Earther: Green Burials

Brian Kahn writes in Earther:

In fact, the only sign there’s a cemetery here is the wrought iron and stone sculpture at its entrance and a few signs demarcating the conservation land that surrounds it.

But what Davis and a cadre of conservationists and afterlife advocates are building isn’t just about reconnecting with the Earth. They’re using the cemetery as part of a greater conservation plan for the Adirondacks. If they’re successful, that template that could spread to other landscapes stressed by human activity, helping them adapt them to the very modern problem of climate change....All told, the funeral industry with its estimated 19,177 funeral homes and thousands of cemeteries and crematoriums is worth an estimated $20.7 billion.

This big industry comes with a big environmental impact. In the U.S., 5.3 million gallons of toxic embalming fluid are buried every year. Each cremation releases as much carbon dioxide as a 500-mile road trip. Whether it’s metal caskets stuffed inside concrete vaults six feet below the surface or alkaline ashes that, if not stored in an urn on your mantle, are a real harm to the environment, the modern death industry has changed our relationship with, well, life.

“It’s bizarre we’ve ended up in a place where we spend thousands of dollars pumping our loved ones full of chemicals and painting their faces and putting them in a titanium casket is normal and wrapping them in a shroud and burying them isn’t,” Michelle Acciavatti, Spirit Sanctuary’s “death doula,” told Earther.