Green When You’ve Gone

by Matt DeNoto

In my first article on this site, I wrote about the confusion landfills have always caused in me. Today I’d like to write about another source of confusion – graveyards.

Graveyards have always seemed to me like an incredible waste of space. Acres of land kept practically barren in an eternal tribute to death. Bodies preserved unnaturally using chemicals, buried in expensive, pointlessly comfortable boxes. We are ‘returned to the Earth’ in the most contradictory way imaginable.

The only other option seemed to be cremation. Have your body burned to ashes, to be stored forever in an urn or spread somewhere.

It is an interesting indication of this mentality humanity seems to hold about everything having a finite period of usefulness, and of our not really knowing what to do with anything once that use has been fulfilled. When we’ve eaten our fast food, we throw away the wrapper. When our TV stops working, we toss it and get a new one. We always need new clothes or shoes, because we’ve been taught that these things are less a practical means of keeping ourselves warm or protected, and more about expressing how we feel at any given moment.

Getting rid of these objects is easy. We set them out at the curb and someone comes to take them away to t he landfill. We need never consider them again.

We seem to be following the same impulse when we die. Get rid of the ‘trash.’ But because this waste used to be a person, it’s not so simple. We must be honored. So we each get our own mini-landfill.

But just like with regular landfills, this tradition is ultimately unsustainable. This practice of coddling our dead is, in more ways than one, hurting us.

Besides the space issue, there is another practical concern. A large number of people die every year because of a lack of donated organs. Our strange obsession with preserving ourselves after we die is now literally costing people their lives.

But as it is with many of the facets of the Green Revolution, we are starting to reexamine death. We are starting to come around. Already, many of us have marked on our driver’s licenses that we wish for our organs to be donated after we’ve died, so that our passing may give life to someone else who needs it.

Others are going even further. The Centre for Natural Burial is an organization promoting a way of reintroducing our lifeless bodies back into the Earth’s cycle, wherein the body is prepared for burial without using chemicals and buried in a way that encourages decomposition. A grave may be marked with a tree or a shrub that does not intrude on the natural landscape.

Or, for the green extreme, you can have yourself composted. It’s not quite legal yet, but in some parts of the world it may be catching on. Think of it. Your body will be used to fertilize and grow the food for the next generation.

Doesn’t that sound more interesting that spending eternity in a box?

the good news… it’s a climate change

The UN Climate Chief, Yvo de Boer, praised the United States in having a night-to-day shift in climate policy and beliefs surrounding climate change.

Speaking from Tokyo where leaders have spent a couple of days laying the ground work for the upcoming international climate change meeting in which the next version of the Kyoto Protocol will be signed, de Boer felt that the change of heart in climate policy will allow for an international agreement on emissions reductions, and the like.

This is a fantastic first step in ensuring this planet is sustainable for generations to come.

don’t bite the hand that feeds you

We all remember the drama surrounding the big auto bailout, with the CEO’s from the Detroit Three showing up in their private planes.  

Well, here is another tale that should be filed with the absurd.

Prior to the bailout the auto companies had filed suit against individual state EPA’s over their amendments to Clean Air Acts and emissions standards, for example what is happening in California.  Apparently, after taking taxpayer money and promising as part of the stimulus that they will pursue new ‘greener’ options in car manufacture… they are still moving forward with all of their lawsuits!!

California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown, observed today on NPR, “The irony here is the auto companies want a bailout, in many ways because they weren’t building the kind of cars that were compatible with today’s energy market—and at the same time, they want to keep going with their lawsuits, which have already cost millions and millions of dollars.”

You know what the saddest part of this whole thing is, however?  That we, the citizens, will probably do absolutely nothing in fighting the auto industry for this audacity.  The money that has come to these corporations is being taken out of our future holdings either through Social Security or the fact that we will have to pay back the Federal Reserve interest from all of these loans.  That we are going to sit by and allow this to happen is an atrocity.

This was first reported through the New Yorker.