about · what this place is
Death Is a Verb is not an archive of the dead, but a compost heap of the living — traces of art, science, and story that decompose, feed one another, and return to soil.
why death is a verb
A forest becomes timber. A river, water rights. A body, remains.
A noun holds the world still enough to own it. Here we try it as a verb: an ongoing, earthly doing. Help us un-noun the world.
how the heap works
This is the driving question of the Compost Heap, and we invite you to answer it with a trace. A trace can be in the form of a poem, a field note, a recording, or a photograph, whatever you are sensing of the living world. Each work might activate another, and contributors can trace resonances between their work and other’s.
keeping the heap light
This is not a social feed.
Every trace is welcome and welcomes cross-pollinating with others. We only ask you share the lightest form that carries your full meaning.
Whatever you leave, the Heap releases in time. Its image or sound let go, only its words remaining. It grows lighter as it ages.
our mission
The Death Is a Verb Foundation gathers artists, scientists, storytellers, and all those who sense the living world as kin — to sense, together, what it means to human as beings of the Earth rather than apart from it.
We believe human death is one of the ways Earth makes itself new. We work with human and more-than-human partners — artists and mycelia, policymakers and topsoil — to let death do its ecological work.
In practice: we facilitate in-person gatherings, and we tend this Heap and its Field Guides online.
The project lives across four intra-related fields:
art as a way of sensing
Art is not decoration but a way of sensing.
Bring traces made with the living world, not just about it. A poem written beside a river. Wind through grass. Water, birds. Find ways of sharing attention with the more-than-human world and sensing its shared attention back.
the practice beneath the metaphor
Human composting, also known as Natural Organic Reduction (NOR) is a gentle alternative to burial and cremation.
Set beside the alternatives, the difference is plain: cremation burns fossil fuel and releases carbon; conventional burial commits embalming fluids, hardwood and metal caskets, and concrete vaults to the ground. Composting asks almost nothing of the earth, and gives soil back.
It is also a different way of sensing death, not as a removal from the living world, but one of the ways Earth keeps making itself.
Want it explained by the people who made it possible?
Recompose — how human composting works ↗
Katrina Spade’s company, and the first in the world to offer the practice. The clearest plain-language account of the process there is.
Katrina Spade — “When I die, recompose me” ↗
Her 2016 TED talk, and the question underneath all of this: what if our bodies could help grow new life after we die?
where this grows from
The path to legal, human composting was opened by people who fought for it. Katrina Spade and Recompose, has led much of that work and led Washington State to legalize natural organic reduction in 2019. As of 2026, fourteen US states have followed, and more introduce legislation each year. Where it isn’t yet legal, remains can often be carried to a licensed facility in another state.
Death Is a Verb is inspired by this movement, but is independent of it. We are not affiliated with Recompose, or with any composting provider or funeral practice. Nothing here should be read as their words.
We have no partners yet. In time we hope to support the people and organizations doing this work.
For now, this is a place to practice the worldview that human composting makes literal: that you are already earth, already entangled, already becoming something else. Leave a trace, tend another, and let it compost.
Enter the Heap →No mycelium is a single thread. Death Is a Verb is held by a network — each person bringing their own filament, reaching toward the others. There is no top here, only a circle. Each of us writes our own words, and many keep company with a plant or animal kin.
A short bio in their own words — what they bring to the network, and the work they tend.
Keeps the circle — a temporary role, like all roles, like all things. Doctor of Arts in Ecological Psychology & Environmental Humanities (Viridis); By day she teaches ecological science to four- and five-year-olds, who already know in their bodies what most of us had to forget. She names her own settler heritage here and holds her learning from published Indigenous scholarship as partial and accountable. This project does not speak for Indigenous communities; it listens.
A short bio in their own words — what they bring to the network, and the work they tend.
A short bio in their own words — what they bring to the network, and the work they tend.
A short bio in their own words — what they bring to the network, and the work they tend.
Some names here are still placeholders. The circle grows and changes; like soil, it is never finished.
Death Is a Verb Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit organization. General and press inquiries: hello@deathisaverb.org. The Human to Humus Fund: humus@deathisaverb.org.
