How To Compost a Corpse

My first piece for The Walrus is up on the magazine’s site. Here’s an excerpt:

Squirrels, it turns out, compost quite nicely. Small birds? Sure. Happens in the woods every day, after all. But stuff a human body into a backyard bin, and within a day or so the neighbours will start to complain.

Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, a Swedish biologist specializing in soil production, explains: “When you die, you start smelling, because the oxygen does not reach inside the body.” More specifically, an abundance of anaerobic bacteria quickly takes hold in such a large mass of tissue, resulting in the rank gases CSI techs use to sniff out “decomp.” But after a decade spent investigating green options for dealing with dead bodies, Wiigh-Mäsak has finally figured out how to discreetly turn our earthly remains back into, well, earth.

How did she do it? Read “Decomposting Bodies” and find out.