An Extremely Modest Proposal

     Friends, we all know the pickle we're in. The planet is heating up. Those hurricanes are getting stronger. We're dirtying our nest because we like stuff and don't wish to give it up.

    The ocean, the basis of life, is becoming more acidic, because it is absorbing carbon from the air, and receiving sulphur dioxide rain from coal plants. The acid will eat at the coral reefs and destroy vast swaths of tropical ecosystems; it will compromise the exoskeletons of countless life-forms that are the basis of the marine food pyramid. Already, old sailors, Inuit elders, and scientists are saying that the seas look empty. It's the largest part of us; it's the world's heart and lungs. 

    So what do we do? The planet has a fatal case of heartburn. What do you do when you have heartburn? You take an antacid pill. 

     What is the most commonly bought antacid made from? A chemical base called Calcium Carbonate. Most often those pills are made from ground-up seashells. Those ground up seashells neutralize acids.

    But we can't throw ground-up seashells into the ocean to correct a massive planetary imbalance. Seashells come from the ocean in the first place. What else is made of calcium carbonate?

    Bone.

    That's right. It takes a horror writer to think of these things.

    Between 56 and 57 million people die every year. Every one will die with a body. Many will be preserved, embalmed, buried. Perhaps cremated, which is an egregious waste of energy. 

    Every cadaver should have its body stripped. The fats can be used as fuel; the bone ground up into more manageable bits and thrown into the ocean to restore its PH. The phytoplankton, the krill, the coral reefs, would return to health. The food chain would cease to resemble a pyramid with an oblique, transparent bottom. 

   We value our dead far too much. We lavish too much ritual on what is now a repository for stolen goods. Think of what good our bodies would do if we could use them to heal the ocean. From dust we came and to dust we return. This sounds vile, disturbing, disgusting, upsetting, but it might help us make a better world for our children. Graveyards would no longer be repositories for the dead but a place where we visit memories. 

    We need to do this. It would signal a final enlightenment, a return to our roots and to a memory of a species that once left little behind, because in nature nothing is wasted. 

     Reduce, re-use, recycle.