Green Reaper

November 1, 2007

Appeared in Orange County Voice as The Green Reaper: How to Die Ecologically, November 2007, page 11.

Green Endings – A Better Way to Go
by Sarah S. Mosko, Ph.D.

The Green Burial Council has contacts in many states who are willing to accommodate green burial

The Green Burial Council has contacts in many states who are willing to accommodate green burial.

There’s one topic that people like to think about even less than what they owe in taxes or the most humiliating thing they have ever done — funerals and burials, especially their own.

We avoid it not just because it brings up the really big questions (Why are we here? Is there life after death?), but also because we feel no connection to the whole mortuary scene — the cold sterile slab, the smelly embalming fluids, the dreary funeral parlor. These facets of modern burials say nothing about us, or the values we hold.

But there’s a movement afoot to offer an alternative that is less impersonal and, for many people, more meaningfully connected to the life that was lived. It is called green burials.

Read the rest of this entry »