Show Summary:
What makes a green burial…green? And what exactly is embalming fluid? Can you drink it? Joe Sehee, founder of the Green Burial Council, answers those questions and how cemeteries can operate in an environmentally conscious way. Note: This is Part One of a two part interview.
New from Brant Huddleston
Show Details
You pick up a bottle of laundry detergent at the grocery store, and it’s labeled “green” and is twice the price of regular detergent. But is it really safer for the environment? Often we just don’t know. Well it turns out green standards for the funeral industry are just as murky and unregulated, and there are some who will sell you and an expensive green funeral that really isn’t…a practice called “greenwashing.” My guest, Joe Sehee, believes consumers should have access to objective information, so he founded the Green Burial Council, which established rigorous green standards for cemeteries who truly want to operate in an environmentally conscious way.
Today the GBC, an international organization, protects consumers like you and me from greenwashing and gives legitimate green cemetery operators an opportunity to voluntarily become GBC certified, which many have. I caught up with Joe in Australia where he and his family live. Joe starts our time together by taking us on a virtual tour of a natural cemetery, and wrap up with a lively discussion about embalming fluid. Salute!
In this episode you will learn about:
- “The Sunflower Forest” by William Jordan, who coined the term “Restoration Ecology”
- “Dying Green,” a film by Ellen Tripler
- The Ramsey Creek Preserve, founded by Dr. Billy Campbell and his wife Kimberley Campbell, is the first conservation burial ground in the United States
- End of Life Revolution brought on by Baby Boomers
- Why we have burial vaults (Hint: It isn’t to thwart grave robbing)
- Conservation Burial, a new initiative by Joe Sehee
- Natural body preparation
- Memorial reef balls
- Greenwashing
- World Health Organization Report on The Impact of Cemeteries on the Environment and Public Health
- Formaldehyde is biodegradable
- 2010 JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute on the effects of formaldehyde on funeral workers
- What goes into embalming fluid
Other "Green" Shows that Might Interest You
- A Natural, Earth Friendly Way to Come Back as a Tree, with Bios Urn Co-Inventor Roger Moline Navarro
- Where, How and Why to Choose a Green Burial with Ann Hoffner, author of "The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide: A State-by-State Guide. (in two parts)
- Going Out Green with Jeff Jorgenson, Director of Elemental NW ~ Seattle’s first and only all green funeral home
- As Below, So Above, with Joe Sehee, Founder of the Green Burial Council (in two parts)
- From Earth to Earth ~ Respectfully Composting Human Remains, with Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak, Founder of Promessa (in two parts)
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
