The Big Exit
eBook - ePub

The Big Exit

The Surprisingly Urgent Challenge of Handling the Remains of a Billion Boomers

  1. 218 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Big Exit

The Surprisingly Urgent Challenge of Handling the Remains of a Billion Boomers

About this book

What are our options after death?

The baby boom was the greatest explosion of births in history. It follows that someday soon we'll see the greatest explosion of deaths in history, and we aren't ready for it. Cemeteries are full and news ones aren't being created. Also, burying bodies in the ground is bad for the environment. Burning them, it turns out, is even worse, which rules out cremation, the most popular means of disposal at present.

What are the alternatives? There are many, and more coming all the time: green burial (a wild and shallow grave); alkaline hydrolysis (good enough for Desmond Tutu); the mushroom solution (a coffin of flesh-eating fungus); composting (it's not just for coffee grounds); body donation (back to the classroom!), sky burial, sea burial, space burial, and many more.

Just as boomers changed the world as they came into their own, first as teenagers and then as adults, they will re-invent it again on their way out, upending a billion-dollar deathcare industry and all of our social norms around dying, death, funerals, and the disposal of our earthly remains.

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Information

Year
2023
eBook ISBN
9781990823213

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Halftitle
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. CHAPTER ONE: What was the baby boom?
  8. CHAPTER TWO: Numbers don’t lie
  9. CHAPTER THREE: The death of the cemetery
  10. CHAPTER FOUR: Cremation, popular, and unsustainable
  11. CHAPTER FIVE: The pros and cons of green burial
  12. CHAPTER SIX: Reverend Tutu’s choice
  13. CHAPTER SEVEN: The mushroom solution
  14. CHAPTER EIGHT: Composting isn’t just for food waste
  15. CHAPTER NINE: Outlier methods, from reef burials to SpaceX
  16. CHAPTER TEN: Body donation, “the kindest gift”
  17. CHAPTER ELEVEN: The profits and scandals of body brokers
  18. CHAPTER TWELVE: Hard truths about funeral homes
  19. CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The corporate way of death
  20. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Boomers at the brink
  21. Postscript
  22. Helpful Resources
  23. Acknowledgements
  24. Index

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Yes, you can access The Big Exit by Ian Sutton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Death in Sociology. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.