My friend Rachael Hanel wants to start a green cemetery but she’s not sure how. Here she is in a regular one.

“Green cemetery” meaning  “…as natural as possible in all respects. Interment of the bodies is done in a bio-degradable casket, shroud, or a favorite blanket. No embalming fluid, no concrete vaults.” (Courtesy of greenburials.org, a good starting point for the biodegradable-curious.)

Rachael gets the mechanics of it, but she’s like, what about the politics? How do you convince a community to zone for this and fund it when most believe embalming is more respectful, more beautiful?

My answer to that is a) sex and b) my hair. Politics follow pleasure and vanity, so the key to making natural burial politically and socially desirable is sexing up the notion of decay. Los Angeles mortician Caitlin Doughty gets at this in her essay on natural burial. In it, she says: