a slow volume of air through each of the vessels. And that's ensuring, again, that the microbes have oxygen, and they can break down everything inside of that vessel. The second thing the vessel's doing is: each one has two temperature probes inside it. And so that is important because when the microbes are working, they are creating heat. Typically, when we place a body inside of a vessel, we've received it, it's usually been then stored inside cooled storage on site for a couple of days, even a couple of weeks. So the body itself is very cool. And we do that so that we can wait for potentially a family to arrive and have a service. We don't embalm bodies, which slows the decomposition process, because what we're trying to do eventually is actually encourage and embrace the decomposition process. But placing a body in cold storage is a very common way of holding onto it until it's time for, in this case composting.

So we've placed a cool body into a vessel. The plant material is a fairly cool kind of ambient temperature. And after we've done that, typically six to 12 hours later, we see temperatures inside the vessel rise to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit. And what that means is that we've set everything up perfectly for microbes to do the work. And it never ceases to amaze me that that temperature rise happens so quickly. But those temperature probes inside the vessel are showing us that the temperatures are staying high. We want to make sure that's happening because that's what ensures that pathogens are destroyed. That's what ensures that the soil we give back to families or use in conservation efforts is safe. So our team can see the temperature of the material inside the vessel on basically a minute-to-minute basis. So that's the second thing the vessels are doing. They're telling us the temperature inside. 

 Usually, after we've placed a body into the vessel, we see those temperatures rise. The temperatures stay sustained over 131 degrees. That's the magic, biological number that we want to see it above. Typically we see that sustained above that number for about a week. And as the temperatures start to fall a week later, our team presses a button and the vessel slowly rotates. So that's the third thing that the vessels do. They rotate slowly for a couple of hours, once a week or so, to get the temperatures back up by mixing ensuring airflow, and like any compost—if anyone out there has composted, you know, you need air, you need to mix materials so that the air can reach all of the material and the microbes can thrive. I'm counting the things it holds the material, tells us the temperature rotates is aerated. Those are the things that the vessel is doing.

 After about 30 to 40 days our team removes the soil and screens for nonorganics like if you have a titanium hip or some other sort of metal implant, those get screened and recycled. And our team takes the bone and they place it in a piece of equipment that reduces it to a sand-like size. Then our team takes the reduced bone and the soil and places them together in a cure bin where cured for another two to four weeks. So the whole process might be two to two and a half months, it depends every single person's body is different. And nature is not on a deadline as we know. But after that time, what you have is beautiful compost, and families either come to recompose to pick it up, and use it to grow their gardens or plant a tree. Or they can donate it through us to conservation efforts. We have land partners that use the compost to help regenerate different forests. We're in the Seattle area, so a lot of forests and different restoration projects tied to conservation lands.

Ayana Young  Wow, that's really fascinating to learn about and I definitely have questions of how you even came up with all of this, because it seems complex, and like there has been a lot of trial and error. And I guess, besides the question of how did you even come to this process? I think there are also people who might be saying, Well, where did the woodchips come from, or the alfalfa or the straw? Is that sustainable in the way that you are sourcing the materials for the process? So maybe if we could speak to both of those things, or you could for us that would be really helpful to understand more deeply. 

Katrina Spade  Well, in terms of the materials, the woodchips, the straw, the alfalfa––we're always looking to improve that. I'd say that's, that's a big kind of last to-do list for Recompose is to really dial in on where we're getting those materials, whether it's ideally, locally, regionally, and then there is any kind of processing of those materials coming in, for example, the straw we use is chopped to a couple of inches. And so we were just discussing, in fact, a couple of minutes ago in the team, when it would be time or make sense to start chopping that straw on site instead of buying it chopped already. So those are ongoing discussions. And they're actually all tied to the question of the carbon footprint of this death care option. 

Katrina Spade  I started thinking about this because I suspected that cremation and conventional burial had carbon footprints that were too big to be comfortable for me in terms of aligning a death care choice with the way I've tried to live. But to be fair, I wasn't first thinking about the carbon footprint. I was first thinking a little bit more conceptually, I guess. I felt like cremation was a little bit wasteful. I'll have something left when I die right in my body, even if it's small and withered at that point. How can I give that back rather than burn it up? So that was the sort of conceptual thinking there. 

 And then on the conventional burial site, I knew I didn't want to place this “stuff,” is the best word. I don't want to judge it and say it's waste because if you love the idea of burial then a casket isn't waste at all. But I didn't want to place stuff in the ground. And I didn't have a whole lot of interest in having a headstone in a cemetery. So as I continued to research, I found out that both of those options, cremation, and conventional burial, have almost the same carbon footprint. Because on the one hand, you've got cremation with the burning of fossil gas. And on the other side, you've got the manufacture and transport of caskets, engraved liners, and headstones, and then the upkeep of the cemetery--mowing and watering, kind of forever, right? Those two practices have their own carbon footprint. 

 What I love about human composting is you avoid the footprint of the manufacture and transport of all that stuff and the upkeep of the cemetery. And you avoid the burning of fossil fuels. But we're also sequestering carbon into the ground into the soil where we want it. It's not going into the air. So there are two pieces to the carbon savings with human composting. One is the avoidance of emissions, and the other is the sequestration of carbon in the process. So for those out there who like a carbon number, it's about a metric ton, a bit over. It's a metric ton plus of carbon saved per person who chooses to be composted versus cremated or buried in the conventional way. And that can add up over time as more and more people choose it for sure. 

 When we think about plant material, and where we're getting that material, all of that goes into those calculations. Currently, our team is working on calculating those numbers again, because we've adjusted lots of the equipment over time. We want to make sure we've got accurate numbers. And one of the things I recently found out was that what doesn't go into consideration in all of those calculations is the benefit to say the forest. If the compost is going to the forest, that carbon benefit of growing those trees is not taken into consideration. So good news, I suspect the number will be higher. And in addition, we're always looking at things like how far is that plant material coming from, that straw? those wood chips? 

 And I realized, you'd asked a little bit more about the design process, and I love talking about it. I don't even I don't know how accurate this is, but I'll float it by you and see what you think. I went to Architecture school late and I was a dabbler in design. I just liked moving things around on paper, or honestly moving furniture around in my living room. And I just liked thinking about how spaces affect me and people around me that it took me forever to realize, like there are careers in design, you can go and become an architect, and went back to school after I was already 30, which is fairly late for something like that. 

 I tend to think all of us are designers even if for the people who are like I just wake up and that's not the thing I think about I don't think about the clothes I wear or the way my house looks kind of feel like even that is a design choice. And we're always all kind of constantly designing our lives. So I chafe against and sort of push back against the idea that there are people who are expert in design. It's really an iterative process, and anyone can start to think about how space is affecting their emotional state. Does it bring you joy, does it not? I do think there are people who can visualize something easier. I know like my dad's like, I can't imagine what that would look like, but your mom can imagine what it would look like. So I get that. But I think there's something really powerful about recognizing that all of us are designers in different ways. But going back to the design process, I guess, it's always been about one step in front of the other—taking on something that might seem incredibly daunting. When I started again, back in school 10 plus years ago, there was no part of me that thought this was going to exist in the world. There was no part of me that was thinking about a business model, or was it possible to actually build this? And so I had this freedom of just imagining a space for the dead where we'd compost them with no doubt that it couldn't be done, because that wasn't the question. Not a thought about budget, nothing. So then, when I approached it as a thesis project, presented that thesis project to my professors sort of got the, This is great for my parents and close friends, but kept getting indications from people beyond my parents and close friends that it was something that they would actually really like to be composted rather than cremated. And so then sort of took the next step, but only the next step forward. That's very similar to the design process where you're trying to bite off chunks that are chewable. I think at some point, there was probably a moment where I started to look wider and think about the whole project of bringing human composting to life, from a regulatory legal standpoint, through the biology and engineering of the process and vessels, to fundraising. How the heck do you get the money together to do this? So it pretty quickly became a whole project and seeing the whole is really important. But every day, I mean, just this morning, I woke up and I was feeling just a little edge of anxiety, for whatever reason. And I said, just go in and literally take one step and then another step, and you'll get to the next spot. So— 

Ayana Young  Yeah, and you know, just thinking about how huge the funeral industry is. Back to that article "Life After Death: What Human Burial Options Will Look Like in a Sustainable Future," Joan Meiners also writes quote, "Conventional burial commonly costs American families between $8-25,000. In the US the Green Burial Council reports the custom also results in an estimated 64,500 tonnes of steel, 1.6 million tonnes of concrete, 20 million feet of hardwood, 17,000 tons of copper and bronze, and 827,000 gallons of toxic formaldehyde, methanol, and benzene embalming fluid being placed underground with the deceased. That's not to mention the lead, zinc, and cobalt used in some casket designs that might also leach out into the surrounding environment," end quote

Oof. That's a lot to take in. It doesn't surprise me, but it does. It does still feel shocking to see those numbers. And yeah, how do you subvert this or these truths without falling back into the profit traps of what is a billion-dollar funeral industry?

Katrina Spade  Well, I mean, first of all, it helps that I didn't do this for the money or as a business plan. I see money, we are in this capitalist system, and I see those funds as fuel to make this exist. And I've had to reconcile that existence within the capitalist system. And I am still not very comfortable with it all and I decided that the most useful maybe thing I can do with my life is to make human composting exist in as many places as possible. So if that answers your question about the billion-dollar funeral industry, that's the start of it anyway. And my whole team finds joy in making this available and working with families to help them understand what it even is that their loved one might be choosing, in spreading the word that there are more ways to care for bodies than cremation and burial. Like we find such joy in doing that, and, you know, it is my job to make sure that as we do it, we're creating something sustainable, that can exist so the business model has to be sustainable, but it's so far from the first focus. Because if we're succeeding, in doing the process beautifully, and caring for families, in making more people aware that this option exists, that all feeds into the sustainability long term.

 I wanted to go back to your question about the funeral industry and the design intent there because I think you kind of really just hit on it a little bit with that last, quote. The funeral industry in the US for a long time, or actually, since it started existing as a formal industry, which was, by the way, in the 1860s after the Civil War. The funeral industry's first focus, at the beginning, I would say was protecting the body from the earth's elements. There's this really awesome newspaper clipping from 1875, or something, and it's an ad for a funeral home. And that ad is about how we can protect your loved one's body from the earth. Which I mean, it is the precise opposite of what we're trying to do at Recompose where we're trying to embrace or not even trying to 100% embrace the earth's process. We need it, we love it. It's what we're, you know, trying to mimic and replicate and embrace. Metal caskets to embalming to the concrete box that that casket is put in, in almost every cemetery around. All of that is like this kind of perverse, like protecting of the body. Which, by the way, you can't do forever anyway. Because nothing will preserve a body forever. But it's also being able to embrace that decomposition, that beauty of that process, which is creating soil all over the globe. Fresh soil is created from that natural decomposition, which means new life is created out of death. And that's so I mean, in a way, it's so easy, you know, to like, of course, we want to go that way. Because it's, it's so easy. It's natural. It's natural.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I think it's really fascinating how much the overculture has conditioned us to not just be afraid of death, but afraid of allowing our bodies to be consumed back to the earth because to me, that seems relieving--that the body reunites with the soil and feeds and part of me wonders even where did this idea come from? You know, it's interesting to hear from you about the Civil War, the news clipping you found? Yeah, I wonder, I don't know if this is even something we can talk about. But who thought this was ever a good idea to poison our bodies, so that they wouldn't return or it would take a while for them to return? So there's Yeah, this cultural question for me. And of course, the healing of that cultural question, which is, how do we create ritual and heal ourselves in our psychology so we can let go, we can surrender, we can reunite back with the earth. 

 And then maybe one more tangent on this is I find it really interesting how, of course, we don't want to let our bodies go back to the earth and we don't really want to let any of our legacy go back. And when I say we, I'm kind of talking about the overculture "we," the dominant culture "we." Like I think about buildings. And there's, you know, we put formaldehyde in plywood, we, put formaldehyde in our bodies, we don't want to let the buildings we build rot, although they still will rot. If the tendency to want to cling to our short lifespans or the lifespans of what we touch in this world. I've just really tried to sit in the complexity of what our belief systems are, and our value systems are, in order for us to be so afraid to let things surrender back to the bigger process of life and death. So I know this is a bit esoteric, but I am just trying to get to the root of what has even led us here, to begin with.

Katrina Spade  Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. Two things come to mind. One is just that a few years ago, after grad school, I kept trying to feed the idea and step by step the idea gets it somewhere, but for a long time, it was very much a concept. Like for years, or six or seven years, it was just a concept. Now it exists, but it didn't for a long time. And so I would be talking about it and often getting pressed from just the fact of the idea, which by the way, is fascinating if you think about that. But then I remember this one email I got from someone who was like a tech guy who was working on a mortality fix. So like, let's solve for mortality. And he was really, really mad. I'm not sure really why he was bothering to get mad. But he was really mad that I was working on this because it went against the idea of fixing mortality, which is a very, very tech-bro kind of thing to tackle. But which, and I feel related, because I'm just like, I know, none of us want to lose anybody. And frankly, I am not yet comfortable with the idea of my own mortality. Full disclosure. I'm trying but I haven't gotten there. But like, I also know that I don't want to live forever. So it's interesting to me that people are trying to make it so you could live forever. I think that's actually really beyond. And it feels related to not wanting your buildings to fall down and not wanting your bodies to rot in the ground or to decompose.

I will say an interesting fact about the American funeral industry. So embalming is practiced almost exclusively in the US and Canada. The rest of the world doesn't practice embalming. In any great, you know, numbers. Maybe if someone needed to be transported to a far distance, they might think about using embalming as a process. The process of modern embalming was invented by a couple of people on the battlefield in the Civil War. And they found that they could charge soldiers before battle. And if those soldiers died in battle, these enterprising people would involve them, I think they used it wasn't formaldehyde, but something similar. They could embalm them and send them back to their families on the hot, hot train. And then, after that practice came up in the Civil War when Lincoln died, he was embalmed and taken on, I think, a 16-city, kind of final goodbye by train. So all of these people saw this preserved presidential corpse. And it's often talked about as a really good marketing—no, I don't mean to laugh, but it is sort of funny—like a really good marketing trip. And so that's where modern embalming began. 

And then, as the funeral industry sort of saw that that was a great moneymaker, they also started implementing more and more licensure and schooling required for professionals to be able to do that procedure. And so that's my understanding of where today's American funeral industry has come from. Now in the 60s and 70s, cremation started to become a little more popular. And the funeral industry by and large said, like, No, we are not going to touch that because what we like to do is involve people and sell people fancy coffins and have a cemetery. Cremation has risen very quickly over the last few decades, but it's been mostly consumer-driven, like the public has said, No, I don't want burial. It's too expensive. I'm not interested anymore in having a plot than a summit in a specific cemetery. I'll take cremation. Thank you very much. But that was interestingly not exactly by design of the funeral industry but came up more from the public's interest.

 So today what we have in the US is actually cremation rates are somewhere I think around 58%. In Seattle, 96% of people are cremated. And so I'd say conventional burial is kind of going away for most people and cremation is what's left as the other choice, definitely less expensive choice. People perceive it as more environmentally friendly, which isn't, but it has that perception for some reason. And so with human composting, we often recognize that we're mostly talking to people who would otherwise choose cremation when we're trying to say, well look at this option, like consider being transported into soil, instead of ash. We're mostly talking to people who would otherwise choose to be cremated.

Ayana Young  Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And to dive a bit more into the topic of soil. Yeah, I guess I'm wondering about the ecological beauty of this work and the ways our bodies can nourish the surroundings, which we kind of spoke to a bit before this moment. And I just love to hear more of your thoughts on this intimate connection between death and life ecologically, and how the soil created from our bodies can be kind of passed forward into restoration or regeneration.

Katrina Spade  Well, a couple of things. First of all, I'll just describe what we're creating... As we transform bodies into soil in these vessels, and then they go through that soil goes through the curing phase, which results in the end, I've started to describe a little like a very fine mulch, or like a compost. like a rough compost. What is very cool about the process is during composting, well, first of all, pharmaceuticals are broken down, pathogens are broken down, and also DNA starts to break down, molecules are being rearranged and atoms are moving around, and what results is no longer human. And I find that so beautiful. It is intense, that we could change from our human form to something else, but I find it only comforting and beautiful. And so then as that soil is brought to a forest and placed in the forest, it is taken up into trees, and, you know, you, you get to literally become that forest, the birds eat the berries on the tree, and we're suddenly truly rejoining this very grand ecosystem, not just figuratively, but actually, truly and literally rejoining that system. I find that to be the closest thing I guess I have to religion, and so very comforting. 

 I find it really interesting, about half of the families we work with, decide to donate the soil. And so then it may go to that forest. In fact, probably almost certainly will. And the other half come to Recompose and pick the soil up from our team. And what I love about that moment, number one, they get to meet the team that's tended to their person's body for a matter of months and tended to the transformation. And then also some of the stories of how people have used that soil are really stunning. I think my favorite today is still: This person died and he'd been a gardener and he lived in Seattle. And he died and his sister came and took all the soil back to his neighborhood in Seattle. And all of his gardening friends came with five-gallon buckets and got some of his soil and brought it back to their gardens. And so it's not a majestic forest. It's a neighborhood garden and another neighborhood garden and a, you know, parking strip. But there's something to me that's really lovely about being folded back into that city that you loved as part of nature in the city.

Ayana Young  Oh, yeah, I agree. And I'm just visualizing the community gardens and yards being fed. And I think it's important you know, as you started the conversation talking about urban spaces and communal spaces and of course, there's forest spaces too. But I appreciate how Recompose looks at all the many ecosystems that are in need of attention and intention.

And yeah, I guess that's the next question that I've heard us both touch on but the importance of death rituals and the possibilities of creation. There's an article called "Is Composting the Future of Death?" from The Takeaway and you say quote, "It really is about creating more choice around death care, giving as many options as possible. We're certainly not saying that human composting is for everyone. If you want to be cremated, you should have that option, I believe. If you want to have embalming and a big fancy casket by all means, you should have that as well. But for those of us who are trying to align our death care with our life experience, and some of the values we hold, dear, I think this is a really exciting option," end quote. And so I yeah, just want to ask more about what possibilities are there for creating new death rituals for reconnecting with the value of making and taking time around death, both for grief and for processing

Katrina Spade  I think we started the conversation talking about inspiration and I mentioned natural burial as a huge inspiration for human composting and Recompose. The other big inspiration for me early on, when I was researching alternative ways of approaching death, and there's beautiful work by people being done to give folks back the experience of when someone dies. Everyone can be a designer, maybe, or an expert in design. Everyone has the capacity and the right to know death and to experience it fully. There are people who are trained as funeral directors, some of whom are on our staff, and there are people who are trained to do human composting, and they are very, very good at what they do. And so, you know, they are the experts in many ways, but each one of us has the capacity and again, really deserves the right to experience death because it's such a critical, meaningful, and even beautiful piece of life. A great example of folks working to make sure that people have that experience in that right are death doulas. Who are people that train in many parts of the end of life, but one of the things that a death doula will train you to do is have a home funeral. Home funerals are practiced all over the world today, they've been practiced for millennia. It's how we used to care for our bodies as we would die, and our families would care for our bodies at home. And until a professional industry came up, that was the way it was done. 

And so home funerals, today are a way to say "Wow there is a lot to be gained emotionally, by practicing that, by having a person's body at home after they've died." When my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law died separately, a few years apart—after each of their deaths, we had their bodies at home for a number of days, in fact. Which is perfectly legal, and perfectly doable. But so many of us don't know that's possible. I happen to be part of a family on my girlfriend's side that knows it's possible and sees the beauty and value in doing it. And so some of that early experience I had in sitting with these people who I'd love, their bodies there, sitting with them, watching my kids, sit and interact with those people's bodies, that really informed Recompose today, and how we want to consider the families and the experience of those families and to provide them with every opportunity and encouragement to be part of the death care process. 

 So what that looks like, here's a couple of ways that that we sort of show up for that idea. One is: we work with a transport team that goes to the place of death and picks up the body and brings it to us at our facility in Seattle. And that's not uncommon. But the transport team we work with is really, really a lovely group of people. And they're thoughtful when they pick up the person's body and they'll talk to the family about you know Would you like to help me load your loved one into the minivan? Do you have music that you'd like me to play on the way to Recompose that your person loved? Those really small, intentional actions can have a huge impact on the person. At Recompose, we have a room we've designed called Cedar and we've designed it as a place for families to have a small gathering like four people, six people, be with the person's body and then do whatever feels right to them—to design that death care time themselves. So we have running water, it's a beautifully designed space, the chairs we thought so much about the chairs and how they would really hold you and support you. You might play music, you might brush your person's hair. You might do your person's nails, you might simply sit in silence. You might do ritual washing or prayer. And all of that is really for the design, again by the family and close friends, and our team is so there for helping that family and friends, if they want help in designing those moments. It's not a blank slate, because actually, it's really hard to design from a blank slate, but it's also not prescribed what you would do in that room

Ayana Young  Sounds really beautiful and grateful that you give people that space to find their meaning and their moment with their people. I could see how powerful that could be. And there was an interview with Madam Architect and you say quote, "Natural burial is almost a perfect system--a body is placed in the ground with a simple shroud or maybe in a pine box, and then nature takes over. But of course, this time, this takes time to do so. It takes land to bury someone, and in cities, we don't have that land to allow for that regenerative process," end quote. And of course, you touched on this at the beginning of our conversation, but I think it's you know, it's so important to maybe give a little more attention to in this conversation. And I am wondering how you see your role in the development of this practice and recognize that people have been taking a compost approach to death for 1000s of years, while you know, of course, also thinking specifically about the very material design for our future, because we have a really large population. And, you know, there's definitely I don't know if it's a design problem to consider. But if you could share more details of how you're thinking through the future of death,

Katrina Spade  I'm pretty focused on providing the option of human composting where people want it, which is a big endeavor, right? So the first six years of this work was sort of a proof of concept, would it really work, what needs to happen to make it available, and that included legalization, and that included piloting it and all of those things. And then the second, maybe four years of it has been, let's create the place and the system and make and start doing it. So my main goal now is to make sure that human composting is available anywhere it's wanted, with a focus, as you point out on urban centers, because if natural burial is a beautiful idea, and we should have more of it, but it takes land, it's a great option for rural settings. So if human composting is focused on urban settings, that to me makes a lot of sense, because it's a process that uses a vessel that then gets reused in a matter of about a month, and can be more scalable as a system than something like burial. So my goal now is to bring Recompose anywhere it's wanted. Our team has a new 30-year goal I would say, which is that we want human composting to be the most popular form of death care to surpass cremation. And if we did that, there'd be huge benefits carbon-wise, soil health-wise. I think emotionally and spiritually as humans, that would have a huge impact, knowing we're returning to the earth, but 30 years might be a little short, actually, it's a long process to get to that place. But that's our new goal is to surpass cremation as the leading form of death care.

Ayana Young  Wow, thank you for taking us so many places with this conversation and if there's anything that you would like to close with, I'd love to just invite you to say whatever is on your mind.

Katrina Spade  I think the beautiful thing about changing the death care landscape is that every conversation you have, with someone who hasn't considered this before, is really quite exciting and groundbreaking, and is totally building the movement and changing the way we're doing death and funeral care today. So go have that conversation over dinner. It can be quite hard to have those conversations. And yet, there's a beauty and a groundedness and having them, and it can, weirdly, it can be a lot of fun to start having these conversations, how you want the end of life to go, what you want done with your body. And I promise you, you can turn some heads at the dinner table if you bring this up. So I encourage folks out there to go talk to everybody about it. Come to our website and learn more about what we do and sign up for our newsletter list and sign up to learn on social and spread the word that's a huge thing. So thank you.

Ayana Young  Wonderful, thank you so much, Katrina, for your time and your attention and intention. I really appreciate this conversation

Katrina Spade  Thank you, I did too

Even Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today is by Yesol. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.