It’s actually worse than the first thing you thought of when you saw the headline as “human compost” does not mean “people manure.” It means human remains which, until Friday, the San Joaquin River Parkway Trust in Fresno County, California had been using to enrich soil for the 76-acre preserve’s plant life, a fertilization method the trust’s executive director Sharon Weaver told local station ABC 30 is “a more environmentally friendly way to deal with somebody after they die.”
Prior to the trust’s Friday compliance with a cease and desist from the county, Weaver had defended the, uh, disposal site’s partnership with local private business “Earth Funerals” as having “all the normal components of compost. We do a test on every load. Earth Funerals has to do a lot of testing at their site to make sure they are complying with regulations.” Weaver did not get into specifics about what “every load” meant, as in the typical condition of the remains upon delivery to the site.
The California San Joaquin River Conservancy, a state agency, had previously demanded that the trust, a privately-incorporated non-profit, stop using people compost and to remove it within 45 days, a demand that was escalated this week with the county’s stop order and a joint press conference by officials from both decrying this most macabre of endpoints to granola hippie culture.
“Not human waste, human remains that has been turned into compost into the soil,” Conservancy chair Garry Bredefeld said at the Friday briefing, reiterating the emphatic distinction in this article’s opener. Weaver told ABC 30 she has no problem with the county’s halt as no further deliveries from Earth Funerals are scheduled currently. She did not however speak to the conservancy’s order to to dig up and cart away God knows how much of the ghastly “compost” already buried there.