“The Greenest
Things to Do With Your Body When You Die”
by: Amelia Martyn-Hemphill from The Atlantic
Commentary
by: Sam Smathers (4th)
When we die we pollute the earth.
Cremations release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, traditional coffins
never decompose, and the large gravestones never fade into the earth. Amelia Martyn-Hemphill says, “Every
year cemeteries across the U.S. bury over 100,000 tons of steel and 1,500,000
tons of concrete from coffins and re-enforced vaults. Green burials are all
about reconnecting death and nature, reducing exorbitant costs, and sparking an
environmental paradigm shift.” Martyn talked to Amy Cunningham a funeral
director in New York that talked about new green ways to be buried including
coffins that are biodegradable, so the earth can eat you and release your
nutrients to create flowers and grass to feed the deer that then feeds your
brother. There are many new ways to be buried greenly such as incorporating a deceased
person’s ashes into a nutrient ball and then place this in a coral reef to
facilitate growth. We came from dust and like all other animals, we must return
to dust.
These traditions of burial have come from our
fear of not being remembered. We wish to think that by placing our dead body
in a steel trap that we will be forever remembered, or by consecrating a huge
headstone people in their lives will revere us in our death. We think these
things out of foolish ignorance. We will all die. And we will be forgotten. Our
impact will be fleeting, and even if you make it into a textbook, no one will
know your favorite color or what socks you wore on Tuesday. Four hundred years
from now, no one would of ever known you. Your personality will be a mystery to
all and no one will truly care, care enough to grieve over your loss. We need
to decompose, we need to become fertilizer and putting our dead in steel boxes
is not reverence for the dead, we do not let them become the Earth. We stop
them from helping an apple tree grow or facilitating the growth of some grass. We
should be able to leave the earth with a small footprint just like the mice and
bears do, we need to take example from these creatures and leave our foolish
fear of death behind us. We must accept or mortality or we will never grow
happy in this life, the only one we know that we have, and without this
acceptance our death will only make the lives of the living harder.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/the-greenest-things-to-do-with-your-body-after-you-die/282297/
This is great.
ReplyDeletemakes sense, I have always thought about why we bury the way we do.
ReplyDeleteI have considered your assertion carefully and I tend to agree, although I found some possible benefits to the practices you mentioned. There are a few health benefits to coffins and burial vaults, as they do curb the spread of disease slightly. They prevent grave robbery, however this is really only harmful when committed by a human. Burial vaults do keep the ground from caving in, but obviously only when a coffin is already present. In my opinion, despite all of these benefits, these burial practices still outline a human obsession with preservation. Mummification, embalming, coffins, burial vaults, urns, headstones, are all primarily used as ways to either mark a death as significant or preserve the body in an unnatural way. Mortality seems to be a tough concept for humans to accept and our denial results in the natural world suffering. Every sentence must have a period. Accept it.
ReplyDelete