I understand that the choice/decision to cremate the self is personal. But I think it stops where the personal starts affecting us all. Is cremation that negligible of an issue for the environment?
[1] http://www.tss-india.com/crematorium
[2] http://www.solarthermalworld.org/content/india-first-solar-c...
[3] PDF feasibility study: http://rsisinternational.org/Issue4/01-09.pdf
"Last week more than 80 bodies – mostly decomposed skeletons and half-burned corpses – surfaced in the river in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh after a drop in water levels. "
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/hindu-bodies-ga...
Not advocating banning cremations or anything. Just found that cool.
There are some serious questions being asked about natural burials and pharmaceuticals. Dead bodies these days are cocktails of drugs, synthetic body parts (knee/hip replacements) even radionuclides. Whether the mushroom suit can deal with all of that properly remains an open question.
Basic principles of no embalming, no vault, simple coffin or shroud, are more or less identical to Jewish and Muslim practices, practiced in every state.
Moreover there are no ecological concerns versus conventional burial, except that conventional burial typically involves sticking a lot of concrete, steel, and treated wood in the ground. Whereas natural burial uses fewer resources and conserves land in a natural state.
Embalming does nothing regarding drugs or radionucleotides in the body. It simply adds embalming fluid consisting mostly of formaldehyde that decomposes after burial. Removing implants may or may not be done for both conventional and "natural" burial, no difference; it's always done for cremation since incineration is involved.
The "mushroom suit" innovation is not a common green burial practice at this time.
Someone else has a spare field, and they get the necessary permissions.
It's just a normal graveyard, but not attached to any religious building, with no or minimal headstones, and lots of trees and native local flowers.
It's just a business.
The alternative (burial) impacts the environment considerably as well. There is plenty of land devoted to cemeteries. Trees or metal are used (once) for the casket. In many places, you also need a concrete vault, which would add to the impact.
This page says it's equivalent to a 500 mile drive, which is much more believable: http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/index.php?page=cremation
Cemetery land gets reused all of the time. In my city, the main park (1890) and high school (1970) were both built on cemetery land. The land gets seized by eminent domain or purchase, bodies exhumed and rebutted elsewhere.
I'm sorry, but what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen
>When growing on mineral surfaces, some lichens slowly decompose their substrate by chemically degrading and physically disrupting the minerals, contributing to the process of weathering by which rocks are gradually turned into soil. While this contribution to weathering is usually benign, it can cause problems for artificial stone structures. For example, there is an ongoing lichen growth problem on Mount Rushmore National Memorial that requires the employment of mountain-climbing conservators to clean the monument.
and
>The lichen exudates, which have powerful chelating capacity, the widespread occurrence of mineral neoformation, particularly metal oxalates, together with the characteristics of weathered substrates, all confirm the significance of lichens as chemical weathering agents.[96]
It's believed lichen may be as old as 2.7 billion years, so they may have beat out every other form of biodegradation by a good margin.
Near where I live, there are boulders that were dragged down a valley by retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago. They've been exposed to the elements for that time, are are materially intact.
That's exactly what I'd want my ashes used for.
In Manhattan, the place that is now Washington Square Park was once the location of mass graves for people who died of yellow fever during an epidemic. Before that, it was used as farmland.
That said, this is far from the norm in the US - New York is one of the few places where this could happen, due to the scarcity of space, and it's also unclear whether people remembered the locations of the graves at the time the park was constructed.
That time is a century or more. The US national cemetery (Arlington) is nearly full. Even after 150 year nobody would dare suggest reusing even the oldest plots.
Most US car owners drive at most 10,000 miles a year. A half year's driving? That's only a trivial energy use by 1st and 0th world standards.
Human composting seems like a good idea to me: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/a-project-to-turn-...
I mean, there's a million more wasteful things that you can complain about, other than how we dispose of our bodies after death.
I for one don't want to drink liquefied brains.
Every molecule of H20 you've every drunk has been part of a disgusting biological process at some point. But homeopathy isn't real; the water doesn't remember.
Yes, or more precisely, wastewater treatment plants can neutralize most fecal-borne pathogens, but they are unable to neutralize prions, the infectious agent behind transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). In fact, in some cases, prions even remained infectious after incineration at 600°C [1].
[1] Brown, Paul, et al. "New studies on the heat resistance of hamster-adapted scrapie agent: threshold survival after ashing at 600°C suggests an inorganic template of replication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97.7 (2000): 3418-3421. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Edward_Rau/publication/...
Eventually bodies make it to the ground, which then eventually make it to the air...
Soylent 1.5, that was just before they switched to algal oil.
I wonder what Soylent 3.0 will be made of?
Hey, you're way smarter than me, so if you are on board with the idea I'll give it a go! Lets eat our dead! xD