Life After Death - ecological burial - Brief Article

The material is gingerly placed in a hermetically sealed container, encased in a concrete-and-steel structure that weighs more than a ton, and then buried underground.

Are they burying toxic waste? No, dear reader, they are burying you.

The excess packaging required by most U.S. cemeteries guarantees that your journey from "dust to dust" will take many hundreds of years. Instead of a quick transformation into sweet earth, you lace centuries of slow putrefaction.

Cremation isn't much better. Burning a body produces carcinogenic dioxins, trace metals, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, sulfur dioxide, and global-warming-inducing carbon dioxide. Only your bone chips return to earth, assuming they're scattered. The rest of you becomes air pollution.

Your final resting place need not be unnatural. In Great Britain's "green burial" movement, people are buried in simple shrouds or biodegradable coffins made of flax, cork, cardboard, or recycled newspapers. Graves are marked with trees rather than headstones, and the cemeteries double as wildlife habitat.

How can you expire without becoming toxic waste? In the United States, a company called Memorial Ecosystems already has a nature-reserve cemetery in South Carolina, and is planning many more. (For information, call (864) 647-7798; www.memorialecosystems.com.) It is legal in most states to be buried in the way you see fit on your own rural land. For the cost of a cemetery plot, you can buy an acre or two that you can preserve--and nourish--as natural habitat forever.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Sierra Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group