On dying ecologically in the Anthropocene
The Ecological Citizen
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
Nov 30, 2017
Pages:
23 - 9
Sources ID:
79521
Collection:
Anthropocene and the Environmental Future
Visibility:
Public (group default)
Abstract:
(Show)
What might we learn about living a more ecocentric life from contemplating death? Alongsidepersistent calls for radical, large-scale cultural transformations, this article contends that
we ought also to turn our attention to the humble and humbling task of caring for the
dead. As we learn to dwell on Earth in the Anthropocene (a concept critiqued in the article),
we would do well to incorporate dying, death, decay, decomposition and ‘deathcare’ into
our critical lexicon. A genuinely ecocentric culture must come to terms with the intimate
entwinement of life and death. Focusing on ecological deathcare practices in the US,
the article demonstrates how innovative approaches to deathcare may be propelling our
bodies into more ecocentric relationships with(in) the teeming more-than-human world.
Recompose, a public benefit corporation which serves in this essay as an exemplar of these
emergent deathcare practices, invites us to enter our dead bodies into new assemblages. In
its efforts to develop a human composting system, Recompose enjoins us to give our bodies
(back) to the ecological systems that sustain them, to become soil with others in the compost
heap. Living ecologically, this article sustains, must also come to mean dying ecologically