Disposal or dispersal? Environmentalism and final treatment of the British dead

摘要: AbstractIn current environmental discourse, disposal does not remove and destroy waste but rather transforms it into something useful or harmful and/or re-locates it. This article shows how this operates when the ‘waste’ comprises human remains, specifically innovative ‘dispersal’ practices are now challenging ‘disposal’ discourse of nineteenth-century burial twentieth-century cremation which contained dead within special death spaces separated from everyday environments for living. Since 1990s, have been supplemented by with an entirely different rationale. Instead containing in safe, out way places, new disperse remains back that sustain living, whether be via natural burial, technologies currently being developed, namely alkaline-hydrolysis freeze-drying. Promoters all these innovations appeal to ecological usefulness, blurring boundary between liv...