The up-and-coming green burial movement dovetails nicely with environmentalism, “non-organized” spirituality and genuine, noncorporate culture.
By Todd Spencer, Common Ground
It’s hard to write about death with funk playing. I’ll have to turn this nasty funk tha hell down. Nothing less “goth” than funk music, it turns out.
OK. Imagine your grandmother’s organ playing.
When I was a kid there was an episode of Lost in Space with a space mummy walking menacingly among the foam “boulders” just a step behind slow-pokey Dr. Smith and freckle-y Will Robinson. It gave me the creeps something fierce, and for days. This led naturally to thoughts of mummies from Egypt, and made me wonder why the ancients tried to preserve their corpses from the desert and time by embalming and wrapping and entombing.
I learned just one minute ago on Wikipedia — because it took a lot less effort than looking it up at the library as a 9-year-old — that “Egyptian culture believed the body was home in the afterlife to a person’s Ka (the life force that is the difference between a living and dead person, and one of the five parts of the human soul), which without it would be condemned to eternal wandering.” So they gutted their loved ones like fish, pulled the brain out the nose by hooks and slathered what was left in preservatives and wrapped them in bandages, to assure them a home in the afterlife.
Flash forward 4,000 years and we still try to preserve bodies. These days, by using fancy airtight coffins, formaldehyde and cement vaults. And by “we” I mean the consolidated, corporate funeral industry — one that charges $6,000 - $10,000 for an average funeral and burial, in a way that 1) only gives the “appearance” of preservation and that 2) poisons the earth with lawn chemicals and embalming toxins and buries 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods every year. Wood that would better serve us in the form of trees turning CO2 into O2 instead of as planks in the form of deluxe funeral home brokered caskets sold at a giant markup. And in the end, those darn ancient Egyptians still get to outlast us rich, modern Americans. Conventional burial is not only unsustainable, it’s regression!
But really, should preserving bodies be the goal anyway? A new movement, much of it based in the Bay Area, is answering that question with a resounding “No.”
True, there are those who say that aliens built the Pyramids and that we humans are not from this earth, anyway. In fact, the whole green movement this issue of Common Ground is based on would not even exist if we lived the way other species manage to: harmoniously with the environment. How we’ve poisoned our own habitat would be Exhibit A in any argument about us being “other.” But on the likely chance that we are as natural to this earth as a bobcat, barnacle or bay leaf, then shouldn’t we — don’t we want to — be returned to the earth instead of being cordoned from it by a mortician? Wouldn’t returning on a cellular level to the soil that we sprang from be one of the most natural, meaningful, beautiful, perfect things we could do? Returning not as a consumer, a taker, an extractor, but as a giver in our final act?
The up-and-coming green burial movement dovetails nicely with environmentalism, “non-organized” spirituality and genuine, noncorporate culture. The latter, because it takes death out of the hands of the likes of Houston-based Service Corporation International, which Wikipedia cites as, “The largest provider of funeral, cremation, and cemetery services in the US, and one of the largest mortuary chains in the world with over 1200 funeral homes, 358 cemeteries and revenues of $1.7 billion dollars.” The family funeral home grabber is the Clear Channel of the funeral biz, and like Clear Channel, the owner is a close friend of George W. Bush.
The nascent “death midwife” movement is especially progressive and, incidentally, anti-SCI. These specially trained persons facilitate “holistic”-style home funerals that allow grieving families to skip the mortuary and funeral director entirely, in order to have something more intimate and quite possibly much more meaningful for the survivors.
http://commongroundmag.com/2007/04/editorsnote0704.html