LAUSR

Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth prompts its readers consider the environmental toll of human disposal practices. This book reflects the author’s own academic interests in environmental ethics, feminism and death, in which Kelly argues for an earth-based ethic of human death and endorses the natural burial movement in North America and beyond. Kelly herself sits on the committee for the Town of Rhinebeck Natural Burial Ground, located very close to her home in New York’s Hudson valley. Taking an ecological approach inspired by scholars and thinkers aligned with environmental and feminist ethics (David Abram, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Rachel Carson, Thomas Berry, Aldo Leopold, amongst many others), Kelly offers readers a potted history of the American funeral industry to repeatedly and eloquently argue that it is paramount North Americans let decay have its place in human mortuary practices in order to foster a sustainable future on earth. She begins her thought-provoking book with a quote from Rebecca Solnit: ‘The process of transformation consists mostly of decay’, establishing the intellectual focus of the book and her main environmental concern; decay (and its place in human cultures of death). As an environmental activist, she advocates that Americans ‘wake up’ and attend to ‘greening’ death by revaluing the place of decay in their experiences of death and funerary rites. Developing the intellectual work begun by Plumwood in her superb essay Tasteless (2008), Kelly rises to the philosophical and ethical challenge of going beyond nature/culture dualism in the context of death by arguing we should remove the cultural taboo imposed on decay and make our deaths matter for the sustainability of earth and for the nonhuman food chain. In the crescendo to her polemic – ‘Wrath of the Corpse’ – Kelly considers: ‘There was a time before all this. A time before human decay was robbed of its own sense and purpose – before the perfect storm of practices wiped a dead body that mattered to nature’. Kelly hopes that the American green burial movement will facilitate some of us celebrating decay and decomposition; a hope also articulated by my research participants who support natural burial in Britain (see Clayden, Green, Hockey, & Powell, 2015; Davies & Rumble, 2012). Kelly’s contribution goes beyond many ‘popular’ books written about the ‘American Way’ of death and its perceived environmental shortcomings, because Kelly – as a scholar and positioned activist – makes suggestions for how to cultivate and practice an earth-based ethic of human disposal that includes disenfranchised human communities (mostly living in urban America); an invaluable contribution to death studies and fostering the future of the green burial movement. Nevertheless, a limitation of the book, is that it solely speaks to and for the experiences and values of North Americans, but what of cremation cultures or those societies who do not embalm? How to accommodate them in Kelly’s impassioned agenda for reclaiming our relationships with a more-than-human world through our funerary practices?