The burial of corpses, generally known as earth or casket burial, has been the most common way of laying the deceased to rest since the 12th century. At that time regulations were also created for this form of burial, and they have not changed appreciably since then. This is so despite the fact that our knowledge has increased enormously over the past 900 years. But our inability to put this knowledge into practice is clearly reflected by our forms of earth/casket burial. To this day the priest or minister says, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," believing he is, in this way, closing the cycle to comfort the next of kin.
One of the decisive things we know today is what oxygen is, something that was not known in the 12th century, and that casket burials constitute a health and environmental problem. This became an acute problem in conjunction with rapid urbanization, primarily in Europe, during the 19th century. In those days the church and its graveyard were usually "in the middle of the village". Villages that quickly grew into cities of millions.
Today we know that there is a biological chain of events for a corpse, that oxygen is directly decisive to its conversion to mulch instead of its slowly rotting, and that there is no oxygen at the depth a casket is buried. By not considering the connections between knowledge and tradition, we subject the deceased to a long and slow rotting process in a casket burial. A fact that we neither want nor dare to think about. Bacteria that live on sulfur cause corpses to rot, over varying time spans depending on the type of soil, and the remaining products follow the ground water until they sooner or later reach the seas where they worsen eutrophication. At the same time as the leach water travels to the seas, a very important resource is affected and in some cases ruined, our drinking water.
Casket burial is an old tradition that, unfortunately, conceals reality from people. Wholesome mulch will not be created when we are buried deep in the earth.
