A tisket, a tasket, an eco-friendly casket

It's hard to always be ecologically correct - especially when you're dead.

In the Bay Area, however, it's getting easier to die green. No need for embalming fluids, mortuary wakes, fancy caskets and concrete vaults. Instead, a corpse can be propped up in bed at home to receive visitors one last time before returning to the earth, wrapped in a shroud or nestled in a biodegradable coffin.

"It's really going back to the past, when people took care of their own dead, and to a time when the cradlemaker, cabinetmaker and casketmaker were all one," Liz O'Connell-Gates said. "People would know who to go to. Now it's more anonymous. I grew up in Ireland, where life and death are so intertwined."

Last Saturday, O'Connell-Gates staged a Green Funeral Fair in Berkeley's Grace North Church. It was one-stop shopping for anyone interested in making an alternative exit in a country where more than 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid are buried in the ground every year.

Jerrigrace Lyons, a death midwife whose Sebastopol business is called Final Passages, has facilitated more than 300 home-based funerals in 14 years. "It's a movement," Lyons said.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/14/DD631AI27E.DTL#ixzz0WrGjpjM8

No embalming, no funeral home - simple and straightforward.

:thumbsup:

:D

Bhuddists in the Himilayas.

They have a certain kind of bird, a vulture that is used to eat the dead, proving that dying is for the birds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

I think some Native Americans also used to expose their dead. :)

As Robinson Jeffers says: "To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death."

and build a wind farm to hack the vultures to death.

I believe your recent bird hacking video in which a bird was hacked to death by the vanes involved a vulture.

Vultures are seriously threatened in parts of the world due to pesticides as well. :(

the automobile.

They're beautiful in the skies, but ugly as sin on the ground. But I love 'em.

There is less money to clean up the dead deer around here and we have lots of deer excarnations.

My boys can go out in the woods around here and find deer bones pretty easily, as one can just walking down any highway.

Hmm. Like.

:D

Hmm. Not so much.

or Ornithosols. :D

Dammit, why is there no research on this vital question? I demand answers!

*or*

A process than can be accelerated by going for a walk in Fiordland with a bag of chips and not sharing.

http://www.promessa.se/sagardettill_en.asp


My father has a pear orchard from which he makes very fine champagne. We have told him that when he dies we will have him composted and sprinkled in the orchard, and rename the product, "Père Champagne"... He loved the idea.

I wish more alternatives were available in the US. I don't want to be embalmed or buried (taking up land that could be used for something else). I did want to be cremated but I have recently been hearing how bad it is for the environment. I would really just like to be tossed into the woods to decay naturally.

bodies in high temperature reformers under supercritical water, making them into CO and hydrogen and using them to make gasoline via the Fischer-Tropsch process.

It is thus possible to make Dad into motor fuel.

Soylent gasoline!!!!!

I think I'll call Amory Lovins and see if we can't found a renewable car program based on this core technology.

The Yes Men beat you to it, I'm afraid...

Vivoleum is People!

why not make dad part of your onerous commute to work? :P

was, "I wonder if they have a hydrogenator upstairs?"

If they'd had one, I could have syphoned some hydrogen off the hydrogen HYPErhearse and made some methanol to drive the fuel cell limos to the cemetary.

People tend not to have a sense of humor at these sort of events though.

but if anyone wanted to be buried in a pine box out near Fresno Dome he did. :(

...for a cheap, ocean-friendly alternative to a well-loved dish. You also save petrol by not having to drive to the Norwegian Deli for some time.

Grandma, on the other hand... 100% Swedish. :think: