Eco-Friendly Burial lets you be Green Forever
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 08.14.05
Treehugger has talked about biodegradable caskets and eco-friendly burials before; now it has gone mainstream in Marin. The New York Times covers the trend. "It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse." ::New York Times
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Finally, this odd ritual of ours gets more reasonable.
I'll be sure to look into this before I buy the farm.
Thanks for the info.
Interesting, but isn't it more eco-friendly (and cheaper) just to be cremated? Or am I missing something?
But being cremated burns fuel and pollutes.
Sort of like what Nate did on Six Feet Under.
Is there anywhere that generates energy from cremations? Personally I like what the Zoroastrians traditionally do. The dead are left in the Towers of Silence, or dakhmas, for the elements of nature — the sun and wind — and birds of prey to dispose of. For Zoroastrians, the laws of purity and nature are paramount: cremation of the body is believed to desecrate the element of fire, burying the body defiles the Earth and drowning the body pollutes the waters. Dakhma Nishin, or sky burial, is the doctrinally preferred practice.
Zoroastrianism, at 3,500 years old, is one of the world’s oldest religions. Most live in India.
..have heard that the vulture numbers are dwindling up there in the zoroastrian regions, in fact they've even replaced vultures with solar reflectors in the Tower of Silence ...actually in the above article Bruce Stirling has a great new way to shuffle off the coil-- he suggests getting ground up into pellets, fed to peregrine falcons living downtown, and then podcasted to the grandkids.. (ok he's a freak--and maybe we dont wanna see granpa getting fed to the falcons, but aside from that part, the rest rocks)