Over 100 billion people have died on this planet and been laid to rest through countless burial traditions and customs, and while a majority of these passings simply re-entered natural ecological cycles, many popular burial traditions of today require exorbitant additions of resources that cause dramatic natural disturbances guaranteed to have a lasting environmental impact. But beyond this, it appears that the way we live in society carries over to the ways we die. The same alienation, segregation, and disconnection from our land and ourselves that we experience in life can all be found in our cultural habits surrounding death. Can we imagine a better way? Or will this grave situation only deepen?
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(This transcript is autogenerated and sucks, but we'll fix it soon)
Thank you Alexey for completing this fantastic transcript!
[0:04] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:06] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:08] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky the end of the world.
[0:19] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:32] David, we spent a lot of time on the show discussing the systemic issues that we all face. And a lot of these issues lead us down a path of insecurities and oftentimes the threat of death, right?
[0:48] Yeah, I know, I mean these are definitely the kinds of existential crises happening all around us all the time that really do in some cases bring us to life and death scenarios, absolutely.
[1:00] Well it just so happens that we haven't really discussed what happens once death actually takes place.
[1:07] You mean ‘the second stage of life’? if we go on and live in the afterlife or just rot somewhere in the ground.
[1:15] Not exactly. I mean this is an environmentally-focused show. I mean: what do you do with a body once it's no longer living?
[1:25] That's a good question! I mean I guess typically what do you hear, you have a choice: either you're cremated or you're buried. And that seems to be about the end of the discussion as far as I ever hear from people.
[1:38] And for most people here in the United States what is being buried usually mean? What does it entail? I mean besides the fanfare of the funeral service itself it's not as simple as just wrapping somebody in the closet and placing them in the ground, is it?
[1:54] No no, you go to a funeral home, it's arranged and it costs a lot of money, you transfer the body over to them, they prepare it, they embalm it, maybe there's a viewing, maybe there's not. The body is then ultimately put into this fancy expensive coffin the funeral director upsold you on. And then you're driven in the car to this fancy beautiful field where you've bought some sort of plot of land and an expensive headstone. And then you're lowered in and other people, who I guess miss you or want to see you in the ground, one of the other, say their goodbyes and that's it.
[2:33] Sounds like a lot goes into that process.
[2:36] Yeah I mean I guess it's something we don't normally think about but really something that we should all be considering it because it definitely is one of the only things that we're guaranteed to have to one day deal within our own lives.
[2:48] And all of this activity, the driving around, of course, but more importantly that beautiful field you mentioned, all the landscaping and all the material that goes into placing somebody in the ground in a concrete vault in a wooden or steel or copper casket – all this takes resources and it has an impact on our environment. And I know what people are probably thinking, they're saying: 'oh, how can you possibly come up with the, you know, something to complain about? This is something we've been doing for such a long time.'
[3:19] Yeah, you know I looked at the numbers, Daniel, cause I was just curious. We're not the first people who are going to die, in fact, there have been 101 billion people who have died before us, give or take. So we're just following in well-worn footsteps at this point.
[3:36] Well you know what they say, David, past performance or history is not a guarantee of future repeat, something like that?
[3:46] So you trying to tell me, Daniel, that you're banking on immortality?
[3:50] Look, David, I'm just trying to do my part to reduce my post-life carbon footprint.
[3:56] OK. Let's talk about that: what is that, not just the carbon footprint, but the larger environmental footprint that is the traditional burial that we have here in the western world?
[4:07] Well, let's just focus on the United States for just a second. Every year, we're talking about 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 105000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete. And the amount of concrete that is currently in the ground from all our cumulative burials is, I think, in the billions of tons, which is just incredible and, of course, a lot of wood: 30 million board feet hardwoods which, by the way, okay so I had to do some fact-checking for some of these, David, so just indulge me for a second.
[4:42] I will always indulge fact-checking.
[4:45] Yeah, if you were to do an internet search for our carbon footprint of burials you'll see a stat that is being published a lot, which is that we use some 4 million acres of forest land each year in the US in terms of casket wood. And that should send alarm bells off in your head right now because every single year the entire world loses some 20 million acres of forest land. So, you know, right off the bat I was thinking: do we really use a quarter of the entire process of deforestation around this world just for the United States caskets?
[5:19] Actually, Daniel, that’s a fifth, your math sucks.
[5:23] You really do love fact-checking, huh? Well, my math mistakes aside, I did find this random 1952 Forest Service document just doing some inventory on the forest lumber in Vermont, cause I was trying to figure out, well, how much forest land are we actually losing to this? You know, 30 million board feet of hardwoods. And it turns out, in 1952 one acre of Vermont forest could produce around five to seven thousand board feet of lumber which at 30 million board feet of casket lumber is around 4,000 acres of forest. So I think someone added an extra three zeros to that 4 million figure.
[6:01] I think it was actually probably the big cremation industry trying to guilt you into being cremated.
[6:07] Which has some problems of its own. I mean, but either way, that's a lot of wood, right?
[6:12] It's a lot of wood. And we're just putting it in the ground to decompose and not in the fun carbon-sequestering way. But you know, it doesn't just end with the caskets. I mean, the entire process of funerals is environmentally damaging. I mean, I love graveyards, I guess I'm one of those weird people who likes graveyards and it's not that weird because, I mean, graveyards are really pretty. You know, you walk around, there's all these like beautiful sculpture, especially if that's an older one, the landscapes very well-manicured, there are beautiful trees, nice grassy fields but, you know, all that landscaping – that's pretty intensive and some of these things have been around at this point for hundreds of years.
[6:48] Especially if you have some of those like perpetual care packages where we can buy like lawn care for your headstone for like all eternity or something. And I'm not sure exactly how they plan on that working out but that is something that funeral directors have figured out they can upsell the people with. But we think about it: you know, you got the water use for all this grass and the chemical fertilizer to keep everything green, all the lawnmowers it takes to keep this up, the people who are coming in and out, the gardeners. I mean, this is a lot of work plus people are driving their cars to these massive cemeteries, that's a drive to get to them cause it way far off cause they need so much land and so oftentimes they're not ideally situated in cities. Because land obviously comes at a premium or we'll talk more about that later.
[7:28] But as you mentioned also the caskets themselves are very intensive in what they require: they're buried underneath these large steel or reinforced concrete vaults, the caskets themselves use all this hardwood and metals, things like steel, copper, bronze. And then what's inside of them are bodies, they're not just there as a natural organic things to decay: that little bit of it has been robbed from us in this embalming process – and it's filled with a lot of chemicals, most notably formaldehyde, which ultimately eventually will seep out of that casket and into the ground contaminating it, and if you're really unlucky, get all the way down to the water table: that's when you start getting some problems. So the entire process here, just in the internment of the body in the casket, is obviously very carbon-intensive, very environmentally damaging and something that we should really be taking a deep look at because it is one of the guaranteed accepted things occurring in all of our lives.
[8:23] Speaking of accepted: I think in the beginning when you were describing the typical experience of burial that we, you and I are familiar with here in the United States, you mentioned embalming and passing as if it was just this thing that automatically occurs. But in fact, we'll get to the history of this, and it wasn't always that way. And even today embalming is not legally required or anything like that, but a lot of people just do it out of...
[8:47] You got upsell, Daniel! That's what embalming is. You got to learn to upsell, make the upsell! Support us on patreon.com/ashesashescast, get a slick sticker, see? Upsell, Daniel, upsell!
[8:58] Upsell, so I'll need to learn more about that. But I do want to take you on one more fact-checking journey, David, if you will indulge me once again. So on embalming fluid: another popular stat repeated is that some 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde get buried in the ground each year in the United States alone.
[9:19] That's a lot of formaldehyde.
[9:22] Now this is not quite as inaccurate as the 4 million acres of forest land we're losing. And in fact, it might actually be pretty accurate. But I found a 2008 scientific paper that said the following: "the primary ingredient in most modern embalming fluids is formaldehyde, it takes roughly 3.5 gallons to embalm the average adult. The National Funeral Directors Association estimates that 2 million Americans are embalmed each year. That translates into roughly 7 million gallons of formaldehyde being deliberately placed in the soil each year." Now the math of that checks out, right? But it's wrong. And the reason it is wrong is because...
[10:06] Cheks out, but it's wrong!
[10:07] It is true that we put about 3.5 gallons on average per adult of embalming fluid, and formaldehyde is the most important chemical in embalming fluid. But it actually only makes up between 5 to 35% of the total fluid so. The maximum amount of formaldehyde that we might be putting in the soil each year is around 2.4 million gallons. But it's probably close to that 800,000, maybe even as low as a 350,000-gallon figure.
[10:36] But it's a far cry from that 7 million gallons that peer-reviewed paper quoted.
[10:42] Yeah, I just really wanted to point out how much we here at Ashes Ashes don't let anything through the cracks, we are going through every single thing with a fine-tooth comb and magnifying glass, we're questioning the questionnaires, right? I mean we are questioning the peer-reviewed questionnaires, the scientists – nothing gets past us here.
[11:01] It’s lies, we fuck up all the time! [IN WHISPERING VOICE]
[11:04] That's your opportunity for that upsell, David.
[11:06] Upsell, upsell! So, subscribe, support our fact-checking! Patreon.com/ashesahsescast! No. Yeah, it is really a good idea to check some of these sensational numbers that come up a lot. Because oftentimes, like you found, Daniel, you chasing through and eventually find one source where somebody just fat-fingered the statistic or purposefully played something up, not necessarily through something malicious but maybe just ignorance about this like you have with this paper. And then everybody starts repeating, and it gets repeated over and over and over again and it's impossible to chase back to see where that mistake first occurred: we see this a lot especially when we're doing things that are sensational in their figures, and so we always try and double-check those. And you'll be surprised at how often those things are wrong.
[11:49] This reminds me of something you mentioned in episode 14 - Sweet Release about going into Wikipedia and changing the name of Francis Cameron to Francis Bacon Cameron.
[12:00] James Cameron, James Cameron.
[12:02] Oh, it was James Francis Bacon Cameron?
[12:04] Well, his actual name is James Francis Cameron, director of Avatar, Titanic. But you know, Francis Bacon! So we changed his name to James Francis Bacon Cameron.
[12:14] In the Wikipedia page.
[12:16] Yeah and then everybody started repeating that, so now that's his new name. There is always a source for the first error.
[12:22] So anyway, what are the risks of formaldehyde in the first place?
[12:25] Yeah okay then, I'll take the hint, we get back to this. Formaldehyde, it's nasty stuff. Everyone probably encountered it, maybe in a school when you had to dissect something and you open it up and it's in this like very stinky fluid that has some sort of amount of formaldehyde in there almost certainly. And it is not a kind chemical, it is absolutely a known carcinogen: in 2004 the International Agency for Research on Cancer designated it as one. And while it's okay in very small amounts, well you know, if you doing these small dissections on frogs or pigs or whatever in the class. For people around it all the time it can be a big problem. And this would be something that would be a big problem, a concern for embalmers who are exposed to an estimated 9 parts-per-million formaldehyde while embalming. And this is important because at around 50 parts-per-million formaldehyde leads to fluid in the lungs and at that point it starts becoming quite fatal as levels increase. In general, embalmers are at higher risk than the average population for various cancers including kidney failure, heart disease and liver damage. And this is almost certainly because of their prolonged exposure to formaldehyde.
[13:36] At this point of time formaldehyde’s environmental risks actually aren't really studied that much, I guess, there’s not a lot of money to bring down the funeral industry. But the WHO, the World Health Organization reported in 2002 that in the environment the chemical can kill marine life and prevents the growth of some plants. So it's probably not a good idea for us to continuously dump it in the ground over and over through the vessels of our departed bodies. Interesting side fact, Daniel, is: the other people who are really exposed to formaldehyde quite a bit, do you want to guess? Besides like medical researchers, people who do autopsies, someone not dealing with death.
[14:17] Airplane pilots?
[14:19] No, hairdressers. Formaldehyde is a common ingredient for people getting keratin treatments or things like that, so.
[14:26] Oh, that's probably not good cause they're probably not wearing proper medical masks while they're doing that.
[14:32] Absolutely not, no. Tip your hairdressers.
[14:36] Don't get formaldehyde, maybe? in your hair.
[14:39] Yeah, but it makes it so shiny.
[14:42] And, of course, you mentioned that perhaps some of the blown-up stats were propagated by big cremation industry. But you know, cremation although it is a cleaner alternative to some of these practices of burial, it's has its environmental issues of its own. Specifically, carbon monoxide, fine soot, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals and mercury from dental fillings are all released into the atmosphere through cremation. And I got to be honest with you, David, before this episode, before researching I thought that I wanted to be cremated, there's just something about the modern burial practices in the west that I've become accustomed to that just doesn't sit well with me, I don't like the idea of using up all those resources, I don't like that is being placed in a vault underground. So I thought, 'hey, let me just be cremated,' and then my ashes can be spread among the wind. But the nail in the coffin for this idea for me was realizing that the ashes from a cremated body do not contribute in any way to the ecological nutrient cycles of our Earth cause all those nutrients that would go into the soil have basically been released into the atmosphere now as a source of greenhouse gas contribution. And so I have decided not to be cremated and I will likely pursue a different alternative that perhaps we can come back to towards the end of this episode.
[16:09] Yeah, I was in a similar boat, Daniel, I always thought, 'well, I definitely don't want to be buried, that's a big pain in the ass.' If you don't dump me in the woods then I guess cremation sounds pretty okay but looking into these numbers I was surprised by how damaging this is: first off, it's an extremely energy-intensive process, so it consumes a lot of carbon in the process of turning you into basically carbon. And there are a lot of outgassing that happens from whatever things you could have added into your body throughout your life especially dental implants which, the burning of dental implants actually, I found this stat, in the UK is 15% of all UK mercury emissions are from these cremations of people's bodies releasing this is mercury from their dental implants into the atmosphere, which is insane. But a lot of people do echo your sentiments, at least before we started researching this show, Daniel, and increasingly the majority of westerners are cremated. Burials are getting less and less popular in large part because they're getting more and more expensive. But not every religion allows the idea of cremation, many of them insist on keeping bodies whole: Judaism, Islam, a lot of these things don't make room for cremation if you're traditional in this process. So there are concerns in certain areas that they would like people to be cremated because there's a space problem in bodies, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but at the same time, you know, this is not the panacea we thought it was because it's actually another very booting process. So we've got two major things here right now: the traditional burial, turns out the embalming and the process of keeping up a cemetery is very problematic and then cremation to is also a giant mess for the atmosphere, for energy use and for everyone who happens to still be alive, their health.
[17:51] Of course there are many variations in between, especially in countries and cultures outside of traditional western ones. But I want to take a detour, David, down a little bit of a history lane because I found the history of embalming to be pretty fascinating.
[18:08] Enlighten me, Daniel.
[18:09] Okay, well you know embalming in its pure definition just means that you preserve the remains of somebody, some human or animal through some method that can slow or prevent that rate of decomposition. Have you ever seen someone dress up as a mummy for Halloween, David?
[18:28] Mummy, what is that?
[18:30] You know like have you ever seen the movie The Mummy?
[18:33] No, I've never heard this word before. Yes, Daniel, of course, I fucking love mummies, I love the movie The Mummy, Brendan Fraser, he kicks ass – I love all the sequels, that Scorpion King one with that weird...oh no, it’s a different movie. The Rock is like a monster in one of them, I think, right?
[18:54] I think you got the right idea, something like that. So a lot of people think that kids dress up as mummies as a form of a scary costume on Halloween. But that's actually a common misconception, it's not really a scary costume: these are actually intellectual and historically literate kids who are celebrating the very long history of embalming by emphasizing the unique Egyptian practice that occurred some 5,000 years ago of removing the organs of deceased humans, dehydrating the bodies covering the skin with a combination of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate, re-stuffing the desiccated body with resin-soaked linen and then methodically wrapping the body with some 4,000 square feet or 370 square meters of linen.
[19:41] That doesn't sound very environmentally conscious either though, Daniel.
[19:46] But it was an early form of embalming.
[19:49] Well, how do we go from mummies to grandma looking like she's all waxed up in the coffin today like we have.
[19:59] So it's a very different process today: the embalming that we know today, for most people anyway, it involves injecting major arteries of the body with embalming fluid, dispersing it throughout the body and pushing that organic fluid like blood and whatever else was in those blood vessels out as discharge. And embalming fluid itself like I mentioned is is anywhere between 5 and 35% formaldehyde, which is used because it's a great chemical at killing bacteria which temporarily slows the rate of decomposition, and it also stiffens the body a bit which is convenient for the way that we present bodies at a funeral service. But all of this embalming, all this process is done just so that families and loved ones can view the body in a relaxed and dignified position before laying it to rest in a coffin underground. It's important to point out that embalming in this fashion does not actually preserve the body underground, it's kind of a short-term thing that was really invented just to slow the rate of decomposition enough so that funeral service could take place.
[21:06] Well, how do we go from wrapping somebody up so that we can't see them at all, like a mummy thousands of years ago which is a pretty good preservation technique, because we have these amazing mummy samples today, in large part because of the technique but also the environment helps a lot, but that aside: how do you go from that to using embalming as a tool to like preserve somebody so that we can look at them for a couple of days before we never look at them again? That feels like there's a gap between the two.
[21:36] Well, and this is why I call it a modern practice because it actually took off in earnest in North America in the 1860s during the American Civil War. And it took off from there to become a standard practice among consumers, but it was first used as an important practice to preserve the bodies of dead soldiers who could then be carried back home for their families to bury. It kind of arose out of a short-term necessity to deliver those soldiers back to their hometowns but there was a big difference in the embalming fluid at that time: instead of formaldehyde as the primary ingredient, they used arsenic, which fell out of favor not only because arsenic is a terrible toxin that no one wants in their groundwater supply, but also because suspects accused of murder by arsenic poisoning were getting off the hook because they could blame the high levels of the toxin in their victims bodies on the presence of embalming fluid.
[The ambient noise of a loud courtroom]
[22:40] Where am I, what's happening, how did I get here?
[Judge bangs the gavel]
[22:47] Is there a David? The court finds you guilty of poisoning your co-host Daniel with the deadly arsenic which you slipped into his tea each night before bedtime.
[22:59] What? But your honor, it wasn't me! I mean, look around this courtroom, it was that that guy, the undertaker that poisoned him. I mean, look at that guy sitting there, he is an old grizzled man, he's literally sitting next to a giant barrel of arsenic with the skull and crossbones on and, I mean, it couldn’t have been me! I could not have been trying to do this to steal all the Patreon money, that’d be crazy!
[Gasps and murmurs spread across the courtroom]
[Judge bangs the gavel]
[23:24] Well I suppose I can’t argue with that. The court here so by finds you not guilty.
[Sighs of relief from the courtroom audience]
[23:37] Sucker! [TRIUMPHANTLY]
Well, courtroom shenanigans aside, Daniel, eventually arsenic was replaced by formaldehyde. And the practice at that point really took off. As Jeremiah and Ted Chiappelli wrote in their 2008 paper titled, and this is my favorite paper title I've ever encountered, Daniel, it's called "Drinking Grandma: The Problem of Embalming". So I got a quote here, listen to this: "The most likely reason for the continued practice of embalming is that it fueled the expansion of the funeral industry. Economically speaking, there is no doubt that viewing the course is one of the fundamentals of the economy of the funeral industry. When you make the body the centerpiece of the funeral you incur costs in dressing and preparing the body, of viewing room with an attended chapel, floral cost, expensive caskets, and grave vaults. Today the funeral industry in the United States takes in approximately 13 billion dollars per year. The funeral industry remains the driving force behind embalming."
[24:39] A 2002 study confirms that funeral directors do induce customers into burial and embalming over cremation. This inducement is aided by state regulation set tacitly to encourage embalming by linking funeral home licenses with embalming certifications. Specifically, 28 states require that funeral directors also be embalmers in order to get a license and 33 states require that funeral establishments maintain embalming facilities.
[25:09] Fact check, David, the funeral industry is not 13 billion dollars per year, in the United States, it is 15 billion dollars per year.
[25:17] Well, I guess this study was 10 years ago at the height of the recession, so.
[25:22] Well anyway, all that being said, we did actually get the idea for this episode from none other than a funeral director themselves who is in Ashes Ashes listener who wrote to tell us that "transportation of bodies, embalming, refrigeration, burial, and cremation are all terrible for the environment. As a funeral director, I encourage families to choose greener options but the fact is: anything available uses lots of fossil fuels, not to mention embalming chemicals and the millions of embalming fluid bottles that wind up in landfills every year." I think it's worth pointing out that there are those in the business at least recognizing these problems and speaking out against them.
[26:06] That's a good point, Daniel, but let's continue cause there's more embalming talk to still tackle. And I think the big point here is if we do know all these problems exist with embalming, if it's so polluting to the environment and if it is basically a scam to get people to pay more to funeral directors, then why is it still being used and justified today? Well, there actually is a public-health rationale and that's this idea that dead bodies pose disease risk and that embalming disinfects the body and protects the public. However, this might be just an idea and nothing more and in fact, there's a strong case for the opposite. As one writer puts it: a dead body "don't excrete, inhale, exhale or perspire" which are ways healthy humans can spread diseases themselves. So a carefully handled dead body will not expose the general public to disease. And in fact, embalming might actually increase the harm to public health because, as you remember, embalming fluid enters the bloodstream by pushing blood out and that blood is then simply discharged, guess, Daniel? You want to figure out where they're dumping all this blood?
[27:13] Do they cremate the blood, David?
[27:15] They don't cremate the blood, can you imagine burying a body but cremating the blood? That is psycho, you would go out of business. Anyway, no.
[27:24] Well, it seems like it would be like cleaner.
[27:27] This is not about cleaning, Daniel. This is about the bottom line. And the bottom line says, 'yes, you know, we could do a responsible decontamination' and maybe some people do that, but for many, it just means that the blood is just discharged into the sewer system. So you're actually introducing a potential blood-borne disease straight into public infrastructure. And then meanwhile if anyone is coming into contact with some dead body disease it's probably not the public that's going to be encountering it but actually, the embalmers themselves, who then, you know, they don't just live in their funeral homes, they actually go out and they look normal lives in public. So that vector of the chance of infecting people exists regardless of the embalming things. So this justification that embalming is a public health measure is just bunk.
[28:11] But if you remember our history lesson, David, embalming came out of a necessity for transporting bodies before they decompose so that they can be delivered to the families. And, of course, it's a justification used for embalming. But there are alternatives, there are ways to preserve a body in the short-term in fact for many months sometimes like freezing, dehydration, you can also wrap a body in dry ice and place it in a sealed bag. There are many options to preserve a body besides filling the blood vessels with formaldehyde.
[28:42] Okay well that's enough about embalming, Daniel. And we've established at this point that the process of preparing a body for burial sucks: it's environmentally damaging, it's potentially toxic for all types of people and it's only really dumb because of this weird cultural thing that appeared I guess because of the Civil War where people just really wanted to see their loved ones preserved so that funeral directors can upsell all sorts of services and things. And, I mean, I understand that, I've lost people, I've been to funerals with open caskets. And it is nice to look at somebody and see them pose very artfully by a great mortician who makes them look happy and content. And it's a nice way to think of their last moments instead of oftentimes unfortunately sick in bed. But our memories are malleable things and we probably, when we're thinking about this person, aren't going to think of them in the casket in a funeral home as a preferred way of remembering them. We have a long history of people that we can imagine, memories that are much happier than a funeral home memory and closed casket funerals are a common thing anyway. Sometimes for necessity out of the cause of death for the body but also sometimes for cultural reasons. And so we could move past this embalming thing and still preserve our traditional casket-style burial system and that would eliminate some of the problems we're facing here.
[30:04] There are still, as we mentioned, major problems with the process of burying caskets. Because what's a casket? I mean it's a giant very expensive box with very nice wood covered in varnishes or whatever other chemicals, expensive metals. And they're beautiful works of art and like hats off to coffin makers cuz y'all are doing some great work out there.
[30:26] When I mentioned that these caskets are placed in concrete vaults, the reason for that is because if you just place the casket underground, and then that wood rots and then that person decomposes, you could actually have a settling of the soil which causes a depression in the surface layer. So they build these concrete vaults to then house the casket itself so that it doesn't displace the soil once it starts to break down.
[30:53] Ideally. But I mean you're talking about springing for the real package there, Daniel. Not every funeral home does this, not every cemetery does it, not everybody can afford that service, concrete doesn't necessarily have to be part of the funeral processing. Not only if you get this depression problem that you've mentioned. And landscape crews will often fix this by just adding more soil over and over again so that it doesn't look like it's an issue, but I mean, it obviously is. But even worse, and this is happening increasingly, when you have the water table rise or you have serious flooding, say from these increasing floods that we're seeing because of climate change or the influx of new hurricanes that are striking the United States and other countries. As we see more energy in this global weather system, this water table rises maybe temporarily, maybe permanently. And you know these caskets, if they haven't entirely decomposed, are wood and they're filled with air and so they float, and so these caskets start rising and they come up and eventually start pushing the little bit of soil above them out of the way if they're not buried in one of these concrete vaults. Which, if you decide that you want to bury somebody, is probably the way to go, if you're not concerned about carbon emissions, I'll help the funeral directors upsell that but you're seeing lots of examples of caskets is bursting out of the ground now. And so these have to be reinterred, reburied, there have to be new ceremonies for that if somebody feels like that is necessary, if not it's just additional cost for these cemeteries, which make the process of burying people increasingly expensive increasing the cost of buying a lot or one of those perpetual care packages in the first place. And so we have his vicious cycle now, where because of our actions as we live we're making the very idea of being dead more expensive in a very strange twist of fate. And there are all sorts of new stories, you can just search them: caskets coming out of the water cause of floods, we'll link one the website you can check out. And this is like a serious weird problem that we're starting to see. And some cities have thought about this, prepared for this: in New Orleans, you oftentimes see their very famous above-ground cemeteries. Have you ever been to New Orleans, Daniel?
[33:00] Mmm, no.
[33:01] Well, you should go, the food is amazing. But if you do end up there, you can also google this, they have these fantastic beautiful cemeteries that are just jam-packed with above-ground mausoleums and tiny individual tombs where the caskets entirely are stored above ground. Because if they put them below ground, they immediately hit the water table and these things are always popping out. So New Orleans as a funeral culture city, I'm not saying it's the only thing that happens in New Orleans, but they have a very keen awareness of death and funerals, more than a lot of American cities maybe because they have these very visible burial grounds all over the city. They reformatted how they approach the burial process and now they don't have all these expensive landscaping costs, though they do have the concrete and the other stone issues that we talked about with the carbon emissions associated with that. But there are alternatives to the systems that arise sometimes out of necessities of the environment which are being increasingly more present in people's minds as climate change occurs and we start seeing this shift in what's happening around the world.
[34:07] Assuming these submarine caskets stay in the ground, David, that's still a lot of space that they're taking up, right? That's a lot of land like we talked about, what did you mention, 101 billion people have died so far. I mean, if we got to fill every future death with a big old casket in the ground, it seems like it would add up to me.
[34:26] I haven't done the land use calculations, but you're right, it is a significant factor, especially in cities where space is increasingly at a premium. And this varies from city to city, some are more intense than others. But I mean, look at New York, so I live in Brooklyn, right on the edge of Brooklyn and Queens. There are actually some very large cemeteries that aren't too far from me and they go just for miles, they're enormous cemeteries. The highway actually cuts through some of them on because they're just so big, they couldn't route around them. And sometimes this is a development problem. I'll talk about a little bit of that in a moment but these cemeteries have been around for, I don't know, 150 years, 200 years depending on which one, whether it's newer or whether it's older. And at that time a lot of people in New York City have died, and there are a lot of very vast enormous cemeteries all over the city. But even still, with all the space, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars in terms of its real estate value, they are basically full up.
[35:24] Unless you have some sort of family plot that somebody bought for you ages ago for your family generations that would eventually grow up and die in New York City, you are probably out of luck of being able to be buried in a place that your family, who also grows up and lives their lives in New York City, can easily visit you from. And so this brings up questions: do we, we can’t easily create more cemetery space here cause it is so land-intensive and we need that space for people to live in, for people to work on and all sorts of things that are more useful than just a pretty place to inter our dead, which does have value, and I’ll talk about that. Also, don't worry, I love cemeteries, don't just yell at me.
[36:06] But I mean, this is a real problem and it's enough of a problem than many cities actually have started task forces or departments that are looking at this, what they call 'burial space provisioning'. London did a great report, it's a couple of years ago, you can find a link to that, it's called their "Audit of London Burial Provision" and it does a breakdown basically saying, we estimate this many people are going to die in London every year for the next two decades and we estimate that based on the demographic makeup of the city based on the current percentage of people being cremated vs buried, and then also the shifts of religious demographics, who is a Jewish, who is Muslim, who is Christian, who is whatever, their different tendencies and how they want to be buried and say, well, we need this many burial spots per year and we need this many burial spots by X year. And what they came out to as saying: we need 300,000 burial plots by 2030 if we want to inter everyone who probably wants to be buried by that point. And unfortunately, already a lot of the cemeteries, especially the inner part of the city, are already full. And there are some that can still take in new places but many of them are at the point where there's just not that much space left, and they don't have enough space in these existing cemeteries to take in all those hundreds of thousands of people that are going to be dying in the next decade-and-a-half at this point from when this report was first written.
[37:27] I mean they don't have solutions really in the report, it is more just like: just so you know this is going to be a problem coming up. But this is a problem. And you know it's important to be able to visit our dead, we don't want to have to bury someone way far off away, I mean for many people culturally speaking. And have to travel a long time to visit them, death is an important part of our culture, the memories of loved ones are important. And we're having to face at this point this idea that we need to shift our cultural ideas around death because of the simple things like environmental concerns or land-use concerns which is kind of an interesting thing. I'm interested to see what's going to become of this in the next few years and decades and I think a lot of these future burial styles and techniques that we'll talk about a little bit will be part of that movement. But you know at the same time maybe it'll offer us some larger concepts of our relationship with death and the relationship death has with their cities because, increasingly, as I mentioned, cities are portioned out as much as possible into usable land, right?
[38:31] Everything has to be either a place for housing or a place for work or industry or whatever it is. And there's very little that's left just to be a place, land to gather on, public space, park – whatever. And the parts that are often built are designed in such a way that enforces certain activities that the government feels are beneficial or preferred. But cemeteries oftentimes because they are places that are supposed to be open to come in and visit the deceased lack rules at least during the day about people entering and leaving. And in a busy city, in places where there is very little green land, cemeteries are a significant component of that green space.
[39:13] And there are lots of people who travel to them to just find them as nature preserves basically in these large cities. And not only people but also animals, birds, insects, all sorts of life that normally would be pushed out of the city find a safe haven a refuge in the cemetery, in that public space component of this is the way of interring the dead that is a very important thing. And I don't want to gloss over it and say we should get rid of cemeteries because I really don't think that's the case.
[39:42] We have a particularly beautiful Cemetery in Atlanta called Oakland cemetery. And I actually have quite a few friends who love to visit the cemetery just to get out and feel a part of nature or something serene and they take walks there and it's a really important part of their reconnection to something other than the busy city life.
[40:05] There's a beautiful сemetery in Central South Brooklyn called Greenwood Cemetery. It’s not only filled with just unbelievable sculpture and architecture and art, but it's filled with people just wandering around and enjoying an empty quiet space in the city cause the refugees aren't just about, you know, hiding from concrete and stuff, but also from sounds as we talked about in episode 44 - Do Not Disturb, where we talked about the importance of these natural soundscapes and the fact that in our urban environments they're very hard to find so these places are important. Greenwood Cemetery, in particular, is interesting because it is the home of parakeets actually can find a bunch of parakeets they're just living in the middle of New York City, it's a little refuge in this otherwise concrete and gray place.
[40:51] And while these green spaces are important as I've mentioned, they also do take up a lot of space and so oftentimes cities and developers find this space inconvenient. And it's come down to at some points just picking up and moving cemeteries completely somewhere else or digging into an area, finding it's a cemetery and then just moving the bodies to entirely different place. And this has been an issue for the construction of stadiums, the construction of expressways. And it shows I think really that these cemeteries are temporary spaces that we've agreed to not touch, but as soon as the interests of state and capital are against the cemetery and the value that the spaces offer economically then they will be moved and we will lose these green spaces and the access to them with little regard to the people who are interred there or what it might mean for their relatives who do visit this space. Disney, for example, when they were building the Disney World Shanghai moved several cemeteries in a process to do this. And they did compensate the families of those interred there but it was something on the order of like $47 per body. And that economics right there where it once again we quantifying what is the suffering of moving a body worth to somebody and some accountant somewhere cranked out $47. I think it is an interesting look at what is this space, is it a spiritual place for people or is it something economic that makes sense for the moment but as soon as it doesn't, you know, we're going to build a new Superdome on top of your cemetery there and it’s tough luck. We'll talk more about economics and bodies in a little bit.
[42:32] Well, the absolute best examples of that would have to come from Singapore. Singapore is an extremely small country, in 1959 it moved towards independence from Great Britain. But in that process, the country had this impetus to modernize and bring the standard of living up to, I guess, modern standard. And what that meant is moving and upgrading the housing for all of the Singaporean citizens to a modern type of construction. And at the time Singapore was really just a loose collection of villages, and within five years this modern housing development board was created and had moved 400,000 people into vertical buildings, which is just an extremely rapid change of pace. And one of the challenges that they had was, well, what do we do with all these burial grounds? Because again, Singapore is a very small country, it takes less than an hour to drive across the entire thing, and so you don't really have the option of acquiring more land or developing outward. The country could only develop upward but it meant that this, all this land that was taken up by hundreds of thousands of bodies had to be moved. And that the time, you know, burial grounds had a very deep and rich cultural tradition with whole villages being centered around them, very elaborate customs and traditions around honoring the dead. And long story short, just about every single grave in Singapore was dug up and the bodies were cremated, and now these huge columbariums exist where every single urn containing the cremated remains of a person is stored. And it was a huge dramatic shift in culture, a huge dramatic shift in economics. And today some 80% of all Singaporeans are cremated and the podcast 99% Invisible discussed some of these shifts in their episode Life and Death in Singapore.
[44:26] Well, these places with compressed spaces, I think, are really interesting explorations of what death is worth and whether it's can overpower cultural norms of how we deal with death and the practicalities of the limitations of that space or whatever other concerns we might have. Hong Kong is another great example here where people are literally spending tens of thousands of dollars as much as $30,000 for the purchase of a burial plot. And you can actually like go into installment plans, pay these out. In some cases, it's easier and cheaper to live like to actually buy a place to live in Hong Kong than it is to buy a lot to put your dead body in it. And so because of that as you mentioned they have moved a lot to cremation, but even the cremation and the places to inter those are coming up with a large premium for this ability and some of these centers have as much as a 4 to 5-year waitlist to be able to put your ashes or this cremation jar into one is facilities so that other loved ones they come and visit there. These exploding costs in a funeral world have actually spurred a lot of innovation and I say that with that "innovation" intonation because some of these things feel sort of weird and I'm not sure what I feel about major investors and VC, people coming into the funeral world. For example, once again in Hong Kong, they want to build a giant floating barge that can hold hundreds of thousands of urns at a premium real estate place because there's just not enough land to put these things in. You’ve seen in other places more innovations where, you know, we've only got so much space to bury down, right? Typically people just put one casket in and that's it.
[46:15] But now there is an increase in doing double-decker tombs. This is actually happening in London because of those space concerns where they will intern a couple of people in a tomb and modify the headstones so that both these people or multiple people are all on there. You're starting to see caskets buried not lengthwise but vertically which was a common practice in the past but fell out of favor but now that land is at a premium again we are doing this once more. And then in some cases know we have mausoleums and stuff above ground where we construct this and stack caskets maybe, you know, four or five high. But some people taking this to dramatic extremes. For example, in Brazil, there's a skyscraper cemetery, Daniel.
[46:57] A skyscraper cemetery?
[46:58] Yes.
[46:59] Cemetery meaning like there's dirt?
[47:02] No, I mean it is a literal skyscraper. There's a skyscraper, it's called Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica and I know I butchered that, I don't speak Portuguese, I'm sorry, Brazil. But this is actually a 14-story building that is just filled with caskets images. And it doesn't look like a mausoleum or anything, it honestly looks sort of like a resort and it is just built on the side of this building. There's a cool little mini-documentary about it, we’ll link it on the website, it’s called “A Tomb With A View”, but it shows these new ways of thinking about what do we do with the dead? And this is something that is increasingly becoming a question because we're running out of space like we mentioned. But of course, all of these things coming at a cost, building a skyscraper to inter your dead is, you know, when we come back to those carbon concerns, this is much more expensive and just burying someone in the ground. There are different environmental costs on either end but it seems increasingly that if we want these traditional forms of burial or cremation that we’re pushed to make sacrifices with our choices. And that there aren't really good solutions here and we will get some of that in a little bit.
[48:10] David, before we go on, I want to just touch on another aspect of cemeteries for a moment. The way we practice death in a lot of ways mirrors or is an extension of the way that we live our lives both individually and as a society. And here in the United States, we have a long history of segregation, discrimination, and exclusion. And it turns out that in our places of burial the same thing goes on. The US state of Virginia has been slowly passing some bills since 2017 to increase funding for its historic African-American cemeteries.
[48:52] Now, why is it necessary to pass a bill in 2019 to preserve historic African-American cemetery? Well, it turns out that as a nation we here in the United States, David, do not take care of our historic African American burial grounds like we do other historical cemeteries. So let me give you an example. In Richmond, Virginia there is a 60-acre cemetery or 24-hectare cemetery called Evergreen that dates back to 1891. And in this cemetery, there are some really historically notable African-Americans who are buried, and this is a purely African American cemetery. And these African-American cemeteries exist because black people were excluded from every other cemetery so they had to find their own land and figure it out for themselves. So, buried in Evergreen we have Maggie Walker and she was the first woman to charter a bank in the United States. Not the first African-American woman but the first woman, period. And this was around 1902 and she died in 1934. Another African-American buried in Evergreen is John Mitchell Jr.
[50:10] John was a businessman, a civil rights leader and an elected member of Jackson Ward in Richmond Virginia, which itself is a historical place as it served as the birthplace of many prominent black businesses in the twentieth-century America. But John also built one of the nation's top progressive newspapers, at the time called the Richmond Planet. And he was, of course, born as a slave in 1863 and he died in 1929. And I want to just read his tombstone right now and it reads: “Editor, banker, alderman, and pioneer of civil rights. A man who would walk into the jaws of death to serve his race.” And then the verse Isaiah 55:4, “Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader and commander to the people.”
[51:04] And this cemetery where Maggie Walker, John Mitchell Jr. and countless thousands of other African Americans are buried is in disrepair. Here is Brian Palmer writing in 2017 about Evergreen and its next-door cemetery East End which is also an African American cemetery. He writes: “Thick, tangled vegetation has swallowed headstones and grave markers. The chest-high spring and summer growth is gone or going, so we’re left with the year-round die-hards that have grown every which way over the decades — English ivy, brambles, privet. Chinese sumac sprouts everywhere and has grown tree-high and tree-thick, competing with and winning against cedar and oak. Beneath it, we find pockets of illegally dumped trash. We also find headstones, fragments and corners of which volunteer spots beneath the carpet of ivy. I tend to find them with my feet, by tripping over them. Even sections we call “clear” will look scruffy and forlorn to people accustomed to manicured cemeteries. There is no lawn, just a patchwork — weeds, dead brown leaves, bare earth. Headstones are cracked, askew, even shattered, by nature or by vandals. Encroaching tree roots have buckled and broken concrete curbs that once enclosed family plots.”
[52:32] And so long overdue in 2017 Virginia passed a bill to recognize the need to preserve African-American cemeteries like Evergreen and East End, specifically for people buried between 1800 and 1900. But it kind of pales in comparison to the attention given to white historic cemeteries where Confederate soldiers and generals are buried.
[52:55] Which is significant because the Confederacy fought in large part to preserve the institution of slavery in America. And in fact, there are two Confederate cemeteries just a few miles from the African-American Evergreen and East End cemeteries that have received tremendous state funding. One of them received the equivalent of $200,000 in 1914 for the preservation of Confederate general graves and another Confederate cemetery is actually owned by the city itself and taxpayer money goes to provide a little extra care to those Confederate graves. And Virginia's bill which I think allots some $35,000 a year to the preservation of African-American graves is an important gesture if a small one. But other attempts that have been made to expand support for these historic burial ground have not been able to move forward. And other states in the country, in fact, do not make any attempt to preserve or even find so many of these African-American burial grounds. In fact, Mississippi and Alabama both have laws that divert taxpayer money to erecting Confederate monuments and purchasing and preserving Confederate burial grounds. And Mississippi actually refers to this as a patriotic donation but the states have no similar laws and none are likely to exist for preserving historic African-American cemeteries.
[54:24] So while white cemeteries get state funding, black cemeteries still rely on volunteers to help with cleanup and preservation. There is a quote from a book called Landscapes of the Dead: an Argument for Conservation Burial by Alexandra Harker. “Disposing of the dead has been a necessary public service for as long as humans have lived in communities. Burial is intertwined with the spaces that humans occupy, and cemeteries have through history provided open space to urban residents. Mount Auburn Cemetery, which opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831, is one of the first large-scale urban public parks in the United States. The current American funeral industry, however, no longer plays an integral role in community or ecological preservation.” That last line, Daniel, it’s something we've already talked about on here. The current American funeral industry no longer plays an integral role in community or ecological preservation. That stands out to me. You know, I was mentioning those public spaces earlier, Daniel, those parks that people enjoy: those aren't new cemeteries. Yeah, they're still operated, yeah, they still get occasional burials but they've been around for a hundred, hundred fifty years. And so often, unfortunately, these modern cemeteries that I encountered aren’t things that are open and beautiful spaces to relax and find yourself in but are ringed with razor wire.
[55:49] Well, again, David, it kind of goes back to this concept that the way we live our lives as a society carries onto how we think about death and how we treat death in our society. That line you read, I think is important because we talk a lot in the show about how many of us in modern society have lost connections to the land that sustains us and we have lost connection to a sense of community. And what better barometer of life in our world today than the way we go about death? And coming back to this like concept of segregation in the afterlife so to speak. You know, funeral directors have received a lot of bad publicity, especially following the industry deregulation in the 1970s during which the cost of funeral services skyrocketed, and many of the industry took advantage of this family vulnerability at the time of death to charge those hefty fees for embalming and other unnecessary services. And throughout the years the funeral industry has become in many ways a poster child for corporate greed and exploitation. But this was not the case everywhere in American culture. In the same way that black people were denied access to burial grounds and cemeteries, the funeral industry was largely dominated by white business owners who explicitly deny their services to black families. And so out of this need came the black undertaker, the black funeral director.
[57:15] And this was, in fact, one of the earliest forms of entrepreneurship for black people in the United States. And because black people took on this job as a form of necessity to serve their community, the way they went about it differs dramatically from their white counterparts. So I want to read an excerpt from an article by Dr. Kami Fletcher titled “What Jessica Mitford Missed.”
[57:40] African American undertakers were not concerned with tricking mourning families into turning over their life savings to bury their loved ones. During the period that Mitford wrote, African American funeral directors were activists in the fight for civil and human rights – a fight against white supremacy. And swindling their clientele out of every dime she/he had, frankly, would have been counter-intuitive. With their wealth, social status, mobility, visibility, and connections, African American funeral directors led the charge in the Civil Rights Movement by using their funeral parlors as meeting places. They threatened not to buy their funeral cars from white establishments if they didn’t hire African American workers. African American funeral directors bailed-out jailed protesters. African American funeral directors fought for justice; they did not have time to collectively concoct schemes to exploit the bereaved. As a viable trade and then profession, African American funeral directors used their newfound financial success to help others in the Black community. They invested back into their communities because the majority believed in racial uplift via self-help, i.e. only Black folks are going to help Black folks up the economic ladder. Case in point, African American funeral directors were involved in many social clubs for the betterment of the community and financially aided others in time of crisis.”
[59:10] All this to say, David, that the business of death so to speak does not have to be an alienating process. It can be rooted in community, it does not have to be a business in which funeral directors are only looking for ways to take advantage of vulnerable families to make a quick profit. It can be made up of people who we know and trust and who care about our well-being.
[59:34] And it does not have to continue to be a business that contributes to environmental degradation, it could be made up of funeral directors like that listener who wrote us to say "we need green alternatives” and who is actively encouraging their patrons to seek those alternatives. And, I guess, as we can talk about now, you know, the business of death does not have to be one in which our bodies are placed in the ground that we have no relationship with or history with.
[1:00:01] I guess this brings us, Daniel, to the point of asking, we’ve talked about cemeteries, we’ve talked about cremation, we’ve talked about embalming – all these things vary from troublesome to just outright bad. And I think it’s time to start looking at alternatives: what is going on outside of these options? And I mean off the top of my head when we started this show and we say, okay I would like to be cremated, that sounds like the best idea since apparently, you can't just dump bodies in the woods. That's a better option than the burial but then we find all these problems of cremation and all the storage and stuff is an issue. But beyond that, what other alternatives are there? I heard there are some things like you can get turned into a diamond, that's a thing that that's some people do. But that seems like a pointless energy-intensive process. You can get launched into space.
[1:00:52] What? Like that car?
[1:00:55] Like that car, that car that definitely had a dead body in the trunk. It’s just the perfect crime.
[1:01:01] Just wait till our space police get ahold of it, you know, pull that car over.
[1:01:06] Well now I think it's actually, this is actually cremation process so I don't think it's any better. But if you want to be like extra just like fuck-the-Earth, fuck carbon, you can get cremated and then launched into space. At least there's a waiting list to do it, I don't know if they actually are launching but that's an option. And then you start the typical things, you could donate your body to science, Daniel.
[1:01:28] Yeah, I mean, I am a donor or an organ donor on my driver's license. But I guess donating your body is kind of the same concept, right? Give my brain to science!
[1:01:39] Well, actually, I'm glad you brought up the organ donating situation here because.
[1:01:44] Actually, I'm pretty sure my brain would be worth like a...
[1:01:47] No, I don't know what you are about to say, but no. So your brain aside, Daniel, I'm glad you brought up organ donations because that is, I mean, it feels like it should be similar to donating your body, right? Any of these are literally parts of your body, somebody could use them. But in the eyes of the law, these are two very different things. And so the US has very strict laws about organs, transplant donations. That's very, very, very illegal to sell your organs for any reason. But it turns out it's not illegal to sell body parts. And in fact, most of the bodies that are "donated to science" are bodies that are bought by what are called body brokers. And I hate that term, but body brokers or as they like to say non-transplant tissue banks. And this is an industry that is basically entirely unregulated and deals with the trade of bodies and body parts. [1:02:49] So at this point you're probably imagining the old body trade that many people are familiar with, where at in the 1900s or 1800s people were just literally digging up bodies of the recently deceased, selling them to doctors and researchers so that they could do experiments on them, autopsies, to see how the body ticks, to do experiments, to test out new surgical techniques. And this was a healthy black market and body trade, there were a lot of actual scientific advancements made in this process but it was literally a black market of bodies.
[1:03:22] So healthy in the sense that we got some scientific knowledge out of it, but still a very illegal under the table process?
[1:03:31] Well, illegal and unethical and immoral. But if you ask the opinions of the scientists, researchers, medical doctors which were working with these bodies, they would say, it’s just a body, it's a hunk of meat, and what I'm doing with it now is good for all humanity, and the soul has already left, so screw it, is fine. But of course, the people, whose loved ones that this body was, didn't quite agree. So time went on, we have a lot of doctors now that we want to train with cadavers, with dead bodies, we have to give them to do autopsies, they practice surgical techniques so that we're not just practicing immediately on live bodies of people who'd actually need these treatments. And so in the medical world, this body trade is very important for the education of a new generation of doctors.
[1:04:23] And not only that, it's also used for all sorts of things like testing new surgical tools, various “experiments”, and I'll just leave quotes around that. And then again some more unsavory uses though those tend to be more black-markety. And there is not a lot of details, overall this whole industry operates almost entirely in the shadows because we don't like the idea that when we donate a body that it is actually being used for profit. But the vast majority of these body brokers and "donate your body to science" programs are just for that, they’re for-profit companies that take bodies that are almost always donated. So they're getting these bodies for free and in exchange, they offer a service to the surviving family members who donate the body. And that service typically at some point once the body is finished being used for whatever experiments it's bound for is cremation. And so what you end up having a lot of time as, this is a service that people who can't afford the exploding cost of funerals or cremation, engage in. So the vast majority of these bodies are the bodies of the poor. So this industry exists primarily to profit off of the fact that poor people can't afford the traditional ways of dealing with a departed loved one because of his exploding cost in death. So what would you think a body’s worth, Daniel?
[1:05:46] By itself, shh, $5,000?
[1:05:51] That's actually dead on. So the high end of a body, and remember this is entirely donated, is worth about $5,000. And that this could end up anywhere from a medical school where young students are going to be practicing autopsies to being sold to the military to test landmines.
[1:06:10] Wait, what?
[1:06:12] Yeah, some of these bodies that are donated to science find their way into the US military's hands to test explosives.
[1:06:18] Hold up, David. That doesn't, that doesn't sound right. So you're saying the US military is purchasing bodies from these like black market...
[1:06:28] No, it's not black mark, it's a totally above the table legal industry of trading in dead bodies. In fact, oftentimes you don’t need any like permits or licenses to do that, you can literally just email some people and then next thing you know, you’re body broker.
[1:06:44] So, so if I get someone to donate their body to me once they die which I don't need a license for, yeah. I put it in my freezer and then I sent an email off to like the army colonel at that the military base in El Paso that we talked about with all the unexploded ordinances and say, ‘hey, I have one body for sale, $3,000 and it's yours.’
[1:07:10] It might not be that easy as just firing off emails to whatever servicemembers you can find. But yeah, pretty much. A lot of these companies start off with just getting donated body, a refrigerated van and then they're off on their way to, and they say ‘rent this body out’ to whatever organization it is that's going to utilize it. And then whatever remains are left they cremate, sometimes there are no remains left and so they give somebody just sand and tell him they have cremated it. That's come up a lot of times, highly illegal, and then return that to the loved ones. And the body could have been blown up, it could have been experimented upon, could have been used for teaching stuff.
[1:07:49] What about the individual parts, like do you think there are people like selling arms and legs?
[1:07:54] Oh yeah, well, that's the other side of it, most of the times people don't want a full body. It's a much better deal if you only need to say, experiment on an arm, just to take an arm. So some of these body brokers are literally dismembering these bodies and then distributing off to whoever wants to “rent” them. And some of these guys are less scrupulous than others. And, don't get me wrong, there are some very high-end body brokers who do x-rays to check for any surgical things, who spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars making sure that they're treating these bodies well and with respect. But then there are these other guys who use chainsaws to separate arms off bodies, chuck them in trucks and then, you know, drop them off wherever somebody ordered an arm for the day for six hundred bucks or whatever. Totally illegal. You can find all sorts of information about this on the website. Reuters did a couple of great exposes on this industry a couple of years ago, and you just got to read these things cause it's appalling.
[1:08:51] It kind of reminds me of something we’ve talked about an episode 46 - Pill of Sale about the human guinea pigs in pharmaceutical clinical trials that have largely been unregulated, and in some cases, have been run out of motels. And again, kind of like the same concept here, targeting poor people, putting them at risk, signing them up for things that they did not agree to and then putting their health at risk. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a body broker out there who networks pretty heavily with some pharmaceutical companies to take care of the botched clinical trials.
[1:09:28] I wouldn't either. This is a wildly unregulated industry, there are almost no data on who these people are or what they're doing with the bodies and where they end up. So we're not even sure how many bodies are sold and traded every year. At the time of that Reuters report, they found that in four years they calculated probably about 200,000 body parts and over 50,000 bodies were traded in the United States alone. And of course, this is a worldwide phenomenon but different levels of regulation and legality in different parts of the world. But, I mean, the whole underworld that we had no idea existed but is intimately involved with a lot of this death conversation. So, like I said, y'all definitely got to read these Reuters reports, they're quite illuminating. And if you're not so sure about that body being sold to the military to test explosives, well, we got to link on the website for that to ashesashes. org.
[1:10:24] That's terrifying. Can I provide like an alternative, David? Like a better, more friendly thing to think about, now that people have this terrible image in their minds.
[1:10:33] Yeah, I mean, so we're not being our bodies because the embalming process is bad, cemeteries are bad, we're not cremating our bodies because the energy uses bad, we're putting toxic chemicals into the air, that's no good. We're definitely not selling our bodies to body brokers to profit off with who-knows-what “experiments” so that we may eventually get cremated anyway, that's like the worst of both worlds. So what does it leave us with?
[1:10:59] Don't forget, we're not shooting our dead bodies into space either.
[1:11:02] Well, that's a given.
[1:11:04] So there are actual natural burials, this still goes on around the world and even here in the United States. It's still a popular option, it is just not the majority. And it's what you think, it's just wrapping a body and then placing it in the ground with no frills or whistles so that it can decompose and become part of the soil and play a role in the ecological recycling of nutrients. And I think this is the way I want to go, David. I don't want to be cremated now since I'm not contributing in any way to soil health, I would rather just be stuck in the ground and allowed to decompose. But, you know, something else we talked about on the show is around concepts of land conservation, right? We live in a world where industrial agriculture is destroying the planet, the fossil fuel companies are doing the same and we're losing our forests at alarming rates, the Amazon rainforest is being burned to the ground. And we need to protect the land. Well, there’s a concept that combines the idea of natural burials with land conservation. And it is a conservation burial ground. And the idea is that you not only protect land, so let's say you have a state park or some natural wildlands that you are protecting through some legal structures so that it cannot be developed and no one can come in and cut the trees down, right?
[1:12:27] Well, you can take that one step further by permitting the use of natural burials. So now you can't cut the trees down and you can't disturb the wild but you can come in with a biodegradable casket and a non-embalmed body, no toxins, no chemicals and conduct a natural burial. And this is actually not a concept, it is being carried out in a number of places here in the United States. The very first one to test this model is called the Ramsey Creek preserve, it originally opened in 1998 as a way to protect 33 acres of wild forest land but it became a conservation burial ground in 2006. So people are actively being buried in this forest in a very natural way. In a lot of ways, this is cheaper than a typical modern burial because there is no concrete vault, there's no embalming and the caskets themselves are very low-cost, they are usually made out of something biodegradable like bamboo or some other natural material. But, you know, most importantly in my mind, these burials represent an intentional decision to connect death with the environment in an ecological-friendly way that simultaneously fosters a community connection to the land which cemeteries don't necessarily do.
[1:13:52] Because again, as you talked about earlier I think, David, you know, cemeteries, often we don't even really know where they are but then someone dies and we say, okay, where's the nearest cemetery, and you go, it's a very carefully manicured landscape that's not natural in any way, there's no real history of that land unless you happen to know other people who are buried there or you happen to go there or maybe have a family plot. But with a conservation burial ground, the landscape itself can become a source of rich cultural, familial and community history and identity, right? What does it do for people's motivation to take care of the land when every week they walk through a forest, the same trees to get to their loved one, what does it do for our sense of community when we all need to come together to protect this place that is important to us, right? Who's going to allow a lumber company to come in and chop a tree down when you walk past that tree every day to go see your loved one and you know this place, it's a place of meaning for you. And I realize that this is not possible everywhere, right, but I think it's an amazing idea and we should be encouraging more alternatives to the modern burial like this.
[1:15:08] I think it's probably the best way of all the burial techniques that I’ve heard, Daniel. I think that one's my favorite, do you have any idea what the cost is?
[1:15:17] I have seen burial plots in these types of places being sold for as little as $1,300, I saw one where the highest costing burial ground was $4,500 because it was on a hill. But remember, the average cost today in the West for a funeral service around $10,000. So we're talking about a dramatically lower cost.
[1:15:40] Yeah and that $10,000 figure is actually pretty similar whether it’s a burial or a cremation, burials tend to be about $11,000, cremations about $9800, so. That seems like a bargain for something that is natural, beautiful and useful at the same time, which is interesting. There are other techniques people using for this expanding industry of green burials, there's a system called water cremation that uses a fancy machine that instead of pumping out all these toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, like that mercury pollution, instead sort of boils you into a liquid and nutritious soup that can be just flushed away or used in the garden or something, pass it on. And then what you're left with is those heavy materials that you don't want up in the atmosphere as well as the carbon and other materials from the harder parts of your body that would be and make up a traditional urn or cremation-like product at the end of it. There's also a technology called promession, and I hope I'm saying that right, it's based on the word promise, that is more popular Scandinavian countries, it's expanding there. I'm not sure if it's available in the United States but this is another type of natural burial where they basically cryogenically freeze your body, Daniel, with liquid nitrogen that turns your body to crystals, more or less. And then they vibrate the body so it disintegrates into basically a couple of dust or particles within a couple of minutes like you literally shattered into pieces.
[1:17:13] So it's just like those cartoons where you know someone shoots somebody with a freeze ray and then...
[1:17:18] Then they shattered to pieces.
[1:17:20] Yes, shattered into pieces.
[1:17:21] Yeah, they do that with your body after you passed. And then once they’ve taken that, they don't stop, then they freeze-dry these pieces, which gets rid of some of the excess liquid materials that we don't necessarily need, which will make it messy whenever it thaws. Then they separate out all the metals: things like dental fillings, other products – things that could contaminate the soil. And then they put this whatever is left of your body, all the organic elements, put in a biodegradable casket, which is a very small casket, which is then interred just the very top level of the soil. And then it started to be digested by bacteria which love this nutrient-rich soup of your body and returns all of your rich nutrients into the Earth so that you can regrow new life in this process.
[1:18:11] Well, will they think of next, David?
[1:18:13] Well, I mean, technically that company went bankrupt, but the technology is cool and I hope it comes back.
[1:18:21] I've also seen companies that have sprouted up that will put your body in a pot of soil, then attach a tree to it and then put you in the ground.
[1:18:31] Yeah, that's another cool technique.
[1:18:33] The only problem with that though is that if that tree happens to get like a fungus or something or doesn't grow and then, you know, this grave that you come to remember your loved one that was supposed to grow into beautiful tree, it’s just like dying but, hey, you know, circle of life, it's all good.
[1:18:49] Well, circle of life, that's a good way to put a lot of these conversations. And these are very Western ideas of burial or cremation and then there are other cultures that have very different types of burials, things like sky burials in Tibet, where your body is basically left out for birds to eat and then I guess you’re part of that ecosystem at that point.
[1:19:10] For some reason I feel like that's the way that you would want to go, David.
[1:19:13] It sounds pretty cool, but getting my body to Tibet is probably not, so you see, I don't think you could just leave my body out in New York, it would be eaten by pigeons and cats which kind of the same thing. But I mean, all these ideas are different ways that we can explore our relationship with death and the places that we encounter death, these cemeteries, these mausoleums, these skyscrapers in some scenarios. And I think as time goes on it's very important for us to reconsider our relationship with death and how we want to be interred, how we want to be remembered and how we want to live our lives and leave our remains for those who live on past us.
[1:19:55] Right, it is something to think about, you know? Not everyone has the privilege or luxury or lives in a geographic place where it's possible to be sent in a concrete ball to the bottom of the ocean to feed the coral reefs or even do one of these natural burials in a preserve. We all have to make a choice that's right for us where we're at. But it is something to talk about with your loved ones, think about, you know, if there is a greener alternative, consider it. You know, that embalming practice, it exists only to preserve a body for a funeral service. Maybe that's something you don't think is necessary, right? I mean, if you did a natural burial, perhaps you wouldn't get to have an open casket. But again this practice was kind of created out of a corporate model of how do we charge more for our services? An open casket was kind of a way to do that because it required, you know, all this extra labor on the part of the funeral director, then they had to create that event and service it. And for a long time, this is not how funeral services went, it's not how we buried people. And so there are lots of different models and it might be worth considering if you would be okay with a different option.
[1:21:10] That's a lot to think about, Daniel.
[1:21:12] And think about it we hope you will.
[1:21:16] You can find tons of information about everything we talked about today, read that Reuters reports on the body trade, find information on other funeral practices as well as read a full transcript of this episode on our website at ashesashes .org.
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