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?

a wee bit morbid, but the right way to go

I found this article, and whole heartedly agree with this movement!

Going Green – all the way to the grave, via the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I think the ultimate middle finger to nature is by not giving back our bodies to the Earth. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” no longer exists. It may exist in the sermon before the burial, but in the actual burial… no, not so much. By embalming our bodies and placing them in steel lined caskets, we absolutely guarantee that we do not give to where once we came.

Each year, along with their dearly departed, Americans bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid and 30-plus million board feet of timber. We bury enough steel to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete vaults – to keep the ground over graves from sinking, which makes maintenance easier – to pave a highway halfway across the United States.

But, in a remarkable move, many people are going the route I hope to go. A pine box without any chemicals. From the article:

He was planting a tree. And, in a way, nurturing the seed of an idea: a shift in the American way of death – a departure from chemicals, concrete vaults and manicured plots.

Mann, cemetery president and CEO, was ceremoniously opening a 31/2-acre “natural” burial ground at the 1869 Lower Merion cemetery, where 100,000 people are buried, including a Titanic survivor and sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder.

No embalmed bodies will be allowed in this area, which has room for 400. Only untreated wood and biodegradable shrouds can be used.