ARTICLE
Shiloh Krupar, 2018, “Green Death: Sustainability and the Administration of the Dead,” cultural geographies 25.2, 267-284, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474017732977
ABSTRACT: This article explores changing American death care – the handling of the dead body and its materiality beyond death – in the context of US-based power relations over administration of human remains. The article briefly surveys efforts to make the afterlife of the dead more ‘sustainable’. I argue that this expanding governance entails intensified bioremediation: the reuse and reprocessing of dead bodies/parts, intensified forms of material-biological extraction, and the conversion of afterlife to forms of biovalue beyond death. First, some disposal efforts encourage an economy of body/parts and a utilitarian ethic of ‘no remains’. Accordingly, the afterlife is not ‘the end’ but a renewable material resource and opportunity to economize the body in death and put the dead body to work. Second, a range of practices now reimagine death as an opportunity for personal legacy and redeem the dead body’s decomposition as natural/as part of the natural world. Bioremediation in this case conceptually recuperates death into life so that death is not wasted; instead, the corpse serves as a material input for nature and a vehicle for personal ‘biopresence’. The article then considers some of the paradoxes and costs of greening the dead and outlines future research directions that might advance our understanding of the ways new sustainable disposal and commemorative technologies of the dead entrench racism and impact civil, consumer, and environmental rights. How bodies affect our environments today will impact people and landscapes in years to come. Because US governance of the dead has historically entailed the differential treatment of bodies after life, the article critically reflects on ‘death equity’ issues that operate across the living and the dead. The article concludes by querying how conduct for the dead might advance social justice through a material politics of human remains.