Featured in Uptown Radio/Columbia Radio News Live Broadcast
I served as Senior Editor for this live broadcast, overseeing story selection and scripting, and reported one of the stories in this segment as well.
Reported Piece:
INTRO
New York City is running out of space for the dead. As burial and cremation prices rise, more people are turning to green funeral options. But some of these methods aren’t as green, as cheap – or as simple – as they seem. Reporter Muskaan Shah reports.
SHAH 1
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Green burials are becoming more popular. They don’t use embalming and they rely on no or simple biodegradable caskets. At the green burial section of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, funeral director Amy Cunningham talks about what these burials feel like.
CUNNINGHAM 1
Sometimes butterflies show up, sometimes the birds will cry at a particularly excellent moment and it’s so rewarding as a funeral director to observe people contending with a great loss and managing to find serenity and some kind of uplift through a simple gravesite ceremony that is performed in an earth-friendly way.
SHAH 2 Green burials feel peaceful, and they could also solve New York’s space problem – but only if the land is reused. HK Lee, funeral director at Aeonwoods, talks about how this works.
LEE 1 If a body is buried in a way that it promotes biodegradation, that the body will fully decompose within 10-20 years including the bones and I think that provides an opportunity for us to rethink how we think about conventional burials as a piece of land forever for every single body versus “hey how do we responsibly reuse this land?”
SHAH 3 But in the US, most states don’t allow graves to be reused even if the body fully decomposes. That’s where other green funeral methods come in. Human composting might be a solution.
CUNNINGHAM 2
Composting in urban areas may offer some solutions. That way, we’re just creating luscious, gorgeous, healthy soil that can be placed in all kinds of wooded areas.
SHAH 4 NYS has approved human composting, but nobody has built the facilities – said Funeral Director and owner of Ripple, Caroline Schrank.
SCHRANK 1
The day the bill was signed I must’ve gotten 20 emails from friends and people saying “wow this is legal” and I have to say “well 5 years maybe it will happen”.
SHAH 5 Even this new method comes with complications. It may save land but it also has environmental costs that are not always considered.
LEE 2
In the case of human composting you’re talking about lots of organic matter that needs to be grown, transported, put into the container so it’s really questionable as to when you look at the entire system.
SHAH 6 For many families, green burials are not characterised by the lack of space at all. They’re about values and how the funeral feels. Carrol Cruz learnt that when she helped coordinate her friend’s green burial.
CRUZ 1
It was a beautiful day in June, and the light that was shining through the trees was like a spotlight right on his plot. This was just so holy, so sacred. You also feel like nature is taking some of the burden off of you that day.
SHAH 7 With increasing demand for such funerals, Cunningham says that the business is changing.
CUNNINGHAM 3
If you would’ve asked me that question two years ago, I would’ve said yes, there is resistance. I’m sensing it much less now, I really am.
SHAH 8 As New Yorkers rethink how they want to be remembered, the industry is being forced to rethink how it serves them too.
Muskaan Shah, Columbia Radio News.
