A California Startup Is Using Ashes to Protect Forests | Hacker News Reader

A California Startup Is Using Ashes to Protect Forests

smithsonianmag.com

56 pointsMz17 comments

Clever! They have bought land and are selling "plots" where one's ashes can be scattered. The idea is that these forests will be protected by the combination of private ownership and legal protections for cemeteries.

That really is a genius idea.

Are ashes as good an idea as just the full body? Even if we are turned off by the idea, if full body decomposition is more productive for a forest than ashes, lets do that!

I'd be down for a full tree growing out from my unburnt remains if it was more useful to the forest.

There can be a lot of issues dealing with a full body. If you're burying it, you're going to be disturbing the soil possibly around existing trees because people will want to be buried next to Giant trees. Unfortunately that's going to cause root system damage and a lot of those large trees actually have very shallow root systems.

You can't just leave bodies on the surface because then you have all sorts of complications when people stumble across them. Even tagging or otherwise identifying left bodies has its own set of issues such as becoming an ideal way to dispose of a body - most likely it would be pretty easy to forge whatever identification would be left, and who's going to be making a practice of checking the papers of all the dead bodies found in the woods?

Edit: forgot to factor in souvenir hunters who might want to collect whatever kind of durable token might be left in & around bodies left this way. Basically, what was practical 150+ years ago no longer is.

My read of the article was that protect was more in the 'protect the forest against human deforestation via legal means', not 'offer protection against fire or add to the biodiversity'.

One of the issues is transportation. Prior to the American Civil War, most people were just buried, without a coffin -- because they were buried locally, not long after death. The Civil War introduced the need to preserve bodies in order to ship them home. Embalming and coffins became common place.

Even if you are avoiding embalming and coffins, if you want your body disposed of in a forest like this, it somehow needs to be shipped. Burning the body locally and then shipping the ashes is a good alternative (to embalming and coffins).

The article has some stats. Cremation is about half the environmental impact of current practices. When you then add in the ability to help protect a forest with your burial plot, it seems like it would add up significantly.

Metal lyrics idea:

I OFFER MY ROTTING REMAINS AS A GIFT TO TO THE FOREST FROM MY UNBURNT BODY COME FORTH A SAPPLING

Would work really well as a Melodic Blackened Folk Doom metal song

I'm actually surprised at the down votes :( and I take HN karma too seriously

Best would be to pyrolyze the body to produce biochar. (Basically, heat without oxygen, the same way charcoal is made.) The carbon so produced is sequestered for thousands of years, and will contribute to soil health the entire time.

I think this is a clever strategy for preserving forests. It also provides for a cemetary that can be used essentially forever which is also a good thing as tying up land in cemeteries can cause its own problems. Focusing on cremation works well too as disbursing the cremains around can be done again and again even on the same spot, not so easily with full body burial.

That said, there is nothing preventing someone from buying a few dozen acres in the Sierras making an actual forest cemetery (where the headstone is a tree). As long as plots were separated by 10' you could make bury someone and then at one end plant a sapling (its root ball being about 2' in diameter). That would be large enough to have a high chance of survival, but small enough that it would clearly be a 'new' tree.

Hah! I'll have to show this to my wife. She already knows to spread my ashes in the California Redwoods. Now maybe we can protect them as well.

So now spreading ones ashes costs money. That is hilarious.

Catholics have to bury their ashes in a cemetery which requires a non-biodegradable urn. It costs a lot of money.

Ridiculous they don't want you to spread your ashes.

This is fantastic.

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