Hindu Wins Northumberland Funeral Pyre Battle
BBC News (February 10, 2010)
Hindu Man Wins Court Battle for Open-Air Cremation Pyre
Matthew Taylor The Guardian (February 10, 2010)
It has been a big week for cremation in the UK. On Wednesday, Davender Ghai, a 71-year old Hindu man from Newcastle won a landmark court case on Appeal. The Ghai case [...]
Aussie Undertakers Turn Funeral Business on Its Head… by Offering to Bury People Upright
Foreign News Service, Daily Mail Online (December 7, 2009)
Just when you thought there were enough options for final disposition, a company in Melbourne, Australia, invents a trolley that will cart around a corpse then deposit it vertically with minimal blunder into [...]
To Casket Or Not To Casket? One Of America’s Great Field Biologists Thinks About Burial
Robert Krulwich, NPR (October 9, 2009)
NPR science reporter Robert Krulwich (also of RadioLab fame) did this short piece (it’s a little over five minutes long) on the decomposition of dead animal bodies and their consumption by beetles. He interviews Professor Bernd [...]
Cow Dung Cremations Catch On in Bihar
Amarnath Tewary, BBC News (September 27, 2009)
Ongoing floods and a subsequent depletion of mango trees, the traditional cremation fuel for the people of Bihar, India, has led to the use of cow dung in funeral pyres. Readily available and culturally acceptable (coming from a sacred animal, and all), [...]
Body Heat
The Economist (August 6, 2009)
Let us all say it together: Reduce – Reuse – Recycle. Now add: Dead bodies. It’s true. Shocking, but true.
A strong case can be made that organ donation, for example, is the noblest form of cadaveric recycling and that the reuse of human organs and tissues to extend life [...]