So, what's the environmental impact of just leaving in the woods to rot naturally? Sounds, yucky, I know, but it would give us a baseline to use to compare the other methods. How about dessication, freezing, or being eaten by scavengers? What about the method scientists use to remove the flesh off of animal remains -- lots and lots of carrion beetles?

If we have to get morbid, let's go all the way!

The bugs that natural history museums use for removing flesh from bone are called "skin beetles", and they aren't part of the carrion beetles family. My apologies to any carrion beetles who may have been offended by my earlier remarks.

What about freeze-drying the dead? Wouldn't that be greener, still?

In Tibet the grounds often too hard to dig, there's not enough wood to waste it on cremation and it's often too cold to just let a body lie there and rot, so they have 'sky burial'.

The corpse is cut up into bite size pieces for vultures at locations the birds have come to know as good sources of easy pickings. There's no ceremony, just a job for someone good with a cleaver.

Zap - body gone, recylced damn effectively, and the birds are happy.

I don't think there's any place in the US that does this, but I'm looking for one!

I am surprised that Pablo did not mention the issues that are most protective of the future of our society:

1) Sign a donor card and make your heirs aware of your desire to donate any and all of your useable organs and skin to others.

2) Donate your body to a nearby medical school for use in their classes. Be aware that cadavers are not generally used for "research", but are used to teach anatomy to future physicians.

3) If you donate your body to a medical school, they will cremate the remains after use. These cremated remains can be then donated to one of the barrier reef projects. (My mother recently mentioned that there is one at the University of Miami, but I have not looked up the details.)

It may or may not be "green", but cremated ashes can also be turned into a manufactured diamond.

For all the pollution the average person creates in a lifetime, I hardly think what happens to their body when they die is anything significant. And let me say, aside from using up land, cemeteries preserve our culture and history and are very meaningful for families of the deceased. Besides that they are a nice place to take a walk.

I've read that in some places the population is large enough that sky burials are common, the vultures are so well-fed that they sometimes have difficulty tempting them to come in to eat.

I guess the best bet is to have your body hauled off to a place where they've got plenty of HUNGRY vultures or other carion-eaters.

Hello,

I have been competeing with my neighbors, the Joneses; for over 30 years now. Everything I get, they get a bigger one; they have to have everything bigger than mine. From the car to the cement lions in the driveway, they always beat me out.

I'm fucking sick of it.

Last week, they traded in their 75 foot Hummer Limo for a fuel-efficient Prius. They went smaller trying to be bigger than me! At first I was really pissed off, but then I realized that this was my chance to show them!

I want the biggest carbon footprint in the world, I want Chinas carbon footprint to look like a bronzed baby boot. I want to have a carbon footprint so big that bigfoot is shamed.

I'm all for being left out to be eaten by coyotes.

The trouble with that solution is similar to the "let's all just eat wild game" solution to the food industry. There's too many of us. Of course, considering that, you might kill two birds with one stone (apologies to the PETA folks for the insensitive metaphor) by turning to cannibalism.

You're right, Pablo. The subject is morbid. Of more relevance is the question of why you chose to write about it.

With all the problems facing America--which is MY priority--why on God's green Earth would you worry about whether we should become worm food or not?

Methinks Pablo needs a wake-up call!

Wouldn't that be useful for corals or stressed marine ecosystems?

Think about it. We spend a lifetime building up all kinds of goodies in our bodies that could be recycled back into the soil- nitrogen compounds, calcium, etc. Why flush down the drain what man has worked so hard to extract from the earth?

I feel this way about human waste, too. There's gotta be a more environmentally friendly method of disposing of our by-products (and bodies) than down the toilet, released back into the atmosphere (cremation), or mummified with toxic embalming fluid.

Night soil, anyone? The rules will change soon enough, I'm sure. Just hope it's in time for me. In the meantime, bury me in a plain pine box and welcome whatever grows.

...I recall when my grandmother died years ago she had a traditional burial. She was embalmed, put in a heavy metal box, then put in another cement box that was in the ground. It occured to me later, as an adult, like she was being buried almost like someone would want to come along and dig her up later. If this kind of burial is standard, we are going to use up our land, and someday these mummies will need to be dug up to be disposed of. Grose.

That all corpses are turned to phosphate by the State. It's the law.

The Parsi community of India (Zoroastrians, originally from Iran, settled in India hundreds of years ago) had actually worked out what I feel is THE greenest way of corpse disposal:

Expose the corpse to the sun and wind at a 'body disposal tower', which the Parsis call the "Tower of Silence". There, vultures eat the flesh from the corpses and in a few weeks all that's left is some moldering bones. (I believe, but am not sure about the following, that every few years the crumbling bones that are left behind are collected and disposed of with no environmental hazard at all).

Alas, of late the vultures in India have been dying out because the 'other carrion' they feed on have ingested DDT and other pesticides used for crop dusting to enhance yields. Now, there are too few vultures to take care of the dead Parsi bodies - and those bodies tend to rot for a long time in the Towers of Silence. (For more info, just google for "Parsi body disposal"; "vultures going extinct" - plenty of material available).

(Just to set things clear: I am NOT a Parsi).

-- GSC