Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [70]
Recently I got a letter from a friend, a former student in California. He wrote:
Yo, Bernd—
I’ve been diagnosed with a severe illness and am trying to get my final disposition arranged in case I drop sooner than I hoped. I want an Abbey burial. A green burial—not any burial at all—because burial is an alien approach to death.
Like any good ecologist, I regard death as changing into other kinds of life. Death is, among other things, also a wild celebration of renewal, with our substance hosting the party. In the wild, animals lie where they die, thus placing them in the scavenger loop. The upshot is that the highly concentrated animal nutrients get spread over the land, by the exodus of flies, beetles, etc. Burial, on the other hand, seals you in a hole. To deprive the natural world of human nutrient, given a population of 6.5 billion, is to starve the Earth, which is the consequence of casket burial, an interment. Cremation is not an option, given the buildup of greenhouse gases, and considering the amount of fuel it takes for the three-hour process of burning a body. Anyhow, the upshot is, one of the options is burial on private property. You can probably see this coming…. What are your thoughts on having an old friend as a permanent resident at the camp? I feel great at the moment, never better in my life in fact. But it’s always later than you think.
—Bill
As far as I was concerned, his feelings exemplify the real and only true religion that I can, in good conscience, honor. So I replied:
I read you loud and clear, old friend. And how amazing to hear your thoughts, when I was just thinking and writing about such things, prompted by a dead turkey that I found in the woods by my field. I was observing the burial/recycling of it by many different beautiful beetles. I was moved to sketch them all, to make it more real, although I’d pass on the art and stick to the ecology when it’s my turn, when I’d want no less for myself. I never thought about the cremation part—using up fossil fuels. Thanks for a reminder on that bit. One must live morally toward the Earth, the Creation—burning on a wood pyre is unfortunately not practical anymore. A casket would be for you, as it was for Edward Abbey, our hero, an unacceptable cage for our otherwise free and ever-recycling molecules that would soon become incorporated into Earth’s ecosystems.
I’d also not want a spectacle, except possibly by those who sang the Maine Stein Song, even if they sounded like they were trying to raise the dead.
I think I also told him that the practical aspects of his wish are daunting, mainly because overpopulation compromises all our freedoms, from birth to grave. It had not been so in the past. Other friends, perhaps even humans, are already permanent residents here. I once found a piece of worked flint on a little knoll by the brook next to our swimming hole near the beaver lodge. It was revealed on bare earth scratched by my recent logging. It had been deposited during a time when, unlike now, we took it for granted that we were a part of nature. They were of the caribou and the bear. What are we part of now?
No hunter ever had a quarrel with a deer so as to deprive deer of forest, or ducks of marshes. The perceived gulf of separation of “us” from “them” resulted in spiritual isolation from our ecology and our birthright, and it happened only in recent times, at almost the last moment of our existence. It resulted from agriculture, fences, and now also technology that threatens the very last thread of connection. We fence ourselves off from nature. We draw lines and make boundaries. Rather than harvesting our meat from vast herds of bison on the prairies, we