I had to do a bit of thinking about this story on "ecologically correct" burial-- in, wouldn't you know it, Marin County. Some of the description is beyond parody:
"He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.
"Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.
"With Fernwood's debut, Mr. Cassity, who likened Mr. Odom's burial to the musical "Hair," became an impresario in a fledgling movement that originated in England".
And some people I normally respect are dismissive. Poet- essayist- undertaker (really!) Thomas Lynch -- I especially recommend The Undertaking -- is dismissive:
"It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse."
But unease at the critics finally sets in. Another "Green" funeral service buries their bodies sans embalming, and what do they say? "Dr. Campbell, a small-town physician prone to quoting John Muir and Coleridge, opened the first of the United States' green burial grounds, the 350-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. There, the departed are buried dust-to-dust-style without embalming - a practice called toxic, artificial and bizarre by critics - in biodegradable coffins or cremation urns that make impervious coffins and grave liners obsolete".
Right, I am not making this up-- bodies without such things as formaldehyde are "toxic".
Ed Abbey was hidden in the desert. When my 17 year- old spaniel Bart died we called a friend with a backhoe, and planted a rosebush above him, which still thrives. The Tibetans feed their dead to the vultures-- as Robinson Jeffers wrote in the poem "Vultures", imagining such a fate: "What a life after death/ What an enskyment". I think I'd prefer any of these, and a return of my elements to the whole shebang, than sequestration in a $5000 coffin.
3 comments:
I second your recommendation of The Undertaking. Very enjoyable and VERY "important" book. All should read it.
Hmmm... the Zoroastrians of Old Persia fed their dead to vultures as well.
The two practices couldn't possibly be related?
In In Search of Zarathustra Paul Kriwaczek argues that Zoroastrian traces underly much of religion, especially in Asia, so, geographically, why not?
The Parsees of India-- present- day Zoroastrians derived as their name suggests from ancient Persia-- still "bury" their dead on Towers of Silence in places like Bombay. The recent vulture population drop had them turning to a friend, the raptor expert Jemima Parry Jones, for advice on breeding etc. I wrote about the vulture crisis in the Atlantic-- should be available online. Peregrine fund researchers have since traced the problem to an agricultural chemical.
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