These are images from the website for the Infinity Burial Project, which was created by Jae Rhim Lee. She’s creating a burial method that encourages natural decomposition through the use of mushrooms. This is in contrast to normal contemporary funerary methods that either release toxins through cremation (all the mercury from dental fillings winds up in the sky) or by attempts to preserve the body with formaldehyde and other poisons. (There is a Ted Talk with her on the subject here.)

I’m excited about this for two reasons. One is that when I was younger I decided that such a method would be akin to reincarnation—that we came from living matter (top soil) and that we could return to that state, to be born again as something else. 

The other is that I’m becoming fervently opposed to the monoculture and the homogenization of society. Not only does it produce boring people and boring art, but it’s also damaging to the planet (and ourselves) since the things that they succeed in selling us to replace our local foods and traditions (formaldehyde-stuffed corpses; corn-fed beef [and high-fructose-corn-syrup-filled food]) are terrible. 

I had a crisis over the past year over what to write (ie which direction, if any, to take my art), but recently it’s been settled. I was given a large book by eco-anarchists to read a few months ago. Its conclusion is that all civilization needs to end and that humans need to return to indigenous, hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The book was against traditional environmentalists who believe that the planet can be saved through legislation and cooperation. Instead war (literal war led by an underground) should be waged on industrial society, until it’s destroyed and everyone is living as man lived 10,000 years ago, with some axes and spears. Which is, they think, “our only hope for survival”. 

This was daffy to me, although I liked the boldness of the idea. It’s not often that one, after 33 years of reading, can come upon something quite so radical. But it’s impractical. 64% of the world’s population has access to clean water and ‘improved sanitation’ (toilets of some sort) according to water.org. I suspect many more rely on agriculture to some degree (if not completely). Both farms and water works are basics of civilization. I don’t think very many who rely on either are going to give them up just so they can live as hunter-gatherers. So I think any such anarchist movement will be squashed by either the government or by the people that make up civilization themselves. (This eco-anarchism also allows the eco-anarchist to feel superior to other environmentalists, since who can trump them in purity? Certainly not Al Gore who wishes for us to be able to keep our lifestyles.)

But still, I was challenged and appalled by all the corn and soybeans being grown in the world when there are so many other things that could be grown (eg. fruits and vegetables that are “outrageously called ‘specialty crops’”). There’s also so many different things that we could be eating. When I became a vegetarian years ago I was able to reject meat because I had a very narrow view of it, one filled with turkey sandwich and McDonald’s cheeseburgers. I was 20-something at the time and I decided that I could legitimately live without those things since they had been done to death. Later, when I picked up a French cookbook filled with offal (mmm, brains) and oysters and steak tartare, I realized that I was missing more than I thought I was, and that there was more in the world than I had been sold. 

So I’ve decided if I’m going to do anything with my life or in my art, it’s going to be striving after the death of the monoculture, because that’s one thing I can do. Is it the most ideal path for saving the planet or our society? Probably not, but who wants to be in that race? But listen, blessed are those who are not buying into the status quo, who reject the messages of the advertisers and the managerial class, those who build mushroom death suits, for within them lies the antidote to the mass human.