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.
