I've been wondering...
In the movie Lion King there is a scene where Mufasa is teaching a young Simba about the circle of life and the way of the world. He says that even though they (lions) eat the antelope while living, when they die their bodies become the grass and the antelope eat the grass, and such is the great circle of life.
But when we die, our remains are filled with chemicals, placed in a metal coffin, and buried in a concrete vault. We never really return to the earth from which we came.
Have we broken the circle of life?
How would our environment be different if we allowed dead bodies to return to the earth?
What if burials didn't include all of the packaging and bodies were just wrapped in a blanket and placed six feet under and buried simply?
Or we were all cremated and the ash returned to the earth?
I know it's a weird thought, but my brain wonders about such things.
I think we tend to upset nature by doing things in very unnatural ways.
What weird things work into your thoughts?
John
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Then all the folks in the funeral industry would lose their jobs (and their powerful government lobby).
ReplyDeleteI think human bodies are too small a fraction of the Earth's biomass for their removal from the "circle of life" to have much impact. For example, for every person on Earth, there is half a ton of termites, and I think the global total mass of ants is even larger.
ReplyDeleteAlso, even modern coffins will eventually deteriorate and render the corpses within them accessible to natural processes of decay -- it just takes longer. Yes, there are often chemicals added to such corpses, but soil bacteria are very adaptable and will eventually evolve the ability to break down and utilize such chemicals.
There are cultures in which the use of cremation to dispose of corpses has been widespread for centuries, which does remove them from the natural cycle of decay and re-use pretty effectively, but I'm not aware of any resulting ecological issues in the regions where those cultures life.