Safe Luxury

What do you think about the "Green Cemeteries" being started around the country?

Green burial seeks to return one’s remains to the earth, as directly and simply as possible. It thus avoids embalming (and its toxic chemicals), metal caskets and burial vaults that are standard features of the modern funeral. http://www.gravematters.us/faqs.html

Public Comments

1. Hi Greenman Sounds great to me. Very environmentally friendly and far less wasteful and self indulgent than our modern funerals. I wouldn't mind at all having a shroud and a simple soft wood casket. Understandably some people will want an extravagant funeral though. To them it represents a life lived in the respect of their peers and social status. For those of us who live without the frantic lifestyle, an uncluttered internment is a peaceful end to a simple life. I like it. :D Peps
2. I think it is fitting seeing as how environmentalism has become a religion. the environmental religion tracks our Judeo-Christian tradition. You have a Gensis story when the apes lived in a pristine environment. Adam and Eve story of the a despoiled Eden so we are all part of original sin. Al Gore offered us a resurrection story, where he is sacrificed on the hanging chad to the evil Bush, but comes back as the Holy Savior in the "Inconvenient Truth" and offers us the salvation in holy sustainability. And, now I learn from your link to "gravematters" that we can have a proper send off to an afterlife of saving the Earth. Oh Joyous Rapture
3. I've always been an advocate of cremation. Cemeteries take up a lot of useful land and it worries me that sometime in the future some developer will move the headstones and build over the graves. My grandfather runs a cemetery that allows only cremated remains to be buried. The ashes are in urns and buried beneath a headstone that lies flat on the ground. But I'd want to be added to a garden or spread over the sea. I looked at the website and the idea of a memorial reef ball is intriguing. Internment and whole preserved caskets just seem a bit too much. If my family wants to have something to remember me by they can make me into a diamond or plant a tree with my ashes.