Name Your Brainstorm-

To preserve the glorious diversity of life on earth, humans will have to change almost everything we do – what we eat, what we drive, how many children we have, where we travel – everything. Fortunately, there’s an amazing outpouring of creativity from people all around the world. Here are a few ideas I’d like to see catch on:

The green goodbye. Traditional embalming and burial are shockingly destructive. Powerful chemicals embalm the body, hundreds of pounds of wood, fabric, metal, and cement enclose it, and herbicides and pesticides are dumped all over the grassy cemetery. Here are some statistics I got from wikipedia.

Each year, 22,500 cemeteries across the United States bury approximately:

30 million board feet of hardwood (caskets)

90,272 tons of steel (caskets)

14,000 tons of steel (vaults)

2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)

1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)

827,060 gallons of embalming fluid ( commonly includes formaldehyde) .

(Compiled from statistics by Casket and Funeral Association of America, Cremation Association of North America, Doric Inc., The Rainforest Action Network, and Mary Woodsen, Pre-Posthumous Society)

How many hundreds of years will it take for land full of chemical-drenched bodies buried in caskets surrounded by cement containers to be restored? That’s anti-recycling with a vengeance! Cremation requires enormous amounts of energy to burn the remains. I don’t really want the last chapter of my body to contribute to killing the earth – do you? Happily, solutions are available. There are actually green cemeteries. Even better is the no-funeral-at-all option. I plan to donate my body to a medical school or research facility – no chemical or fossil fuel abuse at all! There’s also Body Worlds, the traveling exhibit of real human bodies that have been dissected and displayed in astounding educational ways. Some people find the idea of this exhibit upsetting, but I’ve seen it and, like most visitors, come away with renewed admiration and respect for our magic biological bodies.

You can also donate your organs, saving the lives or eyesight of numerous other people. Hmmmm, how can we make this help the earth? Answer: by donating organs with strings attached. It would work like this: you sign an organ donation card and tell the agency that serves as the intermediary that your organs may ONLY be given to someone who does one of the following:

I wish someone (you?) would set up a foundation that did this. I’ll sign up right away.

Ok, so these two could be seen as a bit gloomy. Other options are cheerier. You could teach your cat to use the toilet, saving hundreds of pounds of cat litter over its lifetime. Do this ONLY if your cat never goes outside – free-roaming animals can pick up toxoplasmosis from rodents they come into contact with. The oocysts (eggs) of this bacterium, once flushed down the toilet, can survive water treatment procedures. When the waste water reaches the oceans, otters can pick them up through the food chain. Why does this matter? Toxoplasmosis is deadly to sea otters. For the same reason, DON ’T flush cat litter down the toilet if your cat ventures outside.

Like a lot of things, doing the right thing for the earth and for animals requires thinking through some complicated causal chains and weighing the tradeoffs.

Name Your Brainstorm –

Creatively Reshaping Everything We Do