Re: Actually, I prefer the worms
by
Mel Olontha
05/12/2008, 12:11 PM
"Recycling my parts back into resources the earth can use rather than
turning them into something useless via a process that needlessly
wastes resources seems like the least I can do for the planet."
Well it's not that easy. First of all, your corpse is full of industrial waste, leftovers from junk food (preservatives etc.) and heavy metals from smoking, air pollution as well as fish and seafood. Very often "worms" don't like us anymore.
In many graveyards of deansly populated areas, corpses (even pollution free) do not rot fast enough anyway out of different reasons like the exhaustion of the soil. Often after up to 25 years many corpses are found that stoped decomposition and instead saponificated (turning into adipocere-mummies). The local graveyard-administrations employ new methods of "loosening up", meaning mechanical dismemberment of the corpse by drilling the graves, to get air into them and decomposition going.
How much more practical and humane would be to process corpses imeadeatly into fertilizer! Another possiblity to get your remains back into the circle of life, would be as the Tibetians do to feed the buzzards in a sky-burial or to feed the fishes with them.
Seriously, all this corpse-fetishization is simply result of uneasiness with death and the need for many people to keep somekind of rule over the living after their end.
If there is an energy and cost-saving way of getting rid of the corpse without turning the whole world into graveyards that is only to appreciate by the people that are still living.