Human Potting Soil?

Dust to dust, ash to fertilizer? Yes, if Susanne Wiigh-Masak, a Swedish environmental biologist, gets her way. Carrying recycling or ?EUR??,,????'??green?EUR??,,????'?? to the next step, the Swedish scientist believes that humans should be returned to the soil in the form of organic fertilizer.

People buried in the earth do eventually return to nature, if they?EUR??,,????'???re entombed in wood. However, embalming bodies, some think, is not the ideal way to become one with the earth, as these fluids can get into the water table, and who wants to drink that! The push in some quarters is burial without embalming in unvarnished wood coffins or even cardboard containers, an increasingly popular resting place procedure in England.

People who choose to be cremeated can have their ashes spread o?EUR??,,????'???er the land, sea or air. There?EUR??,,????'???s even a firm that puts human ashes into firework rockets, for those who want to go out in a blaze of glory, a kind of final, final hurrah.

But cremating bodies burns fossil fuels, so, if you want to be really environmentally friendly, Ms. Wiigh-Masak has a variation on the theme: Freeze dry bodies via liquid nitrogen, crumble into fine powder (various way, including sound waves), place into ground in a biodegradable container, and you are compost.

Ms. Wiigh-Masak believes this is giving back to nature. She has only done the procedure on pigs and cows, but has received provisional approval from the Church of Sweden to proceed, perhaps next year, on humans.

A new word has entered the lexicon to describe human mulch?EUR??,,????'??+compostoria.