For most normal people, funerary concerns are primarily about memorializing the deceased within the reasonable bounds of one’s budget. Peterson’s video notes that, in this strange race to the environmental bottom, some advocates believe burying Aunt Lisa in a casket is an alarming degradation of the environment — some might even want her tossed straight into the ground. Maybe, he suggests, readers could consider “freezing [their bodies] with liquid nitrogen or having [their] ashes turned into a coral reef.” It’s an odd calculus at play in the author’s mind, where the ultimate barometer of a funeral’s efficacy is its environmental impact statement.
It’s totally legitimate to criticize modern burials; on its face, the piece seems a cogent critique of excesses in the funeral industry. But what is particularly troubling about Vox’s article is its larger point — that we as humans must give perpetual deference to some vague conception of “environmentalism” at most any cost. As the oft-repeated refrain goes, is environmentalist hysteria the inevitable fate of a society that ceases to believe in God? When organized religion fades and its would-be adherents are left to search for meaning, does the god of the environment end their search for a moral authority?
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