Funerals: Our final party
Welcome to the end, and the beginning
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 4 3 // F U N E R A L S
Death, taxes, and climate change
Death is a taboo topic in America. But if death is coming for us all, we might as well learn to do it right. So this month we’ll explore the final chapter. Not our own death, per se, but the last party that’s ever thrown on our behalf: our funeral.
We don’t think much about how our exit from this world will leave it after we’re gone. But Erica Bruist, a British writer, has thought about it quite a bit. To write her latest book, Erica traveled to seven death festivals in Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and Indonesia, and came back to tell us about it in This Party’s Dead.
This month, she’s writing for Hothouse about the intersection our final send-off and the climate, and how we might do it differently. Along the way, we’ll explore mushroom suits, the burial habits of Victorians, Nepalese funeral pyres, unspoken beliefs about the unmarked grave, and a final ocean voyage in an urn made of ice. And did I mention Erica’s hilarious?
You’ll leave a bit wiser about how to throw one last great party for you, and the climate. Join us.
Mike Coren
Fast-track to heaven on the banks of the Bagmati
By Erica Buist
I’m on the bank of a river, watching flames consume a human corpse. My guide, Sandip, has narrated every moment that led to this. First, the wrapping of the body in a sheet, then the draping of marigolds and gentle scattering of poinsettia leaves, the dripping of holy water into the mouth, the placing of wood, straw, and ghee around the body; and finally, the lighting of the fire. Dark smoke charges up from the pyre, turning white as it billows into the sky.
We’re standing at the temple of Pashupatinath, where the funeral pyres of Kathmandu line the sacred Bagmati river. Being cremated here is an honor, placing you on a fast-track to heaven, so they say. But it isn’t long before a body on a chita (a stretcher for the dead) rushes past my face, heading past the pyres and into a building. I ask Sandip where they’re going and he looks, momentarily, stumped.
“Ah,” he says, realizing, “they’re taking this body to do it electronically.”
The first functioning modern electric crematorium was installed in Nepal in 2016 by the Pashupati Area Development Trust in an attempt to diminish the carbon emissions and deforestation caused by open-air cremations. I ask Sandip what’s different about this family that they’re choosing the crematorium—do they just want to get it over with quickly? He says it must be a sign of wealth. I look into it, and it’s the opposite: burning a body in a crematorium is considerably cheaper than on a wooden pyre, aside from being faster and more environmentally friendly. It will probably catch on; the traditional method has led to substantial deforestation around the Kathmandu Valley, with a huge increase in population over the past 15 years and each traditional cremation using around half a ton of wood.
Whereas Nepal’s dead are moving from pyres to crematoriums, the big move in the West in recent decades has been from burial to cremation. In 1975, less than 6% of Americans chose to be cremated, with traditional burial remaining the overwhelmingly popular option. By the year 2000, it was 26%, and by 2019 over 54% were choosing cremation.
But the ‘cremation vs burial’ dance goes back much further than a few decades. More like… 26 centuries?
Early Romans began practicing cremation widely around 600 B.C., while the early Christians and Jews continued with burial—which was, compared to today’s customs, a simple process: simply wrapping the body in a linen sheet and burying it. Then Constantine’s Christianization of the Empire around 400 A.D. meant burial almost completely replaced cremation in Europe for almost 1500 years—an illegal cremation took place in London in 1769 (yeah, we’re real rule-breakers here in the Big Smoke—and yes, I am writing about climate change in a city nicknamed for its coal pollution).
It wasn’t until 1873 that the cremation chamber was developed, at which point multiple bodies a day could be burned. It didn’t catch on at first, at least not until the Pope got on board; cremation was condemned by the Catholic church until 1963, and they still maintain it doesn’t “hold the same value” as burial. Now, cremation is the ritual of choice for more than half the US population, and in a handful of states, it’s reaching 70-80%.
How does all this affect the climate? The truth is, death rituals all over the world are very carbon-intensive.
Whether it’s gas-fired cremation or India’s crematoriums overflowing and funeral pyres burning throughout the night during the pandemic, or even the Catholic Church’s ongoing thumbs up to burying people in toxic boxes (coffins), modern practices have turned human bodies into an environmental burden after death. We need a solution, and that solution is green burial: the kind of simple, natural rituals our species practiced for centuries. Once again, we humans find ourselves in an odd position: innovating not to move forward, but to get back to the way things were done before we industrialized death, in order to capitalize on it.
Burial: What’s the problem with it?
The romantic vision of burial is that we are “returning the body to the earth.” That edits out the whole mess of other crap going underground with it. Because the typical American body is not alone when it goes into the ground — bodies are embalmed, painted with makeup, and dressed in nice clothes; the cheeks and eye-sockets are packed with cotton wool so they don’t appear sunken; but crucially, there are coffins and vaults. The American soil is packed with coffins made of wood—47,000 m3 of it per year, in fact, which often involves cutting down rare hardwoods. Cheaper materials are also used, such as particle-board (whose manufacturing releases formaldehyde gas), and plastic, all of which is held together with toxic glues. There are also 104,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, and 2,700 tons of copper and bronze—enough to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge or pave a new interstate between Washington D.C and Baltimore.
Because embalming is still common practice, the US ground has 16 million liters of embalming fluid buried in it every year—enough to fill six Olympic-sized swimming pools. But surprisingly, the soil isn’t the environmental concern here. People are.
“We tend to think of formaldehyde as bad for the environment because it’s going into the soil,” says mortician and end-of-life specialist Michelle Acciavatti. “But almost everybody who is embalmed in the US is buried in a vault inside a concrete box, so the body doesn’t really come into contact with the soil.” It’s the embalmers themselves who are taking the brunt of the harm; formaldehyde is a known carcinogen, and it’s not news that the incidences of leukemia and brain cancer are ridiculously higher in people who perform embalming. We might not typically see medical problems and the environment as issues that are linked, but as Acciavatti points out, environmental harm is downstream, one act dominoes into another, from environmental harm to higher cancer rates and medical costs.
Fires of cremation
Burn me up, toss me in the sea. So much less pomp and circumstance than burial, right? No big varnished coffin with a silk inlay, no taking up real estate in the ground. Cheap, simple, no fuss.
Except cremation actually carries an enormous amount of environmental fuss. By some estimates, a single cremation puts about 190kg of carbon dioxide into the air—the equivalent of driving 470 miles in a car. All the cremations that happen in the US alone emit 360,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to TalkDeath, you could emit that amount all by yourself if you drove to the sun and back five times. Truly the worst road trip idea ever suggested.
But even calculating the effect of each single cremation doesn’t capture the harm of it, since it’s done at a scale of so many bodies daily. Not only do crematoriums have to be heated to a high temperature, but the temperature has to be kept steady throughout the day, which means both heating and cooling is required. As if that wasn’t energy-munching enough, at the end of the day the crematorium has to be cooled to prevent it from melting—which is what has been happening in India as they run day and night to keep up with the Covid death toll.
We’re not dying any slower over here. Have you got a better idea?
Well, yes. Green burial. This could mean many things—water cremation, human composting, or even floating off into the ocean in an urn made of ice—we’ll go over a few of the coolest new methods later in the series. Suffice to say, it’s a method of internment that allows natural decomposition and recycling of the body, and there are myriad ways to assure your corpse won’t be a burden on the earth. And despite the word “innovation” getting tossed around as more and more methods emerge, green burial is by no means new: for centuries and across cultures, natural burial was the status quo. For this shift we can grumble at the Victorians, who first professionalized death in the West, and used funerals as a way to flaunt their wealth, shoving lavish coffins into the ground just so everyone would know they could afford one. So now here we are: innovating to turn back the clock, right to the moment before we wandered off in the wrong direction.
Luckily, sustainable funeral options are beginning to pique people’s interest. The 2021 Green Funerals and Burials Survey found that 51% of respondents have attended a green burial and more than 84% were interested in choosing it for themselves, twice as many as the previous survey. But in real terms—i.e. people going ahead with a natural burial rather than just expressing theoretical interest—the shift is slow.
So what are the barriers to getting back to a process that is simpler, where there is money to be made, and where nature does most of the work for us? In short, what gives? Why wouldn’t people just go for a green burial?
1) Death anxiety (AKA The Psychological Barrier)
Humans are the only species that has to live with full knowledge of our impending demise. We humans frequently respond with a bone-deep need to leave our mark on the Earth. This was called “symbolic immortality” in the Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (a book in which psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski sought to prove the many, many ways mortal terror affects our daily behavior). In the decidedly less scientific book The Fault in Our Stars, it was called “pissing on fire hydrants”.
Whatever you want to call it, the “leave no trace” doctrine of the green burial movement is in direct psychological conflict with the human instinct of leaving a reminder of our time here on the planet. Ideally, the mark you would leave would be your positive impact—the children you had, the memories you left with people, the art you created, the hospital wing you funded—rather than the small plot of land you polluted. But that logic requires a train of thought, and “When I’m dead…” is a train of thought we’re very used to derailing.
This certainly isn’t helped by the discourse around natural burial suggesting “leave no trace” to be literal—as in, no memorialization of any kind. This, according to Corinne Elicone, Public Programs and Outreach Manager at Mount Auburn Cemetery, is not correct: “Of course, a green burial with no memorialization is going to leave a smaller footprint than a green burial with a granite memorial that was mined, polished, and shipped, but…memorialization does not make or break a green burial.” In the context of green burial, leaving no trace means leaving no environmental trace—in short, you want people to remember you were at the party because you were fun, not because you blocked the toilet.
“We are in business with mortal people and grieving families anxious about how they will be remembered, and different people will have different preferences,” says Elicone. “The ‘greener’ those preferences are the better for the planet they will be, but that is not the only metric we need to be concerned with as environmentalists in the death industry.”
2) “This sounds pricey” (AKA The Marketing Barrier)
Marketing is essentially the business of answering three questions: What is it? Why do I need it? What will it cost? Acciavatti says that every talk she gives on natural burial still has to include a ten-minute explanation of what it is—which means it’s a new concept even to those who would willingly attend a talk by a mortician. “We’re doing a shitty job of normalizing green burial,” she says, “People still don’t know what it is and it’s tricky to introduce a brand-new concept. This idea that you can have a simple, expedient, both environmentally and economically sustainable, affordable burial—we haven’t normalized that.”
Because its reintroduction is still relatively new, Elicone believes people often assume the cost to be high. “Dying is very cost-prohibitive. Paying for a ‘conventional’ burial and all that comes with it is not realistic for many people’s pocketbooks. Green burial has unfortunately garnered a reputation for being a boutique kind of service, even though at many cemeteries it is not.” There are places where a direct cremation (averaging around $1500) is either the same price or slightly higher than a green burial at a cemetery. Meanwhile, the whole-nine-yards Catholic funerals Elicone saw growing up—embalming, lacquered casket, a new suit, flowers, a service, a burial service, and a reception—can easily run into the region of $30,000 or more.
3) “UMM….Not big on unmarked graves, actually (AKA The Cultural Barrier)
The fear of the unmarked grave is perhaps one of the most difficult to deal with. The focus in public discourse—perhaps in part an attempt by the media to make it feel new when it isn’t—is on the ‘greenest’ version of green burial: one with no memorial at all. Having already mentioned why that might make anyone uncomfortable, the suggestion is particularly horrifying to communities who have experienced attempts at genocide—such as Jews or Armenians—since a huge part of the dehumanization of those groups was the unmarked grave. I must admit that even as a white, middle-class woman, one of my first thoughts was of being murdered and having my body dumped in the woods.
So how true is this association of natural burial with the unmarked grave? Not very. It’s true that most US green burial cemeteries do not allow upright markers that are set in concrete (concrete breaks down faster than soil can naturally decompose it). But, Acciavatti points out, almost every green burial cemetery offers engraved surface stones, which are either laid on the ground or set in gravel. They also offer GPS coordinates. “I don’t think anybody is really advocating for green burial being synonymous with an unmarked grave,” Acciavatti says, “It’s just an option. Some people feel no need to mark the grave with a traditional marker because they’re giving the body back to the soil—some people feel the entire cemetery is a marker because their loved one is now distributed through the trees.”
It’s always frustrating when a perfectly good solution to a problem is right before our eyes and left practically untouched. But brilliant humans are innovating a wealth of solutions—even better and brighter and more exciting than the ones we left behind.
We’ll come to those later in the series. You could even think of it as a menu, mesdames, and messieurs. But before that, *cue dramatic credit music*…
NEXT TIME, some green burial myth-busting: why you really, really don’t need to wrap your corpse in a suit weaved with flesh-eating mushrooms.