An Australian scientist called Wednesday for an end to the age-old tradition of cremation, saying the practice contributed to global warming.
Professor Roger Short said people could instead choose to help the environment after death by being buried in a cardboard box under a tree. The decomposing bodies would provide the tree with nutrients, and the tree would convert carbon dioxide into life-giving oxygen for decades, he said.
“Why waste all that carbon dioxide on your death?”
Short, a reproductive biologist at the University of Melbourne, said the contribution of cremation to harmful greenhouse gases was small, and he did not wish to prevent people from choosing how their body was disposed of according to their religion.
He suggested it would not be a bad idea to bequeath one’s body as food for a forest. “You can actually do, after your death, an enormous amount of good for the planet,” he said. “The more forests you plant, the better.”
I admit my first response to the beginning of the article was a chuckle. After reading it, it ain’t a bad idea. Fits in the category of acts an individual might choose towards a positive end.
But, in most Western nations, I wonder if you could ever get past the religious nutcases and pandering politicians to get “permission” for disposing of your body outside the rules – inside the box?
First….enviromentalists can be very religious like in their zeal. Some to the point of fanatical zealotry.
Second…..I’m heavily involved in Animal issues and their enviroment….so I’m not anti-enviroment…..just honest about the movement.
Third….#19…Misanthropic Scott….I’ve been considering the Polar bear route for my remains for sometime now…..or possibly a final visit to Kodiak Island and communing with the brown bears, maybe offer them a bit of turf with their surf 🙂
(1) For those who don’t want cremation, why do they continue to bury people horizontally? If space is an issue, then a vertical would be much better.
(2) There is a cemetery in Marin where they bury you vertically in a biodegradable sack in a public access park and no markers (headstones). Your family can find your remains by looking up the GPS coordinates of where the planted you.
(3) How about bringing back the methods of old where a family owned a vault (can’t remember what they are called). They would but the body of a dead family member in it, add some lye, then seal it. By the time the next family member died, they previous bodies had decomposed and there was room for new people. So generations of family members would be “buried” in the same place.
(4) How about using more burials at sea? I would not mind becoming shark chow after I die. They bodies would recycle into the ecosystem faster, there is more room, and it would be cheaper. Navies use this system.
#33 – joshua,
I have no problem with my zeal being called religious-like. It probably is. I too love the wild animals, much more in fact than I love humans. That’s what drives me to such zeal. That and the fact that I’d like to minimize the current mass extinction. Ours is already greater, not only than the one that killed the non-avian dinosaurs, but also than the one 250 million years ago. This means that the sixth mass extinction, while still in progress, is already the greatest one this planet has ever gone through. Knowing how you love animals, does this knowledge drive you to evironmental zealotry?
After I’m dead I don’t care what they do with the remains. I have let my wishes be known that I do not want a large expensive funeral. Please, just dispose of my body in the least expensive method allowed by law. If being tree fertilizer is fine with the State, then it is fine with me. But Chum somehow doesn’t make me feel great so if that is what happens to my body, just don’t tell me before hand.
Misanthropic Scott, please don’t take this as derogatory, but mass extinction? There is absolutely no evidence for that. In fact the “models” that are currently used for analysis of climatic data aren’t even proven to be accurate. At best they are a guess based on what we currently know to be driving the weather systems. There are many valid claims by detractors of the IPCC such as:
“The assumption that the Earth had a stable climate and was in radiation balance before industrialisation began cannot be substantiated and is unlikely to be true. The reconstruction of past climates from geological and fossil records identifies a pattern of variability that is not consistent with the IPCC concept of stability” William Kininmonth, head of Australia’s National Climate Centre 1985-1998.
“The credibility of many prestigious organizations and persons is invested in the dangerous global warming cause. Not surprisingly, therefore, the reaction to the mounting evidence against the alarmist case has been to ramp up the rhetoric and pursue with even more vigor the idea that the public must be “educated” about global warming.” Feb./07 Robert M. Carter, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
RICHARD S. LINDZEN, MIT PROFESSOR OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE- On Global Warming Fears: “I think it’s mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves.
And there’s a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of it, we’re talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios — of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less.”
I could fill the blog with challenging views from other qualified scientiests.
#37 – JimR,
I’ll leave the climate change debate for another thread.
As for mass extinction, we’ve been causing mass extinctions on a less global scale everywhere we’ve gone since we left Africa. Within 1,000 years of crossing the land bridge into the Americas, 83 percent of all large North American mammal species were gone and 87 percent of all large South American mammals were gone. And that was just with the weapons we had 15,000 years ago.
We also caused mass extinctions on New Zealand, Hawaii, Australia, etc. Our knowledge of the fact that we have caused such extinctions predates our knowledge of anthropogenic global climate disruption.
The oceans are 90% dead. Our fisheries output has been declining year over year since 1983 despite improved fishing technology to find and catch ever more fish. So, in our arsenal of extinction weapons, we started with over harvesting, then added habitat destruction, then added pollution, now we’ve added climate change. Even without the last, the 6th extinction was already the largest in the planet’s history.
#37 – JimR,
Oh, here are a couple of articles I found fairly quickly to give you some input on the current mass extinction.
This one’s from Mother Jones
http://tinyurl.com/yqamyg
And this one is from the American Museum of Natural History website.
http://tinyurl.com/27u3zg
Enjoy. Oh, and BTW, no offense taken regarding your post. Of course people have different views. Else we wouldn’t both be here to discuss them.
Cremations & everything else we do will have no ultimate effect on the environment. The biosphere will do what it wants. In 5,000 years there will be another massive ice age & there will be nothing we can do to stop that either. Assuming there’s still a “we” here & humanity hasn’t incinerated itself in a bonehead nuclear conflagration.
I want medical students to cut me up after I’m dead. Why waste a perfectly good dead body.
No prob MS. I’ll have a look. Been busy with my new Macs… Tiger OS is just incredible. Time to move on to other threads though. I had forgotten about this one. 🙂