Death Isn't The End
rEvolution inAction.
Posted to Religion on Sat Apr 28, 2007 at 04:39:23 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.
Human traditions are built around the disposal of our bodies after we've died. The major religions all have their rituals and such, but it is the bodies themselves that we should be concerned with, specifically the environmental damage caused by our burial practices.
The standard options for Christians are burial in a casket (as required by law in Germany) or cremation. Hindus are supposed to be cremated and the ashes disposed of in rivers. Muslims and Jews are buried wrapped in linen, and for those hard-core Zoroastrians there are the Towers of Silence where there bodies are strewn high above the ground to be picked clean by vultures so as not to pollute the earth (although they were also known to entomb bodies as well).
Recently, Roger Short of the University of Melbourne, said people could instead choose to help the environment after death by being buried in a cardboard box under a tree, noting that cremation adds to global warming. Rather than filling a human body with poisons (embalming fluid), killing a tree to make a box and then keeping the area where that is buried free of encroaching vegetation, or releasing hydrocarbons into the air while cremating the corpse, some are suggesting a more natural way (their slogan: "save a forest, plant yourself").
While graveyards often end up reusing space after 100 years or so, and they will try to find descendants of previous plot owners and hit them up for money instead of burying new bodies in the previously occupied spaces, most are overcrowded. Given that the human population is just going to keep going up, unless we change our antiquated corpse disposal traditions we may end up in a world covered in tombstones.
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