"Returning" is the title of an article in the August 2024 edition of The Sun Magazine. The article is an interview with Suzanne Kelly, focusing on green burial and "the embrace of mortality." Here is how the article begins:
Every year in the US ninety thousand tons of steel, almost two million tons of concrete, and thirty million board feet of hardwoods like walnut, mahogany, and cherry—not to mention eight hundred thousand gallons of embalming fluid—are buried underground. It’s all part of the $20 billion death-care industry, which fills our deceased with chemicals, places them in satin-lined caskets, encases those vessels inside steel vaults, and inters them in cemeteries alongside hundreds, sometimes thousands, of others who are buried the same way. Cremation is always an alternative, but it pollutes the air with mercury and carbon dioxide, and the energy expenditure of cremating one body is roughly equivalent to a drive from Savannah, Georgia, to Washington, DC. In either case, everything is handled by industry professionals. The bereaved might not see the body at all.
It’s a far cry from how we buried our dead as recently as 150 years ago. Scholar, farmer, and cemetery administrator Suzanne Kelly has studied the grassroots movement to reclaim sustainable burial practices and rediscover rites and rituals that once connected us to—and personalized—the process of death. It’s a movement often referred to as green burial, and it encompasses everything from using cloth shrouds instead of caskets to composting human remains. In the 2019 essay “A Way Back to the Wildness of Death” Kelly writes that the simple rituals of accompanying the body to the grave site, lowering it into the ground, and covering it with soil have the power to “yoke us back, not only to the earth and to each other, but to the bare-bones fact that death is an integral—and meaningful—part of life” (emphasis added).
Similar thoughts have made an appearance close to home, by way of a discussion on our local radio station, which was on the air in Santa Cruz, California back in September.
I actually wrote a blog posting about this topic before - quite a long time ago, as a matter of fact, on October 2, 2017. My earlier blog posting was titled, "Surfing The Silver Tsunami."
The recent article in The Sun, and the KSQD radio program, made me think I should highlight this topic once again. Our "climate crisis" is worse (much worse) than it was in 2017, and I am a lot older. You, too, are older than you were in 2017. Since we should be trying to figure out how to have fewer impacts on the environment, green burials are one suggestion to consider.
The interview with Suzanne Kelly is worth reading. And she has a book, too, if you'd like to follow up! It's called, Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth.
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