A limited effort expended to try to find the comment thread where I explained my preference to be buried in a simple sheet without being embalmed – so as to better return to nature – hasn’t been immediately simple to find.
I really like this idea of making soil from the bodies of the dead. It reinforces the essential point that we are part of the biosphere of the Earth. Putting your remains temporarily in some sealed box is futile and unnatural. The relationship between a particular batch of atoms and molecules with consciousness remains a philosophical and scientific quandary, but it’s surely better to quickly become part of life again rather than be a toxic corpse in a box.
Obviously, any usable organs I possess should be used for transplants or research or practice by doctors, but whatever they don’t want I would like to see composted in the way proposed by the Urban Death Project.
Why Funerals Are a Total Ripoff
But now undertakers’ market power is being challenged on at least three fronts. One is changing customer demand. Driven in part by the decline of religion, and broader shifts in attitudes to death and dying, fewer bereaved are ready to cede their dead unthinkingly to an off-the-shelf burial. They prefer shrouds and woodland burials to coffins and graveyards; celebrations of life to sombre rituals in funeral homes; and video tributes to a life just lost to displays of the embalmed dead.
Cremation, direct or otherwise, is not the only rival to old-fashioned burial. A study in 2015 found that over 60% of Americans in their 40s and older would consider a “green” burial, with no embalming and a biodegradable casket, if any. Five years before the proportion was just over 40%. Jimmy Olson, an undertaker in Wisconsin specialising in green funerals, says it is inconsistent “for someone who’s recycled all their life and drives a Prius to then be put under the ground in a concrete vault, plastic-sealed casket and with their body pumped full of chemicals.”
When I was a criminal investigator I participated in 20 exhumations of coffins buried in concrete vaults. Fancy and expensive caskets. Without exception, after only a few years each casket had failed in some way, most often because of the so-called hermetic seal. The end result were contents which in no way resembled a sleeping loved one. From soupy flotsam to giant mould blooms, the interiors were hideous. Bottom line is, do not waste your money.
MIKE POST
Los Angeles
‘Give back to the earth’: Washington plans to legalize composting of human remains | US news | The Guardian
First funeral held using ‘living coffin’ made of mushroom fibre | Death and dying | The Guardian
World’s First ‘Living Coffin’ Aims to Reunite Us Faster With Nature
https://www.treehugger.com/living-coffin-reunites-faster-nature-5214276
Church of England to consider greener alternatives to burial | Anglicanism | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/06/church-of-england-to-consider-greener-alternatives-to-burial
Human composting rising in popularity as a pollution-free life after death | CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/29/climate/human-composting/index.html
Scotland becomes first UK country to allow water cremations
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9gkknee0zo
Something dies in a real habitat and within hours the process of its incorporation begins. Insects, fungi, bacteria, scavengers — a whole community mobilising around the fact of a body, converting it back into the chemical substrate from which other things will grow. Death in a living place is not an ending but a dense transaction, the most productive moment in many organisms’ relationships with the soil. It seems like the most serious evidence available that the living world considers everything it made too valuable to waste.
A modern cemetery is the negation of this. The embalming fluids — formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, the whole preservative chemistry — are specifically designed to prevent the transaction. To hold the body outside the cycle. To say: this particular matter is not available for reincorporation, not yet, perhaps not ever. The pesticides and herbicides on the managed grounds ensure that the surrounding soil is equally unavailable — sterilised, simplified, reduced to the monoculture grass that requires chemical intervention to maintain because nothing about it is actually in equilibrium with anything.