Facebook and Green Burials

I love Facebook, especial the Short Reels. I watch them an hour and to an hour and a half every day. I suspect I'm addicted to them so I've resorted to setting a timer to limit my time. I don't feel guilty about spending time this way, however, because I learn things and often I get my post inspirations from the site. One of the most useful things I've learned is to never 'like' something on Facebook unless you want to see a gazillion of similar short videos and/or advertisements. I do follow certain people, though, to make sure I don't miss something they put online: Jon Steward, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, The Good News Girl, and the Texas Beeworks girl are all people I follow for predictable content. 

In addition to these celebrities I follow some zoos for content about silverback gorillas, panda bears, sloths and elephants. I also follow or subscribe to Facebook sites about the following topics: Tiny Houses, Unique Trees, Lost Pets, Mid-Century Modern and Atomic Mid-Century Modern decor, cute puppies and kittens, Mahjong and freeing wild animals caught in dangerous situations. Currently I'm fascinated by the turtle pictured above who runs around on a skateboard tormenting the cat that I've actually seen helping the turtle get on his tiny skateboard. As my husband would have phrased it, "That little guy can really haul ass with those wheels under him!" As a kid I spent my summers at a lake so it's probably a sentimental thing, a throwback to when I had baby turtles as pets, that makes the turtles on skateboards so endearing.

I've seen giant tortoises, too, on what I thought had to be custom made skateboards. But I decided to fact check myself before I made that claim and I was shocked to find lots of sources for "Pet Skateboards" and as cheap as seven bucks. There are photos of birds, turtles, bearded dragons, small tortoises, cats, dogs and pigs acting as catalog models for the boards. You can even buy harnesses that go around the boards and your turtles so you can walk them on a leash like a dog. Please do an intervention for me if I start talking about getting a turtle as a pet. Wouldn't I be the talk of my independent living complex if I start walking a turtle? I did do a wee bit of research and learned I'd need at least a 29 gallon aquatic turtle aquarium for a smallish turtle and the water has to be changed weekly. That leaves me out because I can barely lift my gallon watering can to maintain the plants on my deck. 

Still, I miss having a dog. I'd had one in my life from birth to when Levi died a few months before moving here to independent living. Long time readers might remember when I researched getting a cage of canaries and I decided against the idea. There are seven dogs and five cats living here now so I do get to pet a dog almost daily, but I don't think I could find two people who'd agree to care for a dog if something happened to me which is in a document we have to sign to have a dog or cat living with us, plus we pay a $1,000 deposit. That's one of the disadvantages of not having any children or grandchildren or a big estate where I could hire strangers from the pet trust lawyer here in town to be a dog's guardian. The document makes sense in a place like this where every week someone gets hauled off to the hospital. If that person had a pet, the concierge or security guard would call the pet's guardian to come pick it up for temporary or permanent care depending on the outcome of the medical emergency.

Another one of my current fascinations on Facebook are Neil Degrassee Tyson clips. He's an astrophysicist, author, Noble Prize winner and the host of a National Geographics TV show. Not bad for a man with only 132 IQ, which is notably higher than the average person on the street with sixty-eight percent of us falling between 85 and 115. But Neil's is a far cry from smarty-pants public figures like Bill Gates (IQ 150), Elon Musk (155), Mark Zuckerberg (152) and Sunny Doel's 166. What Tyson has that most of these other guys don’t is an ability to communicate advanced theories and technical stuff to ordinary people in a way that we understand it. 

Recently I saw an interview of Neil's where he was asked what happens to us after we die and they got to talking about 'green burials' which is what Neil wants done with his body. I first heard the term on the Netflix series Six Feet Under and the Green Bureau Council defines them this way: “Green burial is a way of caring for the dead with minimal environmental impact that furthers legitimate ecological aims such as the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and/or preservation of habitat.” What they aren't saying is your body is wrapped in burlap and placed in a shallow grave where the worms and bugs help decompose the body and the open land itself can eventually be reclaimed by nature. 

Neil says he wants this type of burial "so that the energy content contained within it [his body] gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime.” Not for me! I'd rather have the energy left in my dead body go up the smoke stack of a crematorium while its still legal. The National Death Centre says, "one cremation uses as much energy in the form of gas and electricity as a 500-mile car trip and releases a staggering 400 kilos of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, not to mention mercury vapor and other pollutants." 

Everything comes full circle if you give it enough time. I predict that 100 years from now our choices in deposing of our deceased will be between green burials and 'sky burials.' There are fourteen places in my state where green burials are legal now, but when I checked while I was binge watching Six Feet Under there were only a couple of places. So clearly this trend is becoming a real thing. They've got to be considerably cheaper without embalming, a casket, a cement vault or a cemetery marker which might account for the trend more than people being concerned about the environment.

Sky or celestial burials were used by indigenous populations and on every continent on earth dating back thousands of years. (How historians know this would fill an entire post.) Sky burials are still legal in Tibet and parts of India and there is a movement to bring them back as an Eco-friendly choice. A sky burial, in case you don't remember involve a raised platform or a tree and either fire or vultures. Yikes! I'm off to Facebook to find some puppy and kitten videos to replace that image in my head. But I'll leave you with this: If you haven't put your preferences in writing, you should because your next of kin might be a penny-pincher and choose something you (may) or may not like.

Until next Wednesday. ©