Warming Trends: Composting the Dead to Help Soils and the Climate, Musk’s Contest to Clean Carbon From the Atmosphere and Posters for Holidays on Flooded Shorelines
A column highlighting climate-related studies, innovations, books, cultural events and other developments from the global warming frontier.
February 13, 2021
In Washington state, a funeral home is offering human composting. After 30 days, a body turns to soil, and can be laid to rest in a forest. Credit Karen Bleier/AFP via Getty Images
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Where will you go when you die? In Washington state, you could choose your garden.
Recompose, an ecological death care company in Seattle, started offering human composting at the end of 2020. The option became legal in 2019 thanks to efforts by Recompose founder Katrina Spade, who worked with her state senator to pass a bill legalizing “natural organic reduction” the process that turns human bodies into soil.
Walls and fences designed to secure national borders could make it difficult for almost 700 mammal species to adapt to climate change, according to new research.
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IMAGE: The Golden Eagle is not under active conservation management in Great Britain and could be candidates for higher prioritisation. view more
Credit: Chris Gomersall (rspb-images.com)
Scientists have shown where bird species would exist in the absence of human activity under research that could provide a new approach to setting conservation priorities.
A study by Durham University, UK, in collaboration with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), investigated how human activities such as agriculture, deforestation, and the drainage of wetlands have shaped where bird species are found in Great Britain today.
Researchers used data on the geographical distributions of bird species alongside simulation models to predict where bird species would exist today if the effects of human activities on the landscape were removed.