by Dave GilsonLast Monday, at around 11 in the morning local time, Osama Bin Laden's body dropped from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson into the Arabian Sea. According to the Pentagon, the hours-old corpse had been washed and placed in a simple white sheet in accordance with Islamic practice. It was then sealed inside a weighted bag and laid on top of a board, which was tilted until "the body slid off into the sea."
Back on land, the controversy surrounding Bin Laden's last splash was just beginning. But beneath the waves, nature was taking its course, quietly and methodically turning the world's most-wanted terrorist into fish food. You could say Osama bin Laden had received the ultimate green burial, courtesy of the United States Navy.
Obviously, the decision to consign Bin Laden to the deep was motivated by expedience rather than eco-friendliness. Seafarers from Odysseus to Ahab have long known that there's no better way to quickly be rid of a corpse than to toss it overboard. But only recently has this salty custom been rediscovered as a relatively efficient way to be laid to rest with minimal environmental impact.
"I have noticed a great increase in interest in burial at sea," says Ann Rodney, an environmental protection specialist in the New England office of the Environmental Protection Agency's ocean and coastal unit, which oversees burials in American waters. The agency doesn't have hard data on how many Americans choose sea burial, but Rodney suspects the numbers, though small, are growing. "Ten years ago, I might get one or two calls a year about it. Now I get at least one call a week."
If you're intent on going into a watery grave, you'll need to enlist someone like Brad White, a 52-year-old licensed ship captain who has been depositing bodies in the Atlantic since 2005. His company, New England Burials at Sea, based in Scituate Harbor, Massachusetts, does an average of six full-body burials a year and has 25 "pre-need" requests on the books. People who choose to be buried at sea, he says, "typically have a love for the ocean, do not want to be cremated, and prefer 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' They want to become part of the Earth again via our oceans."
