Recycle Yourself

April 26, 2009 at 11:19 pm (Think About It)
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Not to be depressing, but I have been thinking about dying.  I have been thinking specifically about what to do with my body after I die.

This line of thinking came about when I was driving recently past the cemetery where my grandparents are buried. I rarely ever visit the graves. It’s located in Newark, New Jersey and the area has so much vandalism that the cemetery is gated and locked shut, and I don’t even know how you get access.

Burying bodies has always seemed like a bad idea to me. As a kid, I dreaded the idea of being put in a box and being set in the ground. As an adult, I see the entire process as incredibly wasteful.

So, I started looking around at alternatives. Cremation seems like the best alternative, though I’d hate to stick my wife and sons with those ashes. We still have my father-in-law’s ashes. We were going to cast them to the winds at the ocean, but the time never seemed right.

I discovered online information about  “green burials.” I actually found some NJ services. You need to find where you can go for more information on burial sites that allow green burials, coffins and other services in your state.

Green burial is burial that can take place without the use of formaldehyde-based embalming, metal caskets, and concrete burial vaults. It’s essentially the way most of humanity has cared for its dead for thousands of years – that is, until the late 19th century in America. In some instances, green burial can also be done for ecological reasons.

In England, green burial sites are unlandscaped, naturally beautiful woodlands and meadows where the deceased are buried in random order with only some natural vegetation or stone to mark the grave. Graves in these natural burial sites are easily located through the use of global positioning devices placed at the time of burial. This enables families to locate the exact position of their loved one’s grave as part of a public park.

According to the April/May 2003 edition of Mother Earth News, every year in the United States the commercial funeral industry uses: 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 180,544,000 pounds of steel for caskets, 5,400,000 pounds of copper for lining caskets, 30, 000,000 board feet of hard woods, including tropical woods, for caskets, 3,272,000,000 pounds of reinforced concrete for burials vaults and  28,000,000 pounds of steel for vaults.

What’s the environmental impact of the typical burial?  Some people have a problem with the use of embalming fluid which contains formaldehyde (a “probable” .carcinogen according to the US Environmental Protection Agency and a known carcinogen according to the World Health Organization). Embalming creates health risks for workers and it’s associated with several diseases such including nasal cancer and leukemia. In very few circumstances is embalming actually required by law, Green funeral directors make available refrigeration and/or dry ice as an alternative to embalming.

Then there are burial vaults. The term vault is the first clue to their origin – a way to deter grave robbers in the late 19th century.  Many cemeteries require them today to prevent the ground from sinking and markers from moving. There are no state or federal laws requiring the use of a vault, though cemeteries are allowed to have policies that do. While some people may consider  concrete and metal vaults to be “natural,” the manufacturing and transporting of vaults utilizes a tremendous amount of energy and contribute to 1.6 tons of reinforced concrete being produced.

Traditional cemeteries upset the natural landscape with the overuse of valuable open space. Huge expanses of grass are kept alive through the use of fertilizers, herbicides, and frequent watering. Green burial sites, on the other hand, use indigenous vegetation and are designed to eliminate the use of water, pesticides, or other unnatural materials.

Which brings me back to cremation which uses far fewer resources than almost any other option. But it also has an environmental impact and “carbon footprint.” Cremation burns fossil fuel and some older cremation facilities can use significantly more energy compared to newer ones. Mercury is also emitted when a person with dental amalgam fillings is cremated, though just how much is widely debated.

If  I do have to buy a coffin for myself or a relative, I favor the more colorful and safely biodegradable ones. These products include wooden caskets, cardboard coffins, willow coffins, corn “plastic” interlining, natural fiber – hemp – coffin linings, hemp ash bags, willow, gourd, ceramic, or wooden ash containers. The  Ecopod made in the UK (also available here in the U.S.) is made from naturally hardened, 100% recycled paper (mainly newsprint and office paper) and a non-toxic natural hardener and works for a green burial or clean cremation. The shape is inspired by the shape of a seed pod. Maybe I wouldn’t mind being planted this way.

UPDATE: via a comment (below) from Megan at Mother Earth News – we point you to their article on DIY Coffins

“…coffins don’t have to contradict the life of the person whose body they contain… Besides saving a bundle of money, making a coffin can reflect and celebrate the life of a specific person, providing a reminder of happy things at a time when sadness holds the upper hand. The best coffins are joyful epitaphs in wood. Several coffin plans exist in the image gallery to help get you started on making a homemade casket.

see http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Build-Coffin.aspx

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Guerilla Gardening

April 25, 2009 at 12:40 am (Do It)
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Guerrilla gardening is political gardening. It is a form of environmental, nonviolent direct action. I suppose it might fall under land rights, land reform, or permaculture.

People who practice guerrilla gardening take over an abandoned piece of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. To these activists, reclaiming land from perceived neglect or misuse and giving it a new purpose is not illegal at all. Still, some of their work is carried out in secrecy. Other projects engage the local community proactively.

The term guerrilla gardening being used was by the Green Guerrilla group in 1973 in New York. They transformed a derelict private lot into a garden. It sounds like “community gardening” but it is gardening on someone else’s land without permission. Proponents claim the idea has been around for centuries, and that there are even Biblical references to it.

sunflower International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day 2009 on May 1 is the third annual event for guerrilla gardeners around the world. Get out there and sow sunflower seeds in your neighborhood! The first event was launched by the Brussels’ Farmers as a way to make a positive contribution to their local environment and have some fun at the same time. Sunflowers not only beautify a space but also are a favorite of wildlife.

You can post ideas on their Facebook page or on the GuerrillaGardening.org community pages for your area and get some tips about planting those sunflowers.

GuerrillaGardening.org was created in 2004 by Richard Reynolds as a blog about his solo guerrilla gardening in London. He was a frustrated gardener trying to beautify the neighborhood. It turned out that he wasn’t alone. There were already other guerrilla gardeners in London.

Since then, he has helped guerrilla gardeners in Libya, Berlin and Montreal. His book, On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries describes activities in 30 different countries. You can check out some of the community in their online forum. They also have their own YouTube channel.

If guerrilla gardening doesn’t sound radical enough to you, you might enjoy activities like seed bombing. It’s a technique to attack those hard to reach public spaces and bomb them with seeds. Get some information and watch a how-to video with Richard Reynolds on how to make them and use them.

Books about guerrilla gardening

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Being Mindful In The Garden

April 19, 2009 at 11:43 pm (Do It, Think About It)
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Theologian Vigen Guroian practices his theology in his garden as richly as in a church.

I heard him speak on the radio and the host said that Guroian describes early spring, the time of Lent, as “the pruning, the mess, the clearing away that prepares him and his soil to receive the gift.”

He also considers the ancient, organic connections between many religious holidays of this time of year and nature’s own very real cycles of fertility, decay, and regeneration.

This is from his essay “On Leaving the Garden” from his book  The Fragrance of God

“I have said on occasion that I think gardening is nearer to godliness than theology. … True gardeners are both iconographers and theologians insofar as these activities are the fruit of prayer ‘without ceasing’… Likewise, true gardeners never cease to garden, not even in their sleep, because gardening is not just something they do. It is how they live.”

He explains that (By “theology” he means the kind of formal written discourse “that my special guild of academic theologians does, and not the praise of God and communion with divine life that ought to inspire theology at its core.”

Elsewhere in that book, he tells an ancient Armenian tale about what happened to Adam and Eve when they were driven from the Garden of Eden:

After Adam and Eve were beguiled by the serpent and ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree, God commanded his angels to remove them from the Garden, and to guard the paths to it with a fiery sword. And so Adam and his wife were banished from the Garden and its light and abundant life and entered a place of darkness and gloom. They remained there in misery for six days, without anything to eat and no shelter. They wept inconsolably over what they had lost and where they were sent.

But on the seventh day, God took pity on the couple. He sent an angel who removed them from the dark place and led them into this bright world. The messenger showed them trees from which they could eat and satisfy their hunger. And when Adam and Eve saw the light and felt the warmth of this world, they rejoiced with exceeding gladness, saying, “Even though this place cannot compare with the home we have lost and its light is not nearly as bright or its fruit half as sweet, nevertheless, we are no longer in the darkness and can go on living.” So they were cheerful.

There is something of being a creator in planning and caring for a garden. Perhaps, to the religious, it is done in the image of  God. I don’t find that to be something I think about myself.  I have come to see the garden as partly out of my control and partly something I am striving to control.

My favorite time is just after planting when the soil is raked and weedless and all the plants are fresh and green. It’s as close to perfect as my garden will ever be. Yes, when the flowers comes and the plants bear fruits and vegetables is also a very good time.

When it is late summer and things are overgrown and I get lazy with the weeding and plants start to yellow and wither, it is an early reminder that the end is nearing. There is very little I can do to slow down the process – nothing I can do to stop it.

“The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden.”
- Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

It is no surprise to me that there are so many books on Zen and gardening because it actually somewhat difficult to be mindless in the garden and rather easier to be mindful. I don’t mean “Zen gardens” which, for all their serenity and beauty, seem to me to be lifeless, solitary and almost sad.

If you’ve ever explored meditation, you have heard the term “mindfulness” as it is used by Eastern philosophers.  Perhaps it is because I have never master meditation to any high level, that I feel I can get the benefits of meditation by focusing all my attention on what I am doing (acting mindfully) in some ordinary tasks. I can do it while cleaning or cutting the lawn, but it seems more intense in the garden whether I am planting, weeding or gently plucking off dead leaves and aerating the soil.

I know my experience is not unique. I would be interested to hear of anyone who has “formalized” the practice on their own  (not in an organized group or at a monastery, for example).

TWO BOOKS BY GUROIAN

Listen to the radio program  Restoring the Senses: Life, Gardening, and an Orthodox Easter with Vigen Guroian (mp3, 53:09)

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Nature’s Calendar

April 19, 2009 at 6:19 am (Do It, See It)
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I have been following signs in my local area for a lot of years of nature telling me that it was time to plant in my garden. It is something you have to do locally, so my dates probably apply to New Jersey and this area in some cases, and only specifically to my own square mile in other cases. In fact, sometimes they seem to apply only to my own backyard.

For example, the daffodils I have planted in the garden bloomed five days later than several houses around the block – probably due to the amount of sun they receive.

I have kept a kind of nature calendar for a bunch of years. March 25 – piping plovers return to NJ (prune evergreens; turn compost; sow peas and spinach) April 26 – bluefish run usually begins. April 29 – first piping plover nests on Jersey beaches. You get the idea.

For centuries farmers, naturalists, and scientists have kept records of the patterns of plants and animals and used the information to predict the best time for planting and harvesting crops and when to start expecting problems with insect pests.

There are other “citizen scientists” out there. You can join thousands of others in gathering environmental and climate change information from across the country in a program called Project BudBurst.

It asks you to make careful observations of the phenophases in your area such as first leafing, first flower, and first fruit ripening of a diversity of trees, shrubs, flowers, and grasses. What is really important is to observe the first day of the appropriate phenophase (like the first flower).

Phenology (which I had never heard of, even though I was doing it) is the study of the timing of life cycle events like leafing, budding, and blooming in plants.

What makes it more important of late is that the timing of phenological events of many species has changed recently as a result of changing temperatures and rainfall patterns. The average global temperature increased by 0.6°C ( 1.0°F) during the 20th century. The temperature is predicted to rise with another 1.8 to 4.0°C ( 3.2 to 7.2°F) in the 21st century. That probably seems like pretty small variations, but at the global scale it can have dramatic effects on the environment.

It’s the kind of data that leads most scientists to believe that this will cause the sea level to rise with 10 to 89 cm (4 to 35 inches) during this century.

Climate change has the largest effect on plants because, unlike many animals, they cannot move easily from one area to another.

The results might be that the growing season could start earlier or continue over a longer period of time. In my part of north NJ, the official last frost date is May 15, but I have been keeping track myself and a May frost has been the exception for my little microclimate in he past 20 years.

So, watching for the phases of the plant life cycle (phenophases) causes you to be very mindful of things like temperature, rainfall and day length. Monitoring changes in events such as first bud, budburst, and flowering, can help scientists detect climate change.

If you volunteer to take part in Project BudBurst, you track climate change by recording the timing of flowers and foliage. The project started as a pilot program in 2007 operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the Chicago Botanic Garden, and the University of Montana. They are collecting thousands of observations from students, gardeners, and others to give researchers a more detailed picture of our warming climate. It’s crowdsourcing data collection.

Looking at data from 2007 and 2008 gives a baseline for the timing of key plant events. 4,861 observations were reported online in 2008 from participants in every state except Hawaii.

There’s lots of information on the project site and at the links below, but here are some basics:

  • Each participant in Project BudBurst selects one or more plants to observe. (The project website suggests more than 75 widely distributed trees and flowers, with information on each and you can add your own choices.)
  • You start by checking your plants at least a week prior to the average date of budburst–the point when the buds have opened and leaves are visible.
  • After budburst, you continue to observe the tree or flower for later events, such as seed dispersal.
  • When you submit records online, you can view maps of these phenophases across the United States.

One category is “Deciduous Trees and Shrubs” (as opposed to evergreens). The Project lists 28 deciduous trees and shrubs that are easy to identify and widespread across the continental United States. You can get a printable identification guide and phenophase field guide online with pictures, identifying characteristics, and plant specific phenophase descriptions. One that I did this spring is the Forsythia (Forsythia xintermedia).

white clover

white clover

When white clover (Trifolium repens) pops up in my lawn, maybe I won’t spray it, but observe it.  Did you know that it is in the plant family of the pea or legume (Fabaceae)?  Trifolium repens, like other members of the pea family, fix nitrogen. This makes clover an important agricultural and rangeland plant—by planting it with grasses it is possible to increase the grass yield. Clover leaves and flowers are also good forage for wildlife, such as moose, grizzly bear, white-tailed deer, and blue grouse. Clover is used widely by bees to produce honey.

I like both the scientific side of this, and being mindful of the natural world around you. I recommend you taking up this in your own little part of the world. You can certainly do it for yourself, but sharing the information with the Project really adds another level of awareness.

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The Spring Full Moon

April 9, 2009 at 12:09 am (Full Moons, See It, Think About It)
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The April full moon (tonight) is often called the Full Pink Moon.

It is a name taken from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the early flowers of the spring that is commonly found. One of our most easily recognized spring wildflowers, Wild Blue Phlox produces slightly fragrant, five-petaled blue flowers which bloom profusely on one foot stems. It grows like a ground cover in woodland shade. In gardens, it is used as an underplanting for larger, summer blooming plants.

Continuing with signs of spring from nature, other names for this moon are the Full Sprouting Grass Moon and Seed Moon.

The Egg Moon – the full moon before Easter – is another name associated with the first moon after March 21. With the longer days, hens are laying more eggs. At least on the old-fashioned family farm (not on factory farms that artificially alter the days and nights), hens lay fewer eggs during the winter when days are short.

Many bird species also lay their eggs in the early spring, so that the young have the longest possible time to prepare for winter and migrations.

Eggs have long been a symbol of spring, regeneration, rebirth.

The ancient Persians painted eggs for Nowrooz, their New Year celebration, which falls on the Spring equinox. Sculptures on the walls of Persepolis show people carrying eggs for Nowrooz to the king.

At the Jewish Passover Seder, a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water symbolizes the Passover sacrifice offered at the Temple in Jerusalem.

The pre-Christian Saxons had a spring goddess called Eostre, whose feast was held on the Vernal Equinox, around 21 March. Her animal was the spring hare (rabbit), so some believe that Eostre’s association with eggs and hares, combined with the rebirth of the land in spring was adapted for the Christian Easter.

Native American tribes along the coast called it the Full Fish Moon because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.

American Shad Alosa sapidissima

American Shad Alosa sapidissima

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Mike Wallace Interviews

April 5, 2009 at 11:55 pm (Hear It, See It, Think About It)
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There is a great collection of old TV interviews now available online that were done by Mike Wallace in the late 1950s.  The Mike Wallace Interview ran from 1957 to 1960, but this collection held by the Ransom Center only has interviews from 1957 and 1958.

Wallace donated these materials to the Ransom Center. The 65 recordings are mostly kinescopes (films of the program made by filming a television monitor). Wallace also donated the related materials, including his prepared questions, research material, and correspondence.

I watched (at times, I just listened to them while I was working online) the ones with Steve Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Tony Perkins, Salvador Dali, Reinhold Niebuhr, Aldous Huxley, Erich Fromm, and Ayn Rand. They are amazingly intelligent conversations.

As an example, the interview with Aldous Huxley from May 1958 presents Huxley as social critic and author of Brave New World.  They talk about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.   You can watch the video and read the transcript.

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Seven Deadly Sins 2.0

April 4, 2009 at 12:37 am (Think About It)
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It is said that Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) considered the seven deadly sins to be:

  1. Wealth without works
  2. Pleasure without conscience
  3. Knowledge without character
  4. Commerce without morality
  5. Science without humanity
  6. Worship without sacrifice
  7. Politics without principle

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