In article .net,
Jonathan Ball wrote:


You wrote, "It would be nice if regular sober
middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural
eco-friendly dreams & then really achieve them, but one
rarely sees that; if it exists it doesn't advertise
itself as loudly."
I think it does exist, and I think
you correctly identify the issue: it doesn't advertise
itself. There was an article in yesterday's L.A. Times
(http://www.latimes.com/la-me-greenbu...,5190938.story)
about a man in South Carolina working to promote "green
burial", in which only simple caskets, or no caskets at
all, are used. Successful life simplification usually
occurs in small, unseen ways, not in a paradoxically
grandiose movement "off the grid".

I never understood the fancy casket thing, & if I don't before I die
decide to be burnt to ashes instead, it looks like I'm going into the
ground before sunset in a very ordinary wooden box. My stepmom was born &
raised Buddhist & her Thai family performed burials right in the ground &
kept the same casket clean & in storage between uses (it was used only for
display of the corpse during the cleansing ritual, but never wastefully
buried with a body in it), then they would dig up the bones after the meat
was retaken by the earth, & cremate only the bones. Long ago there was an
illegal cemetery in Underground Seattle in a buried part of the city where
only Asian people lived. Tey had to perform their burials secretly because
there were laws that existed exclusively to protect the mortuary industry
(the mortician was ever neighborhood's richest ******* & he'd contribute
to politician's coffers to insure the perpetuation of laws that "forced"
people to pay for burial methods that for some people are outright
offensive; whoever was religiously or ecologically opposed to being shot
full of preservatives & locked up in a metal box were out of luck. It's
weird to think that even today it's newsworthy & eccentric to propose a
perfectly rational system of burial.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/