This Is A Thing In Which I Am Very Interested

I’ve even made plans, presuming some of this becomes legal in the next 10 years where I live. I have high hopes for sky burials and terramation, at least those are my 2 favorites.) I have links to more info, but this is good for some who maybe haven’t thought of this aspect of the circle of life.

Think Outside the Coffin: Green Burials Gain Popularity

Green burials have been gaining favor for nearly 30 years, offering an eco-friendly way to say goodbye.

Chi Sherman

As Ben Franklin once said, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” While the subject of taxes may be unpleasant, conversations about death don’t have to be.

“Most families are close enough to know what their loved ones want, [but] a lot of people don’t learn about death care until a loved one dies,” says B. Milton, a retired death care industry professional in Indiana. End-of-life discussions can be uncomfortable to broach — a lot of people don’t pre-plan, according to Milton — but having direction for your post-life care allows for peace of mind, both emotionally and financially.

As most people know, conventional burials — those that include options like a viewing, a funeral service, and burial in a casket — can be very expensive. The national median cost of a funeral with a burial in 2023 was $8,300, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Caskets alone can cost thousands of dollars. Of course, the sentiment is wonderful; there is a true gift in being able to choose a beautiful vessel as a loved one’s final resting place. A growing number of people, however, prefer to keep funeral costs lower and more eco-friendly with green burial options, including burial shrouds, terramation, and aquamation.

Burial Shrouds

“Green burials are in their infancy,” says Russ Burns, director of All Saints Cemetery and The Preserve, a natural burial site in Michigan. “In 20 to 30 years, they’ll be up there with traditional burials,” noting that customers interested in green burial are well-informed and concerned less about themselves post-mortem and more about how the area where they will be interred will remain green.

A cenotaph wall at The Preserve. The wall is a collection of rocks engraved with names of those buried on the property. It offers a physical place for family and friends to visit their loved ones as graves are inaccessible after the burial service. (Image courtesy of Mt. Elliott Cemeteries)

The use of a burial shroud is simple: The deceased is placed in a shroud made of a biodegradable material like canvas and committed to the earth about three feet underground. The shallower depth allows for more oxygen flow than the standard six-foot depth for coffins, which helps the body decompose and return to the soil. The process takes about a year and costs, at the lower end, around $1,800.

Burns cautions customers to do their research and make sure they work with an organization that is fully funded and has “more than good intentions.” Following burial, the land continues to require maintenance you would expect, like mowing and landscaping, but may also need an environmental impact study or a controlled burn to get rid of invasive plant species.

Terramation

Terramation, to put it simply, is human composting. If you’ve ever joked about having a green thumb, now you can have green everything and quite literally be turned into soil.

The first stage of terramation takes about a month. The deceased is placed in a vessel and covered in organic materials like straw, alfalfa, and wood chips. Families who attend the preparation of the body also known as a laying-in ceremony — sometimes bring garden clippings and assist in the process. The vessel is then closed and stored while microbes break the body down to roughly one cubic yard (or several hundred pounds) of soil. The material is examined for any remaining organic matter like bone or non-organic matter like surgical implants and then left to cure. Before being released to the family, the soil must pass safe compost regulations, including tests for the presence of arsenic or lead.

The process of composting people has only been around for about 10 years and is currently legal in 12 states, including Minnesota, Arizona, California, Colorado, New York, and Washington state. Cost can range from $5,000 to $7,000. In the video below, mortician and green death advocate Caitlin Doughty chats with Katrina Spade, the founder and CEO of Recompose, a green funeral home near Seattle that specializes in terramation.

(snip-some MORE)

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2025/04/think-outside-the-coffin-green-burials-gain-popularity

Two From Werd.io: About An EV, And More

The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen

[Tim Stevens at The Verge]

It’s rare these days that I see a new product and think, this is really cool, but seriously, this is really cool:

“Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.”

So far, so bland, but it’s designed to be customized. So while it doesn’t itself come with a screen, or, you know, paint, you can add one yourself, wrap it in whatever color you want, and pick from a bunch of aftermarket devices to soup it up. It’s the IBM PC approach to electric vehicles instead of the highly-curated Apple approach. I’m into it, with one caveat: I want to hear more about how safe it is.

It sounds like that might be okay:

“Slate’s head of engineering, Eric Keipper, says they’re targeting a 5-Star Safety Rating from the federal government’s New Car Assessment Program. Slate is also aiming for a Top Safety Pick from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.”

I want more of this. EVs are often twice the price or more, keeping them out of reach of regular people. I’ve driven one for several years, and they’re genuinely better cars: more performant, easier to maintain, with a smaller environmental footprint. Bringing the price down while increasing the number of options feels like an exciting way to shake up the market, and exactly the kind of thing I’d want to buy into.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating – so let’s see what happens when it hits the road next year.

#Technology

[Link]

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Trump ‘Alarmists’ Were Right. We Should Say So.

[Toby Buckle at LiberalCurrents]

This resonates for me too.

About the Tea Party, the direction the Republican Party took during the Obama administration, and then of Trump first riding down the escalator to announce his candidacy:

“If you saw in any of this a threat to liberal democracy writ large, much less one that could actually succeed, you were looked at with the kind of caution usually reserved for the guy screaming about aliens on the subway.”

And yet, of course, it got a lot worse.

The proposal here is simple:

“I propose we promote a simple rule for these uncertain times: Those who saw the danger coming should be listened to, those who dismissed us should be dismissed. Which is to say that those of us who were right should actively highlight that fact as part of our argument for our perspective. People just starting to pay attention now will not have the bandwidth to parse a dozen frameworks, or work backwards through a decade of bitter tit-for-tat arguments. What they might ask—what would be very sensible and reasonable of them to ask—is who saw this coming?”

Because you could see it coming, and it was even easy to see, if you shook yourself out of a complacent view that America’s institutions were impermeable, that its ideals were real and enduring, and that there was no way to overcome the norms, checks, and balances that had been in place for generations.

What this piece doesn’t quite mention but is also worth talking about: there are communities for whom those norms, checks, and balances have never worked, and they were sounding the alarm more clearly than anyone else. They could see it. Of course they could see it. So it’s not just about listening to leftists and activists and people who have been considered to be on the political fringe, but also people of color, queer communities, and the historically oppressed. They know this all rather well.

#Democracy

[Link]

“Open Windows” and Clay Jones

Slapshot by Clay Jones

That ship’s gonna sink Read on Substack

If they weren’t so pathetic, you might could possibly be sad for some MAGAts. Take Juanita Broaddrick as an example, whose entire national profile is built upon debunked claims she was raped by Bill Clinton in the 1970s and who is now a full-fledged lying MAGAt.

After Canada’s Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre distanced himself from Donald Trump, Broaddrick claimed he would lose the election because Canada loved Trump so much, which didn’t make any sense.

If Canadians loved Trump so much, then why did they just elect Liberal Mark Carney to become their new Prime Minister? That’s like denying Trump’s current favorability numbers. They suck.

There’s also the fact that Trump lost this election for the Conservatives. The Conservatives were ahead by double digits when Trump entered office last January, then he started barking at Canada, waged a tariff war, and repeatedly insulted them by claiming they should be America’s 51st state.

If Donald Trump had kept his mouth shut and had waited at least 100 days for his stupid tariff war, Poilievre would be Prime Minister today.

Yesterday, thanks to Donald Trump, Canadian Liberals won. Trump is now internationally toxic. Everything Trump touches…dies. Super Bowl champion running back Sequon Barkley played golf with Trump a few days ago, and now I expect his knees to give out during the preseason. Trump is poison. I would tell you to ask Elon, but he hasn’t figured it out yet.

Pierre didn’t just lose his race for Prime Minister, he also lost his seat in parliament. (snip-MORE)

A four-year old cancer patient deported by Ann Telnaes

The boy and his sister, both U.S. citizens, were deported to Honduras with their undocumented mother Read on Substack

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/28/us_citizen_children_expelled_from_country

This Is Beautiful-

go see the entire post! 🐙

Octopus – enshrouded

“Mighty Monarch”

Western Kingbird

Peace & Justice History For 4/26

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april26

Peace & Justice History for 4/23

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april23

Mothers For Peace, Earth Day, and More in Peace & Justice History for 4/21

A Multi-Post

of some stuff I ran across yesterday.

Let’s All Watch Liz Warren Tariffsplain To Inattentive Dunderhead On CNBC by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Ma’am, you need to use your listening skills. Read on Substack

Snippet-go read this, the videos are delightful- Sen. Prof. Warren remains outstanding!

Professor Senator Elizabeth Warren stopped by CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday for some chattin’ and some rantin’ and some tarriffsplainin’ for the benefit of the show’s blow-dried hosts. We don’t normally watch financial news shows, because what are we, the Vanderbilts? But put Warren on anytime, and we’ll consider tuning in more. She can be entertaining!

Especially if your anchor isn’t following her argument, which sends her into her professorial did-you-not-do-the-reading voice. Which is what happened to Sara Eisen, who must have thought for one moment that she was back at the Medill School and had skipped that week’s assignment. (snip)

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Not to pick up the is-it-blue-or-green thing again, but-

Scientists Learned How to Trick Our Eyes Into Seeing an Entirely New Color

By stimulating thousands of individual cone cells, researchers made volunteers see a blue-green color of “unprecedented saturation.”

By Ed Cara Published April 18, 2025

**Olo apparently looks like blue-green, but with the saturation turned way up.** © 9gifts via Shutterstock

Black Mirror, eat your heart out. Researchers have apparently just figured out how to make people see a color completely new to humanity.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley conducted the research, published Friday in Science Advances. Using a technique called Oz, the research team induced human volunteers into seeing a color beyond the “natural human gamut.” Oz could allow scientists to conduct experiments previously not possible before, the authors say, and the lessons we learn from it might even someday help color-blind people regain their missing color vision.

Our retinas contain certain photoreceptive cells, known as cones, that allow us to see color. There are three cone types that correspond to different wavelengths of light: short-wavelength (S) cones, medium-wavelength (M) cones, and long-wavelength (L) cones.

Typically, when we try to reproduce color in front of someone’s eyes, we do so by manipulating the spectrum of light seen by the retina’s cones. But since some of our cones, particularly M cones, share overlap in how they respond to certain wavelengths, there are theoretically colors out there that our eyes can never truly see. The UC Berkeley researchers, based on their earlier work studying cone cells, say they’ve found a way around this limitation. (snip)

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South Africa’s Ambitious Renewable Energy Masterplan involves Solar Manufacturing

The Conversation 04/19/2025

By Ricardo Amansure, Stellenbosch University

(The Conversation) – About 85% of South Africa’s electricity is produced by burning coal. The country’s move to renewable energy means that the coal industry will be phased out. To this end, the South African cabinet recently approved the country’s first renewable energy masterplan, which sets out what’s needed to establish new renewable energy industries. Ricardo Amansure of the Centre for Sustainability Transitions researches the move towards renewable energy and how communities can benefit from this. He explains what the masterplan aims to achieve, what problems it might face, and how it can succeed.

What is the South African Renewable Energy Masterplan?

It is an industrial strategy that sets out how South Africa can set up a new manufacturing industry in renewable energy and battery storage value chains.

The masterplan was developed by the government, some sections of organised labour, a non-profit organisation advocating for renewable energy, and representatives of the renewable energy industries. It sets out a framework to produce renewable technologies locally. These include solar photovoltaic panels, wind turbines and batteries.

The masterplan has been drawn up so that it aligns with South Africa’s existing national target of adding 3–5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity each year to 2030. This is a scale that can support the development of local manufacturing hubs. (One gigawatt can supply electricity to about 700,000 average homes.) This steady supply will be enough to give businesses and investors the confidence to commit to long-term investments in local manufacturing hubs. These are zones where renewable systems and components are produced or assembled for domestic and export markets.

The state-owned electricity company, Eskom, has not directly guaranteed that it will buy 3-5 gigawatts of renewable energy each year. But the government’s national electricity plan (the Integrated Resource Plan) provides a strong indication of future demand. (snip)