It ain’t over till it’s over
* Choose to be cremated
* Plan your final fling
* Make a blazing exit
Face it: you are going to die. But don’t despair, even on the way out there is still something you can do. In death, as in life, your proud promise to wreak carnage upon the planet can still be upheld. You can depart in a blaze of glory, your bloated body expunged in a final destructive burst of greenhouse gases. You will opt to be cremated in the hope that it is you who triggers the impending Armageddon, the burning of your carcass causing the pivotal release of carbon dioxide which finally pushes the planet past tipping point towards unstoppable meltdown. For you there will be no natural burial or touchy-feely return to the soil as part of the natural cycle of death, decay and rebirth. Get yourself down the local crem. It’s better to burn out than fade away.
You glance at your melting wristwatch and grin. It’s one minute to midnight on the Doomsday clock. London has been engulfed by rising seawaters. Manhattan has sunk. Africa is wreathed in fire and famine. You decide to write your will. More than anything, you want your body incinerated in a final infernal halo of toxic global-warming gases. And so, in your neatest handwriting, you begin. First, you request that your teak coffin is made from the last remnants of surviving rainforest, scythed from an earmarked pristine plot on the Peruvian-Brazilian border and transported 7,000 miles to your final resting place. Next, you politely ask for the wood to be smothered in veneered chipboard and bonded with a formaldehyde resin, just like most cheap coffins. Formaldehyde is marvellous stuff, classified as one of the most hazardous compounds to the environment and an influential player in the happy hat-trick of acid rain, global warming and particulate air pollution. Around 1,000 grams of the poison is usually emitted per cremation, a figure you would happily die for. Naturally, your coffin should be smothered in the traditional coating of chemicals that never fails to unleash the toxins of hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Government figures reveal that 12 per cent of dioxins coming into the atmosphere are from crematoria, which must surely be one of the most persuasive arguments for premature death that any authority has ever devised. Dioxins are described as among the most dangerous toxins around. So adept are they at toxifying that the World Health Organization once set their safe exposure at 10 pictograms per kilogram of body fat. As a pictogram is a millionth of a millionth of a gram, this, rest assured, is fine material.
As an extra request, you should ask to be embalmed. Considering you’ll soon be dust, this is rather eccentric, but the practice prompts an additional generous release of formaldehyde and as such cannot really be ignored. Finally, you must make sure the undertaker knows that when you say you want to be burnt, you mean really burnt. Toast. You ask for the heat to be cranked up high. The usual temperature of a cremation is a cool 800°C, with a maximum of 1,150°C. You ask for 1,600°C. Minimum. This is important. The average cremation uses 285 kilowatt hours of gas and 15 kilowatt hours of electricity, around the same energy demanded by a living individual for an entire month. So be careful to state that you don’t want your remains to arrive at the crem too early; it takes two and a half hours to heat a crematorium oven just to the 850°C point.
When you die you will be extremely fat. During your last few weeks on earth you will be so immobile that you might as well spend them inside your chemically coated coffin. But those extra body tissues sure are going to burn. This will be some bonfire. To achieve such an impressive body-mass index you must eat and drink so much gunk that something will surely give. First to go will probably be your molars. By the time you die you expect to have thirty-two teeth and twenty-eight fillings, all made from mercury, another brilliantly toxic heavy metal, poisonous to animal and plant life, and with an impressive knack of leaching into waterways and killing everything it comes into contact with.
Cremations release 16 per cent of the UK’s mercury pollution and, unless tackled, are forecast to rise two-thirds by 2020. Your elephantine dimensions will play havoc with your joints towards the end and, ingeniously, you will have requested artificial joints made from plastic and therefore creating another valuable source of dioxins. You excitedly sign your will and smile. In the days before you started trying to f**k the planet, Britain recorded 650,000 deaths a year, 420,000 of which resulted in cremations. Now you are hoping for a full house, deliberately ignoring petty projections, which claim that by 2010 some 12 per cent of funerals will be classed as ‘green’. For some time you have been telling anyone who will listen that woodland burials using ecological shrouds or eco-coffins provide nothing more than paupers’ graves for the poor and misguided: ‘If you want your mother dumped in a cardboard box somewhere in a farmer’s field, then fine, go ahead.’ Gratifyingly, many in the funeral industry seem to be on message, and there are rumours that some have even attempted to block green burials, because they are cheaper and make undertakers less profit. At least one manufacturer of ecologically sensitive coffins came to your attention when he accused mainstream funeral directors of ignoring his low-cost coffins. In that instance, four thousand funeral directors were contacted about their knowledge of eco-friendly resting places, but just two responses were received. And anyway, with space such a priority on this crowded, denuded island, who wants to be crammed into a multi-burial site? People, understandably, get all squeamish when it comes to the thought of being piled on top of strangers in dank places.
You always dreamed of living for ever, a modern-day Peter Pan in an age of universal immortality, where the age of 500 marked the onset of adolescence. Currently, scientists are examining ways to put cellular ageing on hold. Tests on laboratory animals have produced reasonably positive results. Fruit flies, for instance, can double their natural lifespan and die healthy and vigorous. Famed Cambridge geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes that the first person to live to a thousand might be sixty already. Perhaps it won’t be you, but there is news that gerontologists are fast at work on detailed plans to repair molecular and cellular damage to the body.
You know, of course, that even if humanity does ever achieve immortality, the planet hasn’t got a hope in hell. Consider the 200,000 or so extra mouths who arrive on earth waiting to be fed each day, and it doesn’t take de Grey to calculate that, with natural resources already being outstripped, the effect of this genetic breakthrough will prove compellingly destructive, leading to an overcrowded world where you would be competing with your own children in the workplace, where evolution itself would be neutered. Yes, man has constantly reinvented his environment, purely to find new ways to f**k the planet. Take the discovery of fire, invention of the wheel, electricity and nuclear energy – all of them, as you have proved, offer such unswervingly glorious potential for messing up the earth. Longevity, you hope, will be merely the latest. Perhaps, you ponder, the best plan of all might in fact be to just carry on as you are until the offer of immortality is unveiled. In the meantime, seize the day! Party on! You ain’t never gonna die of boredom. And you might, just might, live for ever.
* Natural burials banned as space becomes a premium. Even triple-decker burial slots are considered a waste of a shrinking land. Possible.
* The Office of Fair Trading investigates complaints that eco-burials are being deliberately sidelined. Maybe.
* The age of immortality comes a step closer as scientists announce a genetic breakthrough in 2012. Tests on mice unlock the ageing process. Experts say four hundred is the new forty. Remote.
* Restrictions placed on cremation temperatures. Councils sanction only mass cremations, to cut down on greenhouse gases. Likely.
* Government eventually orders a lowering of crematoria temperatures to save energy. Bodies take five hours to burn. Grieving relatives complain at extended length of services. Probable.
Likelihood of cremations becoming increasingly popular by 2015: 8%