Dust to Dust — to save the planet

Why is this not a good idea? Wherever you stand on the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” business, doesn’t it make sense to quit burying tons of toxic materials in the ground along with our dust and ashes?

Recently an idea for better handling of our dust evolved into the Urban Death Project, a nonprofit that caught this writer’s eye with a Kickstarter campaign some months ago. The campaign having surpassed its designated goal, my “Future Tree” tee shirt is now on its way; and the good idea seems worth sharing.

Urban Death Project founder Katrina Spade is not the first to come up with an alternative to the seriously harmful burial practices of recent centuries – practices that dump unimaginable amounts of contaminating formaldehyde, non-biodegradable metal and concrete into the ground, as if the planet had limitless ground to contaminate.

Natural burial, or “green burial” has been around for at least as long as civilization. The writers of Genesis saw fit to include that “unto dust you shall return” line, and most people found ways to make that happen fairly effectively, with exceptions made for the pharaohs. But somehow, embalming and vaults and caskets crept in, and staving off decay became both profitable and popular. Jessica Mitford’s 1963 The American Way of Death exposed abuses of the funeral home industry – Mitford herself had an inexpensive but memorable ceremony in San Francisco this writer recalls with fondness, and her ashes were scattered at sea. Her wildly popular book, though targeting funeral homes, may also have helped kickstart the search for better alternatives to what had become traditional burial practices in the U.S.

Jerrigrace Lyons was among the natural burial movement’s pioneers, with the founding of Final Passages in 1995. Lyons sought to “reawaken a choice that our ancestors once held sacred.” Final Passages is “dedicated to the reclaiming of traditional funeral and burial practices,” including green burial. One 65-year-old whose will specifies a green burial puts the issue in plainer terms, declaring he wants “to be part of a tree, part of a flower, go back to being part of the earth.”

Urban Death Project takes green burial to a new level. A three-story cone will form the space into which bodies are gently laid to rest, following a cycles-of-nature ceremony for loved ones. Also within the cone are high-carbon materials which – with the help of “aerobic decomposition and microbial activity” – decompose everything fully into a rich compost

All of which makes perfectly good sense.

It is not easy, however, to give up long-held ideas about dealing with one’s remains after one has presumably gone on to a better place. Family burial plots, oak-shaded cemeteries, columbaria and the scattering of ashes in special places all have great attraction. This writer has long cherished the notion of her children and grandchildren having a couple of lovely parties while they toss her ashes into the Chesapeake and San Francisco bays. This despite knowing that cremation takes high amounts of energy and sends carbon dioxide, mercury vapors and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

But here is the irrefutable bottom line: the total land surface area of planet earth is 57,308,738 square miles, including 33% desert and 24% mountains to divvy up among more than 7 billion people – all of whom will eventually die.

Turning us into trees to shade the next 7 billion? The Urban Death Project could be onto something.