Permanent carbon offset

You learn something every day. And today, via Pajamas Media, I learned that death can mean a lifetime of pencils:

Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.
There's no denying that pencils have a definite and ascertainable utilitarian value. I suppose if Grandma wants to spend her afterlife being sharpened, chewed on, and erased, it's not for me to judge.

The idea of a corpse having utilitarian value is at least as old as Jeremy Bentham, whose preserved body and severed head have been maintained as an "auto tract" since 1832:

As to the head and the rest of the skeleton, it is my desire that the head may by preparation after the New Zealand manner be preserved, and the entire skeleton with the head above it and connected with it, be placed in a sitting posture, and made up into the form of a living body, covered with the most decent suit of clothes, not being black or gray, which I may happen to leave at my decease.
Bentham's body was dissected in accordance with his wishes, but the head preservation didn't work out as planned, so a wax head was affixed to his clothed skeleton.

For students of preservation, I think the head still has a certain utilitarian value, and I don't see why Bentham would have any objection to blog readers gazing at it.

benthamhead.jpg

Nice eyes, don't you think? (He selected the post-mortem eyes during his life, and used to enjoy showing them off.)

I think think the kind of people who don't just want to be stuck in the ground or cremated might have higher ambitions than being made into pencils, though. I suspect they'd go for something more dramatic.

Like diamonds! There's a company call LifeGem which will extract all the carbon from your dead loved on and transform it into a diamond. From the website:

High-quality created diamonds have been present for many years. These diamonds are created by placing carbon, the primary element of all diamonds, in conditions that recreate the forces of nature. The LifeGemĀ® process differs by using an exact carbon source to create a beautiful and meaningful diamond tribute for you and your family.
The process is explained at the website ("we now place this graphite in one of our unique diamond presses, which replicate the awesome forces deep within the earth - heat and pressure"), and it certainly seems to be catching on.

In recent news, a court in Germany refused to allow a woman to have her dad's carbon pressed into a diamond:

"The daughter of the deceased could not provide sufficient proof that it was his final wish to be pressed into a diamond," the court in western Germany said, ruling in favor of his 86-year-old mother.
I don't know how the court would have felt about pencils, but hey, carbon is carbon isn't it?

There's more than one way to permanently offset your carbon footprint.

posted by Eric on 04.05.07 at 07:26 PM





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