Sustainable Living - and Dying

Are you the kind that takes public transportation instead of driving, doesn’t waste water, recycles and composts? Well how about composting yourself? That’s precisely what artists Jae Rhim Lee and Mike Ma now offer you with their mushroom-based burial suit. Many have recognized that cremation contributes to climate change and reacted by offering green burials, which however don’t prevent chemicals in your body (like pesticides or mercury) from polluting our soil. So why not leverage our nature-given master decomposers - mushrooms; they thought. Brilliant! The biggest challenge however isn’t actually figuring out the science - they have, it’s rather our cultural fear and resulting ignorance about death. So let’s use the burial suit as an invitation to start thinking and talking about the acceptance of death and our personal responsibility for environmental sustainability while alive - and dead. Shipping starts summer 2016, so who’s signing up with me?