Shelvock Mark, Kinsella Elizabeth Anne, Harris Darcy
Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Illn Crises Loss. 2022 Oct;30(4):640-658. doi: 10.1177/10541373211006882. Epub 2021 Apr 7.
One less explored area of research concerns the response to the ecological crisis through environmentally sustainable death practices, which we broadly define in this paper as 'green death practices'. In this paper, interdisciplinary research and scholarship are utilized to critically analyze death practices, and to demonstrate how contemporary Westernized death practices such as embalming, traditional burial, and cremation can have harmful environmental and public health implications. This paper also investigates the multi-billion-dollar funeral industry, and how death systems which place economic growth over human wellbeing can be socially exploitative, oppressive, and marginalizing towards recently bereaved persons and the environment. Death-care as corporatized care is explicitly questioned, and the paper provides a new social vision for death systems in industrialized Western societies. Ultimately, the paper advocates for how green death practices may offer new pathways for honoring our relationships to the planet, other human beings, and even our own deepest values.
一个较少被探索的研究领域涉及通过环境可持续的死亡方式应对生态危机，我们在本文中将其宽泛地定义为“绿色死亡方式”。本文运用跨学科研究和学术方法，对死亡方式进行批判性分析，并论证诸如防腐处理、传统土葬和火葬等当代西方化死亡方式如何会对环境和公众健康产生有害影响。本文还研究了价值数十亿美元的殡葬业，以及那些将经济增长置于人类福祉之上的死亡体系如何会对新近丧亲者和环境造成社会剥削、压迫和边缘化。作为企业化照料的死亡护理受到明确质疑，本文为西方工业化社会的死亡体系提供了一种新的社会愿景。最终，本文倡导绿色死亡方式如何可能为尊重我们与地球、他人乃至我们自身最深层价值观的关系提供新途径。
