About Death Is a Verb Foundation

Death Is a Verb Foundation is a public documentation project exploring death, composting, and ecological belonging through art, science, story, and practice.

The project grows from a simple proposition: we are not separate from the earth, and death is not outside life’s cycles. Through the Compost Heap, the Rewilding Guides, and the Accessibility Fund, the foundation creates ways for people to contribute, learn, and participate.

We are made of the earth and always returning to it. This project invites visitors to sense that reality more fully — not only as an idea, but through forms of attention, creativity, and care.

Our Vision

We live in a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista movement reminds us in its Fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), or rather, where they always already did, before the narratives of petro-capitalism, individualism, and human exceptionalism sealed us off from sensing it. Death denial and climate inaction are not separate. They arise from the same wound—the story that we are above and separate from the living world that makes us. Our Death practices mirror this: bodies processed, toxified, emitted into atmospheres, treated as if they could be ‘disposed of’—yet they linger as accumulating harm in soil, water, and air. As Ecological Psychologist Dr. Lori Pye reminds us: in the ecological world, there is no waste—only humans make waste. The Metamorphosphere exists to compost those stories—not by storing finished answers, but by holding a living field of experiments, questions, and alliances in common.

We are made of the earth and always returning to it. This project invites visitors to sense that reality more fully — not only as an idea, but through forms of attention, creativity, and care.

Our Commitments

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance

We follow the CARE Principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) established by the Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group — rooting collective benefit, community authority, and ethical responsibility in Indigenous self-determination.

African Data Ethics

We honor the African Data Ethics framework (Barret et al., 2025), which centers communal consent, narrative sovereignty, and data self-determination as essential foundations for just and responsible practice.

Tending

Like any living system, ethical engagement requires ongoing tending — co-developing practices that remain responsive to those most affected, recognizing that respectful collaboration means communities retain authority over how their wisdom travels through the world.

These commitments shape hiring, partnership, and curatorial decisions—not just our methodology.

Theoretical Roots

Ecological Psychology — Dr. Lori Pye

The organizing framework for this project is Dr. Lori Pye’s Ecological Psychology, which traces five ecological processes — energy exchange, diversity, decay and renewal, change, and relationship — as lenses for understanding human psychological and ecological life. Pye’s work insists that psychological flourishing is inseparable from ecological flourishing and that composting harmful narratives is both a psychological and an ecological practice.

David Bohm — Rheomode

Physicist David Bohm proposed a rheomode — a verb-based language that honors reality as flowing process rather than static substance. Where nouns fragment and fix, verbs flow and relate. Death is a verb is, in Bohm’s terms, a rheomode proposition: death is not a state but an ongoing-ing.

Donna Haraway — Becoming-With

Haraway’s concept of becoming-with names the choreography through which no body remains truly separate. We become who we are through relationships with other beings — plants, animals, microbes, soil. We are made-with rather than self-made, sympoietic rather than autopoietic.

Quantum Physics & Karen Barad

Karen Barad’s quantum-informed philosophy of intra-action shows that nothing exists independently — everything comes into being through relationship. Boundaries don’t pre-exist relationships; they emerge through entanglement. This is not metaphysics but physics: the material world is fundamentally relational, processual, and porous.

Robin Wall Kimmerer — Grammar of Animacy

Kimmerer’s work in Potawatomi language reveals a grammar of animacy in which living beings are not it but who — where a bay doesn’t just exist but bays itself into being. Indigenous epistemologies never forgot what Western thought systematically suppressed: to be is to verb. To re-cognize this is not to learn something new but to re-member something ancient.

Erin Manning & Bayo Akomóláfé — The An-archive

The concept of the an-archive draws first from Erin Manning’s processual archive — a “repertory of traces” that functions not as static documentation but as a “feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.” Manning’s an-archive refuses permanent preservation, activating traces as carriers of potential rather than inert objects. Akomóláfé extends this into ecological composting of knowledge systems — a space of radical incompleteness where knowledge continuously decomposes and recomposes. As Akomóláfé teaches: the times are urgent. We must slow down.

About the Founder

Dr. Courtney Hayne holds a Doctorate of Arts in Ecological Psychology and Environmental Humanities and a Master of Arts in Ecological Psychology from Viridis Graduate Institute (2022–2025), and a BA in English from UC Berkeley.

Her work in education has always moved at the intersection of embodied knowing and ecological re-cognition. She co-founded Bent On Learning in 2000 — a health and wellness nonprofit that continues to bring yoga-based movement and mindfulness to 2,000+ NYC public school students weekly, in partnership with the NYC DOE Office of School Wellness. After fourteen years with Bent On Learning, she taught mindfulness and served as a Behavior Interventionist at Harlem Village Academies, sensing early the intra-relatedness of psychological well-being and ecological belonging. She is now back at HVA as a Pre-K through 1st Grade Science Teacher, building climate literacy and ecological awareness through hands-on investigation of our agential planet, and leading STEM Afterschool Enrichment for grades 2–4.

At Viridis Graduate Institute, she co-taught Contemporary Cultural Narratives — a graduate course tracing the intra-related narratives of supremacism, purism, misogyny, and fascism as persistent cultural forces. Her sections examined how these narratives enact boundaries that, when composted, open pathways out of climate inaction, colonial logic, and the Cartesian splits that try to sever us from the paradoxes, indeterminacies, and deep relationality of the living Earth.

Her doctoral project, Decomposing Boundaries: The Human Corpse as Ecological Participant for Multispecies Flourishing, is the seedbed of this foundation.