by Martin Kaufman
They gingerly place the material into a massive, virtually impenetrable, hermetically sealed container, then place the container into a second fortress-like enclosure of concrete and steel that weighs more than a ton. The whole works is entombed underground.
Are they burying nuclear waste? No, dear reader, they are burying you.
Not very ecological, is it? How are we to return to the earth whence we sprung when we are literally isolated from it by thick, enduring barriers? How are we to know the comfort of "dust to dust" when sequestered - by caskets and steel-reinforced concrete burial vaults - from the natural processes that bring this transformation about?
As most US cemeteries require us to be buried today, earth never comes in contact with our bodies for many decades or even centuries. Indeed, there's little earth to come in contact with - the adjacent space consists mainly of our neighbors' vaults, all crammed in tightly like safe deposit boxes to maximize the cemetery owners' return on their land. To put the problem in perspective: wood coffins buried without a vault have in some cases remained intact for over 300 years. How long will today's coffins, often made of fiberglass, stainless steel, or other non-biodegradable material, endure when placed not in soil, but in concrete? One can only speculate.
The result of this unnatural isolation from the soil is that people decompose in a thoroughly unnatural way. Instead of a quick transformation into sweet earth, they undergo an extended putrefaction that can last centuries. They don't become part of nature again, taken up into roots and becoming a flower, or a tree, perhaps a berry, perhaps the bird that eats the berry. They just lie there and putrefy.
They also turn into monsters. Corpses kept from decomposing swiftly are things of horror, well-suited to the most ghastly monster movie you can imagine. Do you want to look like Norman Bates's mother in Psycho or one of those nightmarish corpses rising out of the grave in Poltergeist? Well, with coffin or vault burial, you will. (And don't get your hopes up that this will mean a lucrative new career in film. Horror directors generally use wax corpses.)
Environmentalists rightly protest excess packaging of everything from fast food to household gadgets. What bitter irony to be overpackaged ourselves.
Modern mouldering
The British have other ideas. Over 80 Nature Reserve Burial Grounds are already open in Britain, or have received permits, and many more are planned.
In these cemeteries, people are buried ecologically, in a shroud or biodegradable coffin. Instead of a headstone, a tree is planted over the grave. Many of Britain's green cemeteries double as habitats for endangered owls, ducks, herons, butterflies, red squirrels, and other creatures.
Outside the US, enlightened attitudes are common even among businesses. An English company makes "eco-coffins," designed to decompose quickly. Other European firms make biodegradable flax coffins, cork urns - even urns of chicken excrement for those who want to rest in their gardens. Coffins made from cardboard or recycled newspapers are readily available overseas. A British store called Green Undertakings sells biodegradable body bags for as little as £14 ($23) and wicker burial stretchers from £22 ($36). In the US, where death is a 25-billion-dollar industry and coffins commonly cost bereaved families many thousands of dollars, such sensible, inexpensive solutions are virtually unheard-of.
Posters to the Natural Death Centre's web site have even proposed such good ideas as composting the corpse, then incorporating the compost into a memorial garden. In India, the dead are often tied to tree limbs so that vultures can quickly reduce them to skeletons, then the bones buried. This seems a reasonable way to become part of the chain of life, yet one can imagine the neighbors complaining if you tried to do it in the States.
What can North Americans do? Well, there's cremation, but that produces carcinogenic dioxins, trace metals, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Not very green. Only your bone chips get to return to earth, assuming they're scattered. The rest of you just becomes air pollution.
Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love, says it's legal in most states to bury your loved one on your own rural land. So why not buy some? For less than the cost of a single cemetery plot (commonly five to ten thousand dollars), you could buy several acres of beautiful land you can enjoy now and be buried on later. And nobody will dictate that you use a coffin and vault.
Corpses need soil as fish need water. To isolate them from their natural habitat is to impose a kind of death sentence on the dead, because it keeps the earth from resurrecting them as new forms of life. Dead bodies lying separated from the earth in coffins and vaults highlight the lunacy, and vanity, of a human race that insists it's not a part of nature, but somehow above it.
What's at stake? Nothing less than our right to life after death.
Martin Kaufman is a freelance environmental writer. For more information on green burial, see <www.worldtrans.org/naturaldeath.html>.
Recycling Yourself