By chance, quite a bit of my recent entertainment seems to involve death. I recently finished Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm (which is only marginally about death per se), but now I’m reading Death’s Acre by Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson, and coming up on the reading list is Stiff by Mary Roach. And I just listened to a KQED Forum show on the city of Colma, California, which is a necropolis — a city of the dead — just south of San Francisco, which reminded me I’ve always wanted to read Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death.
There is an alternative, called the “Green Burial” (or natural burial, as Wikipedia would have it) that retains the practice of burial, but without the environmentally wasteful or hazardous side effects. No embalming, only a simple coffin that degrades easily to permit natural decomposition. Fernwood Cemetery, in the San Francisco bay area, was the first to take up the mantle in the United States (the trend started in the U.K.), although apparently without some small drama of personality conflicts between it’s founders, according to the New York Times.
The Wikipedia essay has a few intriguing links, however, to more extremely ecological forms of, er, disposal. They point to the Tibetan practice of jhator, or “Sky Burial”, in which the deceased is cut up into little pieces (eeewww!) and then exposed on a platform, mostly for birds of prey (“jhator” literally means “alms to the birds”).
The Tibetans weren’t alone in this practice, of course. Apparently many cultures have done the same, from the elevated burial platforms of native Americans to the Zoroastrian “Towers of Silence”.
Another link is to the ultramodern practice of promession, in which the body is freeze dried into a powder before being interred or scattered. In this case, immersion in liquid nitrogen performs a service equivalent to that of natural gas in cremation, but metals (such as those dental fillings containing mercury) can be filtered out.
On hearing of some of these practices (well, I hadn’t heard of the Mr. Freeze exit) I considered that they were all still pretty wasteful. Even natural burial takes place well below the bioactive zone of the soil which is generally in the top six or eight inches (or at least as I've understood it from backpacking's Leave No Trace guidelines). So while this technique might permit “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”, it certainly doesn’t hasten the process. And cremation (as well as promession) uses a fairly large amount of energy.
I pondered this, and decided that tidal wetlands would be a preferable solution. I imagined big hovercraft skimming out to a fresh burial site (using GPS coordinates), using long scoops to pry a temporary opening out of the mud, and dropping in the shrouded body before releasing the mud to seal it in.
Then I heard about Tibetan jhator the same evening I was listening to a podcast which deplored how we are stripping the ocean of fish. And eureka: instead of alms to the birds, how about alms to the fish?
Of course, burial at sea is nothing new. But the normal practice doesn’t look too promising. If the body decays, gases tend to develop that make it float — and we don't really want those bodies washing ashore. If the body doesn’t decay, then what’s the point? But what about the jhator practice of cutting the body up? Well, aside from the grossness factor, that is still a pretty environmentally messy process. Even if it were done at sea, letting the waves clean up the mess, there’s really no reason to let so much technology get involved (bar conversation: “Well, my job is to sharpen the huge knives used on the funeral fishbait boats. What do you do?”).
So move most of the practice of jhator offshore. But to reduce our corpses to bite-sized pieces for the fishes, how about bugs? A little research reveals that Dermestidae beetles are used by natural history museums to remove the flesh from animal skeletons, so the skeletons can be studied, stored or displayed.
So: what I envision is a platform at sea which accepts one body and an appropriate number of these bugs. As the body is, uhm, processed, some beetles will wander away and fall through the open grating into the sea below. Small parts of the body might blow away in the same way. Eventually, all that will be left is a skeleton and a host of starving beetles. Some time later, after most of the now-dead and desiccated beetles have blown away as more fish food, a boat comes by and deals with the skeletal remains per the family's instructions. Calcium is always welcome in the sea, right? It’s what seashells are made of, right?
Of course, for those poor folks that don’t live near the sea, there is no reason the same practice couldn’t be adopted on land — just a variation of the old Temple of Silence, but with bugs helping to make the process a little quicker, a little less messy, a little more predictable. Excarnation is no longer necessary, since the insects take care of that. The bugs also mean the bottom of the food chain would be fed, which is probably better for the system than an unbalanced boost to those specializing in carrion.
Would I want this to be my final disposition? Absolutely. I’m not sentimental about what happens to my body; the whole point is that I’m not there anymore. So whatever makes most sense for those still around, and I don’t think you can get much less environmentally wasteful than this practice.
Well, except for the Soylent Green alternative, which I think would be unsavory unless restricted to vegetarians.
And now, the real gross-you-out content. The Youtube link below will demonstrate beetles removing the flesh from a piglet (which died a natural death, according to the text accompanying the post). And if you are really still interested, you can buy a supply of the beetles to start your own hobby, and a book is available from Amazon for guidance (click over to the book just to see the author’s surname)!
