Dev Needelman (they/he)

Dev Needelman is a horticulturist with years of experience in land stewardship through farming, orchard and tree care, gardening, and food systems organizing. Their Jewish, Queer and Non-Binary identities guide them in the importance of community and the art of contemplation. They are passionate about honoring and celebrating the complexities of the natural world and working to create change in how humans tread on the planet.

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My vision for green burials follows the same laws as that of Jewish burials, given that our traditional practices are already green. Today, as more and more people fracture from their religious roots, we lack the spaces and structures needed for them to move through stages of loss with due spiritual processing. In a similar vein, as we answer to the modern demands of a monetized society, we are continuing to fissure further from the sanctity and complexity of this planet’s land and resources. I know it might seem difficult to confront the ways in which we are failing the earth. But it is imperative that we understand that our planet is bound by finite laws. The legacies we build over a lifetime are only as secure as the earth that holds the container of that wealth. Mysoulium is a project that interweaves green burial practices with death, and grief support with ecological restoration. With gardens designed to represent someones core essence, a seed saving program to reinvest in heirloom crops and medicinally significant plants, grief rituals tied to land tending practices, and the creation of new green burial cemeteries, Mysoulium returns to the mycelial networks that connect all plants and animals underground. If we change our relationship to grief and death, we can allow our bodies to be the catalyst for shifting the resource consumption that has come to define human existence. In our Jewish tradition, we are commanded to go from dust to dust, and to fully decay back to the earth and to sit shiva in community to help our loved ones process their grief. With Mysoulium, I hope we may listen to our ancestral wisdom and the ground beneath our feet, knowing that embracing decay is the only way we are going to survive.