How does honoring the dead impact the environment?

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How should we decide what happens to our bodies when we die? And what implications does that decision have for the living? It’s common to think a burial at a cemetery is the final resting place for a loved one. But as we heard in our last episode, sometimes the need to progress as a society is in direct conflict with the desire to honor the dead. Today, we talk to one of the leaders of the Green Burial Council, funeral director Samuel Perry. His organization advocates and sets standards for “natural” burials, which he calls “the full body burial of the person directly in the ground with only biodegradable materials.” We talk about the practicality of natural burial in Chicago and the very personal and spiritual decisions that add complexity to this corner of the death care industry.

Transcript

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0:32.2	What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curious City.
0:37.4	In our last episode, a Curious City listener asked us why there's a cemetery at O'Hare Airport,
0:43.6	wedged between two runways and a FedEx building.
0:47.2	The reporter on that story, Andrew Meriwether, told us that that cemetery, which is called
0:51.8	Rest Haven, survived an expansion project in O'Hare in the early 2000s.
0:56.9	But another cemetery nearby did not survive. The occupants of that one were moved in 2012,
1:04.3	at great expense to the city and over the objections of the families of those buried there.
1:10.2	This somewhat eerie image of the city exhuming and repatriating bodies
1:14.8	got us thinking about where our bodies go when we die.
1:18.8	And whether a permanent, final resting place is something we can expect
1:23.0	or when you take the long view, mostly a pipe dream.
1:28.0	So I asked my guest today, how should we be thinking about where to put the bodies of the deceased?
1:34.2	Both in the now, but also many generations down the line.
1:39.6	Yeah, so this is a loaded question, right?
1:43.6	This is Samuel Perry.
1:45.6	He's both a funeral director and a lecturer of mortuary sciences at Southern Illinois University.
	...

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