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Record W2053083640 · doi:10.1080/13668790701329726

Death to Life: Towards My Green Burial

2007· article· en· W2053083640 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEthics Place & Environment · 2007
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicReligion, Ecology, and Ethics
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAstrobiologyEnvironmental ethicsBiologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper presents reflections on the author's death aspirations as they are informed by a set of earth-connection stories, environmental concepts, and modernist burial practices. This weave is meant to inspire further consideration on what is coming to be known as 'green burial'. More precisely, this means an exploration of the author's earth-centred burial musings in association with the following themes: the meanings and historical trajectory of prevailing death and burial practices; 'narratives' of the human–earth life-cycle; relevant environmental ethics and place literature concepts; and lastly, some sense of the newly emerging practices and appeals to green burial—i.e. the normative and practical grounds for rethinking and working toward more environmentally sensitive burial practices. This weave of themes is instructive for posing green burial as evocative of a more comprehensive and spiritual ethos of connection, continuity, and responsibility. In this sense, rather than being seen as contrary or contentious, green burial may actually enable us to dispel some of the growing angst, uncertainty, and insensitivity often underlying prevailing burial practices, while contributing to an emerging environmental consciousness. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank his family and colleagues for their sense of humour regarding his prognostications on this theme, and his partner Irena Zenewych for her editing prowess, as well as her promise to follow through with his green burial hopes. Notes Notes 1Note that the process of getting to this remote location is hazy in some respects—ensuring that friends and family get my close-to-death body to this sacred place on time, though not so soon that I find myself twiddling my thumbs and waiting impatiently for my death to occur. I jest here, as my story has raised much collegial humour. 2The terms 'decay' and 'rot' do not generally connote pleasant or comforting images in their common usage—certainly not when applied to our conceptions of the body after death and its placement in the earth. Such visual speculations on decay and rot are more the fodder for the genre of the horror film, where they are meant precisely to horrify, not appease or comfort us regarding the continuity of the cycle of life after death. 3My own death scenario on the surface has some resemblance to the Zoroastrian 'sky burial', one whose tradition, held by the Parsis, was to have vultures pick the bones clean of the 'contaminated' flesh. The bones could then be properly disposed of in water, fire, or earth (see Kastenbaum, Citation2004).

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.010
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.929
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0100.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.356
Teacher spread0.288 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it