Bring Out Your Dead

Jim McElroy has been scouting the outer encampments of the Global Warming front:

This link from the Australian Science Media Center appeared briefly in Yahoo news today. I had to track it down after it disappeared so I'm attaching a copy as I don't know how long the link will be around. It's a take on global warming that has never been raised so far as I know and is interesting at many levels. Consider it the ultimate contribution versus global warming and I wonder how many legal, cultural & commercial obstructions would have to be overcome to implement the concept.

The main advantage of cremation is that it skips past the intermediate steps, cuts out of the loop all the flora and fauna that rely on bodies, and heads straight for ashes and minerals. The main disadvantage of cremation is that it requires the combustion of fuels. In the case of modern cremation, the fuels are greenhouse-enhancing fossil fuels.

The folks Jim mentions want to make burial more eco-friendly, reintroduce the flora at least, and get rid of the fossil fuels:

Professor Roger Short from the University of Melbourne is the reproductive biologist who came up with the concept of lemon juice as a contraceptive and a means of preventing HIV in women. It is currently being trialled in Nigeria. He will be discussing his idea of environmentally friendly death at the World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ) in Melbourne on Wednesday.

“Think earth to earth,” he said, “but not ashes to ashes or dust to dust”.

Professor Short’s proposal is that everyone should be buried upright in a cardboard cylinder, next to their favourite species of tree. This would allow the remains to enrich the growth.

“Not for nothing are trees known as the lungs of the world”, he said. “A single tree over a hundred-year period absorbs over a metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2), so imagine the difference it could make if everyone was buried and had a tree planted in their memory”.

“Photosynthesis in trees is the single most efficient way of sequestering CO2. Not only that, but they do what no other method of carbon minimisation can do, and that is to produce oxygen”, he said.

Professor Short’s idea comes in the wake of China’s policy of encouraging cremation due to lack of space and the Hindu practise in India of burning the body on a funeral pyre made of trees.

He said that in Australia during cremation, the average male produces over 50 kilograms of CO2 as the body is heated to 850 degrees centigrade for an hour and a half. “And that’s not counting the carbon cost of the fuel, and the cost of the emissions involved in producing and burning the wooden coffin”, he added.

Note that there is a misconception in Professor Short's explanation, at least as presented here. Trees and other vegetation, and people for that matter too, are just temporary storage vessels for carbon. Planting a tree does not add oxygen to the world, except temporarily. In order to get a permanent addition of oxygen, you need to permanently bury the tree's carbon in such a way that it never, ever enters the ecosystem again. Biogenic litter that gets incorporated into oceanic plates subsiding under continents - that sort of thing. Six feet under ain't far enough.

Worrying about a person's own CO2 for Global Warming purposes seems beside-the-point to me, since it the body was just a temporary closet for CO2 anyway. And didn't physicist Richard Feynmann use radionucleide decay to make a simple observation that every molecule in a person's body will be replaced anyway in a span of about seven years, leading him to remark how amazing it was that we could remember older events, when the matter of the memory itself was composed of much-younger stuff?

Nevertheless, there is some merit in Short's proposal. For example, when I buried Sylvie the Cat in 2001, I planted a peach tree on top of her, which worked well (at least until last year's madness, when Adam misunderstood my instructions and cut down the peach tree). I wouldn't mind being planted under a peach tree myself.

Here's another idea I like much better, directly from Jim, but which has little to do with Global Warming, per se, but much to do with Nature. We have been much too hard on the living Earth, and we should let Mother Nature take over, or never disturb her in the first place, if possible. As Jim relates:

I am attaching a personal photo related to the topic. It is a view of a family cemetery on a piece of land that was in the family for many generations in Indiana. I am confident that my great-great grandparents are buried there though no monument or paper record exists as proof. The cemetery was created shortly after the family arrived at the site in 1846 and served both family, neighbors, and transients until a public cemetery was opened in the nearby town of Scotland, Indiana in 1880. The old farm, never profitable, has been recycled into woodland under the guidance of the Indiana Forestry Association. The photo illustrates what the suggested concept could lead to, in a peaceful and respectful way. Looks good to me.