Bob Stannard’s recent commentary about death and dying in VTDigger prompted this octogenarian friend to do some thinking.
My wife and I have discussed and made clear we want green burials when our times come. But although there are 14 cemeteries in our home town of Hinesburg, none allow natural or green burials. The nearest green burial site is in Vermont Forest Cemetery, some 40 miles away. While Vermont has some 2000 cemeteries, only 15 allowed green burial as of 2023.
At the recent memorial service of a neighbor and friend, her surviving spouse detailed the complexity of simply finding and using a green burial site for his recently departed wife. It’s worth noting that green burial has been the dominant form of interment for most of humankind’s time on earth. The dead are simply laid to rest in a hole in the ground with no chemical embalming, liners or concrete vaults, using only biodegradable materials such as a linen shroud, pine coffin or nothing at all, and they’re buried at a shallower depth to hasten natural biodegradation.
What is the dominant form of interment today? Currently, over 60% of Americans choose cremation over embalming and burial. Embalming requires the use of fluids such as formaldehyde, methanol, sodium borate, sodium nitrate, glycerin, coloring agents and water, some of which are toxic. And burial often uses exotic wood or metal caskets and concrete vaults.
Cremation, however, typically releases between 160 and 190 kilograms of CO2 into the air, equivalent to driving a car 470 miles and it uses some 28 gallons of natural gas or propane fuel to reach the required heat for cremation.
Our world is rife with many funerary customs.
When I was in India, I saw a great deal of cremation sites near the Ganges, but in their tradition bodies were simply burned on wood piles and the remains were dumped into the river. I also saw “sky burial,” where the corpse is left on an elevated wooden rack to be eaten by vultures until only the bones are left and these fall through the rack onto the ground where they’re collected by relatives for veneration on small altars within the home. In Tibet, the body may simply be left on a high mountain charnel field to be consumed by vultures.
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When hiking across Baffin Island with three friends in the ‘90s well north of the Arctic Circle, we attended a local burial in which a young Inuit boy who had just drowned in a whalebone kayak was simply laid on the ground and covered with stones to prevent wild animals from disturbing his body as permafrost that far north makes burial impractical.
On our honeymoon in China, my new wife and I saw the Terracotta Army of China’s first Emperor Qin Shi Huang, dating from 210 BCE. The pits where the buried soldiers were found in 1974 contain some 8000 life-size terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses. Built by slaves, this terracotta army was intended to protect the Emperor in the afterlife.
Around 2600 BCE, Egyptian royalty began the 70-day process of mummification to preserve bodies after death. This lasted well into the Roman Era. Embalming entailed removing all the organs and the brain to reduce moisture, covering the body with salts and then finally wrapping it with hundreds of yards of linen. Amulets, masks, and religious objects accompanied the dead before they were entombed. Mummified bodies were believed to be the home of the soul or spirit and only if the body was preserved could the spirit make the journey to the afterlife.
In 19th and 20th-century America, death and burial was catapulted into popular view by Edgar Allen Poe who wrote in 1844 about his terror of being buried alive — “taphophobia.” His bestseller, “The Premature Burial” ignited popular fear leading to the use of “safety coffins.” The Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven has such a coffin with a pipe from the coffin to the lawn above to enable the buried person to be seen and to ring a bell if he were indeed buried alive.
When I was young, our family doctor told us that some doctors he’d known kept an eight-inch hatpin in their black bags that they used to pierce the heart of one believed to be dead and, if not, to ensure that they were before burial.
What drives this obsession with human rituals of death? For some it is religious and derives from belief in an afterlife. For others, it’s inherited family or community tradition. For my wife and me, anything other than a natural burial is alien. I liken it to regenerative rather than industrial agriculture.
The idea of life ending, being laid to rest in the ground and becoming an enriching element of the earth that then nurtures future generations of flora, fauna, and humans appeals to us much more than the idea of being “preserved” or turned into “cremains” in an expensive, polluting process that feels alien.
With the average funeral costing $8,000 for burial and $7,000 for cremation in 2023 and more than 3 million people dying in the U.S. in that year, one can secure a plot in a green burial cemetery for as little as $1,000. Surviving family can dig the shallow gravesite, lay the body to rest, and refill the grave, leaving the surface as it was found in nature or possibly placing a small flat stone over the grave. So, adding up all those funerals, So that’s $3 billion vs. $22.5 billion, a net savings of $19.5 billion that could be used to reduce hunger or homelessness.
Let us hope that our Vermont and national communities expand options for green burial for the sake of the earth. One can learn more at the Green Burial Council’s website.
When I was young, our euphemism for death and dying was “pushing up daisies.” My goal when I die will be just that, to “push up daisies.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: Green burial in Vermont.