Katrina and I drove up the winding roads of southern Appalachia, the Blue Ridge Mountains that straddle the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. Here, as in the rest of the United States, the modern funeral industry has seeped in and taken over the rituals and logistics of deathcare. But because of the isolation, religion, and poverty of the area, the creep of industrialized death took longer here than almost anywhere else in the country.
At last, we turned down an isolated road and pulled up at a gate. Dr. Cheryl Johnston—Dr. J, as her students called her—was already there, joined by a small group of undergraduate volunteers. Dr. J runs the Forensic Osteology Research Station (FOREST) at Western Carolina University. You might have heard this type of facility described as a “body farm,” where corpses, donated to science, are laid out to decompose for forensic study and law enforcement training. But, as Dr. J is quick to point out, “body farm” is an inaccurate term: “A farm grows food. We don’t grow bodies. Considering our end product, you could call it a skeleton farm, I guess?”
I was giving the side-eye to some silver tarps covering what looked to be dirt burial mounds. “Do they place the donor bodies under there? Right where we park the cars?” I wondered. I had seen many a dead person in my day, but they were all nonthreatening, lying on sterile white tables and gurneys. It makes you uneasy when a body is somewhere it’s not “supposed” to be, like seeing your chemistry teacher at the supermarket.
“Nope,” Dr. J said, after introductions were made. “They’re not human. Those are the black bears. Roadkill. Sometimes the Department of Natural Resources brings us fifteen to twenty a year. Their fur is so black that they’re pretty easy to hit with your car at night.”
The bear burials (bearials, if you will) acted as practice for the undergraduates. After a bear decays down to bone, the students set up a systematic grid and collect the bones to bring back to the lab for examination. Successfully processing a bear permits a student to work on the human beings, located not in the parking area (I was pleased to discover) but in a 58-by-58-foot pen up the hill, fenced in with razor wire to keep out the curious, which include coyotes, bears, and drunk college students.
The group trudged up the hill to the pen’s padlocked gate, which Dr. Johnston opened. Stepping inside, I wasn’t hit by a pungent smell or an eerie sense of death. Instead, this tiny pen for corpses in the North Carolina mountains was picturesque as hell, with dappled sunshine pushing through the trees and hitting the voluptuous undergrowth. At present it held the remains of the fifteen souls that had come to rest in the facility postmortem—three bodies buried beneath the soil, twelve exposed on top.
The bones of a female skeleton in purple polka-dot pajamas had scattered due to runoff from the spring rainstorms. Her skull had come to rest down near her femur. Several yards to her left a man, more recently dead, had a jaw that yawned open, hanging by a thin layer of flesh that held his mandible in place. If you knelt next to him you could see the amber facial hair poking through.
Katrina gestured up the hill to a splayed skeleton. “When I was here a few months ago that guy still had a mustache and the most beautiful marbled blue skin. He didn’t smell so great, though.” Then, seeing as he was lying right there, she apologized. “Sorry, it’s true.”
The idea to compost the dead first came to Katrina when she was working on her master’s degree in architecture. While other students aped the work of Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, Katrina was designing a “resting place for the urban dead.” She saw her future clients as the deceased denizens of the modern metropolis, comfortable with a life in the concrete jungle, but longing in death to return to the natural world, where “flesh becomes soil.”
Why attempt to compost, though, when the obvious way to address the primeval yearning to have “flesh become soil” would be to open more natural or conservation burial cemeteries, where corpses could go straight into a hole in the ground—no embalming, no caskets, no heavy concrete vaults? Katrina responds, correctly, that overcrowded cities are unlikely to assign huge swaths of valuable, developable land to the dead. And so she aims to reform not the market for burial, but for cremation.
The result of Katrina’s thesis was the Urban Death Project, an architectural blueprint for body composting centers in urban areas. The centers would be scalable worldwide, from Beijing to Amsterdam. Mourners would carry the dead person up a ramp built around a central core made of smooth, warm concrete, two and half stories tall. At the top, the body would be laid into a carbon-rich mixture that would, in four to six weeks’ time, reduce the body (bones and all) to soil.
The compost reaction occurs when you mix things that are high in nitrogen (think food waste, grass clippings, or . . . a dead human body) into a pile of material high in carbon (think woodchips or sawdust). Adding a dash of moisture and oxygen causes the microbes and bacteria inside the pile to begin breaking down the organic tissues and releasing heat. This gets the whole thing cooking. Temperatures inside the compost pile often reach 150 degrees, hot enough to kill most pathogens. With the right balance between carbon and nitrogen, the molecules will bind, creating incredibly rich soil.
“During those four to six weeks you’re in the core, you’d cease to be human,” Katrina explained. “Molecules literally turn into other molecules. You transform.” This transformation of molecules is what inspired the name she’s given the process: recomposition (“corpse composting” being about three degrees too intense for the general public). At the end of the recomposition, the family can collect the soil to place in their garden, and a mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life.
Katrina was 99 percent confident we could recompose a human, and she had an impressive roster of soil scientists on her advisory board who thought that her confidence should be at 100 percent. After all, they had been composting livestock for years. The chemical and biological processes that break down a 1,000-pound steer should work just as well on a measly 180-pound human. But she needed experimental evidence on real live (well, real dead) human remains.
This is where Dr. Johnston and the FOREST facility came in. Dr. J was intrigued by Katrina’s idea for studying human composting, but hadn’t planned immediate experiments. Then, serendipitously, she inherited a small mountain of woodchips from the on-campus recycling program. Shortly after, she got a call that a new donor body was on its way to the facility. So she texted Katrina: “I’ve got a body. Should we try?”