Natural Burial/No Casket No Cemetery

For most of human history, what we now call natural burial was just called “burial.” A simple, shallow hole dug into the earth, and the shrouded dead body placed into the hole. However, in many modernized areas of the world, cemeteries require the body be placed in a metal or wooden casket, then placed in a concrete or metal vault. The earth is not coming anywhere near the dead body. In addition: “American funerals are responsible each year for the felling of 30 million board feet of casket wood (some of which comes from tropical hardwoods), 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete for burial vaults, and 800,000 gallons of embalming fluid. Even cremation is an environmental horror story, with the incineration process emitting many a noxious substance, including dioxin, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and climate-changing carbon dioxide.” via Just How Bad is Traditional Burial? In this Order article, Natural Burial and Embracing Decay, I discuss the reasons it’s so existentially valuable for our society to accept this kind of decomposition when we die. If we work towards accepting, not denying, our decomposition, we can begin to see it as something beautiful. More than beautiful— ecstatic. The ecstasy of decay begins as disgust and revulsion, the way we feel when we imagine ourself as a corpse. But disgust and revulsion turn to pleasure as we use that feeling to realize we are alive now. We will someday be dead, but today blood pumps through our veins and breath fills our lungs and we walk the earth.