A Grave Situation—Post-death carbon footprint & Green burial alternatives—Ashes Ashes #90
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2020-05-06

Over 100 billion people have died on this planet and been laid to rest through countless burial traditions and customs, and while a majority of these passings simply re-entered natural ecological cycles, many popular burial traditions of today require exorbitant additions of resources that cause dramatic natural disturbances guaranteed to have a lasting environmental impact.

But beyond this, it appears that the way we live in society carries over to the ways we die. The same alienation, segregation, and disconnection from our land and ourselves that we experience in life can all be found in our cultural habits surrounding death. Can we imagine a better way? Or will this grave situation only deepen?

Podcast by Ashes Ashes, reposted under CC License. Browse episode resources & read full transcript at https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-90-a-grave-situation


Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org 

CHAPTERS
3:49 Post-Life Carbon Footprint
17:50 Embalming History
28:42 Land and Space Challenges
48:10 Segregation in Life and Death
1:00:01 Body Brokers: Bodies and Profit

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT
Daniel: What do you do with a body once it's no longer living?

David: That's a good question! I guess typically either you're cremated or you're buried. And that seems to be about the end of the discussion as far as I ever hear from people.

Daniel: For most people in the United States what does being buried usually mean? What does it entail? I mean besides the fanfare of the funeral service itself it's not as simple as just wrapping somebody in the closet and placing them in the ground, is it?

David: No no, you go to a funeral home, it's arranged and it costs a lot of money, you transfer the body over to them, they prepare it, they embalm it, maybe there's a viewing, maybe there's not. The body is then ultimately put into this fancy expensive coffin the funeral director upsold you on. And then you're driven in the car to this fancy beautiful field where you've bought some sort of plot of land and an expensive headstone. And then you're lowered in and other people, who I guess miss you or want to see you in the ground, one of the other, say their goodbyes and that's it.

Daniel: Sounds like a lot goes into that process.

David: We don't normally think about but really something that we should all be considering it because it definitely is one of the only things that we're guaranteed to have to one day deal within our own lives.

Daniel: All of this activity, the driving around of course, but more importantly that beautiful field you mentioned, all the landscaping and all the material that goes into placing somebody in the ground in a concrete vault in a wooden or steel or copper casket—all this takes resources and it has an impact on our environment. 

David: I looked at the numbers. We're not the first people who are going to die, in fact, there have been 101 billion people who have died before us, give or take. So we're just following in well-worn footsteps at this point.

What is the carbon and the larger environmental footprint that is the traditional burial that we have here in the western world?

Daniel: Every year in the US, we're talking about 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 105000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete. And the amount of concrete that is currently in the ground from all our cumulative burials is in the billions of tons. And a lot of wood: 30 million board feet of hardwoods.

David: It's a lot of wood. And we're just putting it in the ground to decompose and not in the fun carbon-sequestering way. But it doesn't end with the caskets. The entire process of funerals is environmentally damaging. I love graveyards; they're really pretty. You walk around and see beautiful sculptures, landscapes very well-manicured, beautiful trees, nice grassy fields but, you know, all that landscaping—that's pretty intensive and some of these things have been around at this point for hundreds of years.

Especially if you have perpetual care packages with lawn care for your headstone for all eternity. I'm not sure how they plan on that working out but funeral directors have figured out they can upsell that. But you've got the water use for all this grass and the chemical fertilizer to keep everything green, all the lawnmowers it takes to keep this up, the people who are coming in and out, the gardeners. I mean, this is a lot of work plus people are driving their cars to these massive cemeteries, that's a drive to get to them cause it way far off cause they need so much land and so oftentimes they're not ideally situated in cities. Because land obviously comes at a premium. We'll talk more about that later.

Daniel: In the US we have a long history of segregation, discrimination and exclusion. It turns out that in our places of burial the same thing goes on.