Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie

The green movement has helped reignite interest in burial techniques other than embalming and the use of a casket and/or a burial vault.

 

The Wall Street Journal reported on a proposal to create a more natural burial technique “cemetery”. The “business plan identified pagans, ‘old hippies,’ penny pinchers, environmentalists and Muslims — who traditionally bury the dead without caskets — as their target market”  WSJ Green Revolution Hits Dead End In Georgia Cemetery Proposal

 

There are now companies that sell “bio-degradable” funeral supplies.  According to the Journal, Passages International makes a $1,600 woven willow casket, which looks like an oversized picnic hamper. It also sells a $300 cremation urn made of “Himalayan rock salt” that “will dissolve within four hours when placed in water.”

 

There is an idea for a tower on which bodies will be left to decompose naturally with the help of nature’s vultures.  There are cultures where the elderly slip off quietly into the woods and nature when they know the end is near.

 

There is enough room in this world for a variety of beliefs – but I am not sure that we need to tie this into environmental protection. 

 

Makes me reminisce about our childhood song about my cowboy career:

 

O bury me not on the lone prairie

Where the wild coyote will howl o’er me

Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the winds blow free

O bury me not on the lone prairie (song information)

 

Michael D’Angelo