Your editors talk about the climate impact of typical burials » Yale Climate Connections

As fall settles in and the leaves turn from green to red to brown, your editors have been thinking about an often-taboo subject. We got together to talk about our culture’s relationship with the end of life and the greener alternatives to common burial and cremation practices. 

This discussion has been edited and condensed.

Sam: So it’s spooky season. And I’ll acknowledge off the top that this can be kind of a taboo subject in modern American culture, which, Pearl, I know you have feelings about. 

Pearl: I need to take full responsibility for the fact that we’re talking about this because of my strong feelings.

Sara: Say more. 

Pearl: I’ve done a lot of research and written articles about death, dying, bereavement, and grieving, and I just think it’s an important thing for people to talk about because it is one of two things that are certain in life – we were born and we will die. And yet a lot of us walk around avoiding the subject matter altogether. I think if more people talked about it, it would help prepare us for what is going to happen, as well as prepare us for what is going to happen to our loved ones, and make us more educated and be just all around more healthy. And, yeah, I just find it a really fascinating topic. Because I’m weird.

Sam: I don’t think it’s weird.

Sara: I’m excited to learn from you. 

Sam: So thinking of the climate lens of things, I think it would be useful for us to talk a little bit about the two most common ways of … what is the right word? Not dying. Being, but dead? [Everyone giggles nervously.]

Sara: A green burial?

Sam: Yeah, but a green burial is a specific kind of thing. The common after-death options are a burial in a concrete vault with embalming fluid or cremation, both of which have relatively high environmental costs, and also I was just reading only really started to become common after the Civil War. So I think about them as the “traditional” methods, but actually, some of the greener methods are actually much more traditional.

Sara: Can you say more about the environmental impacts of those two options?

Sam: Yeah, and Pearl jump in. I wrote down some notes from two really good Washington Post articles I read before this conversation. So this one says cemeteries in the U.S. put more than 4 million gallons of embalming fluid and 64,000 tons of steel into the ground, along with 1.6 million tons of concrete. Concrete has a lot of carbon emissions associated with manufacturing. And then cremation, because you have to heat a furnace really, really hot for a long period of time, it produces about the same emissions as driving 500 miles in a car. These numbers were coming from the Green Burial Council.

Pearl: They’re a really good resource. You can find cemeteries on their website that offer green burials in your area. I think here in Rhode Island, there’s three cemeteries. 

In traditional burials, formaldehyde is a big thing. But also sometimes with the cremations, you will embalm the person if you’re going to have to wait a while before you have a ceremony or the body needs to be transported, unless for religious purposes it cannot be embalmed. For the health care of the morticians as well, you know, you’re dealing with this known carcinogen that is just nasty all around.

Sara: Is that the formaldehyde?

Pearl: Yeah, formaldehyde is a known carcinogen. It’s crazy how much we’re putting into the ground every year.

Sara: What is the purpose of the formaldehyde? It is it part of the embalming?

Pearl: If you’re going to do a viewing, oftentimes that’s a week. It could be two weeks. I mean, sometimes bodies have to be expatriated to another country. So you have to preserve it or sanitize it and that’s really the only way you can do it.

Sam: And I was reading that there are some embalming fluids that use less formaldehyde. That’s a greener option, but on the spectrum, not as green as some of the other ones. 

Pearl: So one of the newer, greener ways to … to … I don’t even know what to say.

Sara: Dispose of the dead?

Pearl: We don’t have the right language, right? 

Sam: Exactly, yeah, exactly. 

Pearl: Here we are as journalists, and we’re getting lost on words. 

Sara: It really underlines the point that it’s so taboo that we don’t talk about it. And yeah, we can’t even figure out what the right words are.

Pearl: Anyway, so for aquamation – a green alternative to cremation – they use an alkaline process. They stick the body into a vessel, and it’s a six-to-20-hour-long process, and then the water goes back into the sewage system, and it’s OK for the environment because it mimics the natural decomposition process, where the alkalinity would be of that amount anyway, with a body decomposing. But personally, I want the mushroom bag.

I think by the end of this conversation, we need to all come up with which green way we want our body to be disposed of.

It’s hard to think about it when you feel like you’re not being faced with your own mortality. But, you know, it can happen at any point.

Sam: Yeah. 

Pearl: At the end of aquamation, you basically get ashes, just like you do with cremation. And I also just learned today that there’s a service for getting rid of animals in that way too. A lot of people get ashes of their l animals, so I think aquamation is a great choice. It’s not legal here in Rhode Island. But it’s legal in 27 states right now. 

Then you just have the regular green burials too, where you can’t have the formaldehyde process, and you have to be in a biodegradable vessel. That’s a cool way to go too. I mean, you’re still taking up land, but at least you’re not leaching nasty stuff into it. And it’s a lot cheaper.

Sam: So the mushroom suit?

Pearl: Yes, let’s go back to the mushroom suit.

Sam: Do they dress you in a mushroom suit and bury you, or is some sort of decomposition happening outside of the ground?

Pearl: No, I think it’s all just in the suit. There’s actually a short Vimeo documentary called Suiting Dennis. It’s a family story about this decision and the planning process. They just put you in the suit, they bury you in the ground, and the mushrooms go to work and do what they need to do. You can also be buried in a sack with a tree on top, and then you become the tree. I think that’s pretty cool as well.

Sara: Before this call, I learned about composting bodies, which I found interesting and comforting to learn about because the process is not that different from the process that I use to compost my kitchen scraps. You need the right ratio of carbon and nitrogen, so they often will add wood chips around the body inside of a vessel. They might monitor the temperature to make sure that as the process is happening, you’re getting hot enough. And they also make sure there’s enough oxygen coming in. 

And when you’re done, you have this compost that can feed plants, and you can put it in an area with trees, or maybe plant a tree with it. And I like the idea of the nutrients in my body that I have accumulated by eating plants going back into the plants.

Pearl: Yeah, that’s terramation, right?

Sara: That sounds like a fancy word that I did not encounter.

But again, I saw that it’s not legal everywhere. It’s just in a few states.

Pearl: There are several companies that you can send the body to. They turn it into soil. They can either place it in their local forest or send it back to you and you can utilize it. But then there’s questions of the carbon costs of transportation.

Sam: I was not raised with any religious tradition, but I do think I like the idea that life is just energy. And I don’t want to be put in a state where I’m not decomposing and my energy is stuck. I would much rather it go to whatever plants are above me. 

In the Jewish tradition, you don’t wait a long time to bury the dead, and it’s often just in a shroud. Often when I think about climate solutions, like death or otherwise, there is a move toward treating the land as if it is also a being that feels really nice to me. And so I think it makes sense to carry that into death as well. 

Sara: I think there’s something really important about the ethic of being part of something bigger than yourself that continues on. Most of the atoms in our bodies came from stars. And bringing it back to climate work, the work is going to continue on climate change after we’re gone. This isn’t a problem that we’re going to solve in our lifetimes. And so I think that’s part of why we’re seeing comfort in returning our energy and our nutrients to this system that will fuel the people who work after us on this problem.

Sam: Yeah, that’s so nice.

Pearl: I grew up in a very non-custom-driven, nonreligious household. And maybe that is part of why I find all of this fascinating. Those rituals of death are there in every culture for thousands of years for a reason: because it brings comfort to the loved ones that are still left. 

There is less of that binary: “dead, gone” vs. “living, here” in many cultures. I was reading that in one culture, they bury their loved ones near to them, and they dig them up every couple of years to put new clothing on them. 

I think it’s sad and hard not to have ritual in your life, because it leaves you so woefully underprepared for what is eventually going to happen to you. And to Sara, to your point, yeah, it almost feels like our work takes on this religious component to it. We want to venerate this world, and we can do that by giving back our bodies to it.

Sam: I do think it’s important. We can get really into the day-to-day of life. But stepping back and looking at what does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be part of this natural system that we are trying to repair our relationship with? How does that interact with all aspects of our life? 

I wonder, did either of you do any reading about where this fear of or separation from death came from within our culture? 

Pearl: I don’t know. I wonder if it has to do with industrialization and people living in close quarters. And death meant disease, so therefore it was to be feared.

Sara: I don’t know the reason either, but I think what you’re getting at is that these traditions arose because they were serving a purpose for the people at the time. And so now we’re at a point where we’re asking, “Is this still serving us, or should we make a change?”

Pearl: Yeah, absolutely. We’re just kind of at this inflection point where we have to figure out what we need to change and what’s going to work better for us. Can we re-pick up these ways that were better for the world, not just in death and dying, but also just in general? Can that work for us in a modern society?

Sara: Sam, what did you learn about why this tradition of embalming arose after the Civil War? Do you know how that happened?

Sam: Embalming became common because it allowed soldiers’ bodies to be returned to their families. So, yeah, like Sara was saying, what worked for people at the time.

Pearl: There’s a lot of conversation within the funeral industry. The way that we say goodbye to loved ones is changing as well. Seeing the body helps somebody process grief and go through whatever process they need to. But I think we’re still in a stage where we’re like, “Oh, we don’t need the big, grandiose funeral. We’ll just burn the remains of our loved ones, and we don’t even need a ceremony.” And no, we still need to have these traditions or customs that help us get to the next phase of our lives. And what does that look like? What do we do to be OK with the passing of our loved ones and our own passing?

Sam: Having a ritual is really important, and I think we talk about it, too, with nonhuman losses in climate change. We’re going to be losing a lot. So what does that mean? What does that look like? How do we keep moving forward? 

Pearl: When people ask you, “How you are?” they want you to say, “Fine,” or “Good.” When someone is grieving, they feel like they need to hide it in this culture, and that’s just really sad, and it’s a really isolating and lonely place to be. And it’s not right. We should be getting more comfortable with talking about grief, talking about the loss of things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a person, but it’s important. 

Sara: Loss of places. 

Pearl: Yeah, loss of places, loss of traditions. We’ve observed a lot of loss in just this past year. It’s a lot to process. 

Sam: I have totally lost track of time, but I will state for the record since Pearl said that she wants a mushroom suit, I do think that the cotton shroud burial does feel like – I mean, hopefully not any time soon, maybe I’ll change my mind by the time I die, but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow – that would be nice. 

Pearl: All right. Well, we’ll make sure to tell your parents. 

Sam: Thank you. They can read this article.

Sara: I like the composting option, but it’s not legal in my state, so I’ll have to hang on until it’s legalized. [Everyone laughs.]