A leading public health expert is calling for a strategic initiative to develop green burial corridors alongside major transport routes because British graveyards and cemeteries are rapidly running out of room. With 500,000 deaths annually in England and Wales, it is likely that there will be no burial space left within five years.
Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor John Ashton points to the recent announcement of a scheme to plant 130,000 trees in urban areas as a contribution to reducing pollution and global warming. While lacking in ambition, he writes, it gives a clue as to what might be possible by joining up the dots of green environmentalism and human burial.
The environmental and human health impacts of the fluids and materials used in embalming and coffins is a matter of growing interest and concern, writes Prof Ashton, and resonates with the recent move towards simpler funeral approaches, not least green funerals with biodegradable regalia and coffins in woodland areas.
With little prospect of finding burial space for those who seek it, he writes, there is a real opportunity of stepping up to the mark as boldly as the Victorians did with the Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852.
Prof Ashton concludes: “A glimpse of what might be possible with political will and imagination can be seen by what has happened alongside long-forgotten canals by neglect and default where wildlife corridors have evolved over time. It is time to revisit the public health roots of human burial and connect them to a new vision for a planet fit for future generations.”
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How about feeding them to Drax?
Just do what they do in New Orleans cemeteries & other areas with high water tables — build up, above the ground.
The Ferenghi vacuum dessicate the dead and sell them in nice labeled disks for a profit! > ; }
Still holding out for a Starfleet ‘launched out the photon torpedo tube’ burial.
~¿~
I’m going to go for cremation. No offense against God, He will know where I am. Regular burial is just an a waste of money.
Who ever ends up with the little ceramic box, or whatever, can just drop the ashes by spoonfuls when they go for a walk. A teaspoon here and there in the parks and on the boulevards will never be noticed.
My wife and I are arranging “green” burial for ourselves in rural New York state. Just a matter of personal preference and our understanding of what physical death really entails.
I never understood the insistence on spending thousands of dollars on a casket which is then buried in the Earth.
A simple brass plaque will mark the spot under a long-lived oak tree to be planted between our graves.
I’m not a fan of the hiway-side graveyard idea.
Why not use the Parsee or Tibetan way? Let scavenging birds solve the problem and re-integrate us into Nature’s grand recycling scheme.
Though I hear the parsee have serious problems in India since they killed off nearly all vultures with diclofenac.
I didn’t know Viktor Brukhanov or Nikolai Fomin wrote blogs under an alias.
People could save a lot of space by cremation and placing ashes in a loved one’s coffin that’s already in place. You get the cemetery experience and maybe a plaque in the ground next to the original headstone.
People could save a lot of space by cremation and placing ashes in a loved one’s coffin that’s already in place. You get the cemetery experience and maybe a plaque in the ground next to the original headstone.
A local VFW has been using a decommissioned armored vehicle to inter cremated remains. Unless someone blows it up those remains are going nowhere for several thousand years. I believe it is an M 48 Engineer variant.
Don’t they use burial vaults into which the casket is placed. I think that it keeps the fluids from getting into the ground water and contaminating wells. Isn’t it cholera that is caused by this? So bury the dead along the road and then kill a whole bunch more.