Beyond the Corporatization of Death Systems: Towards Green Death Practices

Abstract

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.

Impact of Green Process Innovation and Productivity on Sustainability: The Moderating Role of Environmental Awareness

“…It shows the importance of green productivity to sustainability. We must shift the production and productivity of industries to be greener, and ensure reductions in waste, carbon emissions, and other products or industrial wastes through green productivity [110,111].…”

End-of-life doulas: international reflections on a transnational movement

“…Rather than necessarily seeking a consensus, most participants expressed appreciation for open discussion about how to equitably develop the role and services in the context of the increasing entrepreneurialism surrounding dying, death and bereavement within late capitalism and mixed economies of care. 8,21 There was widespread (but not universal) agreement among participants about the benefits of a blended model whereby EOLDs could choose whether to offer their services for a fixed fee, through subsidy, a sliding scale and/or for free.…”