Death will never go out of business. But that doesn’t mean that the industry itself isn’t open to disruption.

As we read this week in The New York Times, recent efforts to make death a “greener” experience may be catching on. Notable examples include a mushroom lined suit that more rapidly decomposes the body in order to add nutrients into the ground and bio-degradable urns that can be used for potted plants.

“I want to propose a different way of thinking about death that moves us toward death acceptance,” said Jae Rhim Lee, the designer behind the mushroom suit. “I think death acceptance is a critical aspect of protecting our environment.”

This continues the cultural narrative of what we first taught you last year on the good death movement, which tries to improve understanding and acceptance of our own deaths.

Coined by ZEITGUIDE friend Michael Hebb, the good death movement has sparked some novel social projects to prompt people to face their mortality. Organizations like Get Your Shit Together offer free checklists of important documents from wills to life insurance that everyone should have organized to prepare for the unexpected. Death Over Dinner has an interactive website with questions, readings and more designed to spur thoughtful and constructive discussions. The group Death Salon has regular meetings to discuss mortality in knowledgeable and creative ways.

For those for whom discussing death isn’t enough to reconcile with it, there may be a chemical solution. In a piece in the New Yorker, author Michael Pollan explored the promising potential of psychedelic drugs to ease the anxiety of terminally ill patients. One researcher was quoted saying that the administration of psilocybin (the active substance in magic mushrooms) had terminally ill cancer patients “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance” after their experience.

A study of using MDMA to treat this end-of-life anxiety has yielded similar results. “People are having breakthroughs, working through the trauma and coming to a new appreciation for their lives,” said Phil Wolfson, the psychiatrist behind the study. However, the earliest the FDA could legally approve these treatments is 2020.

But the most important part of discussing death may be how it inspires us to make better use of the time we have left.

As our friend Marshall Votta told us, “One of the most important things that often happens when people start thinking about what happens when they die, is that they start thinking more clearly about what it means to be alive and what they want to accomplish or experience before they pass.”