Varanasi, India
The demand for Hindu funeral pyres is rapidly deforesting India, environmental groups say. Burning a single body in the traditional Hindu manner requires 600 to 1,000 pounds of wood. With more than 8 million Hindu deaths a year, India burns 50 million trees annually, producing 500,000 tons of ash and 8 million tons of carbon dioxide. “If we don’t come up with a solution for dealing with the dead, we are going to affect the survival of the living,” said Anshul Garg, director of a New Delhi environmental group. The government offers environmentally friendly gas-powered cremations, but only the poorest are sent off that way, as most observant Hindus insist on wood. Garg’s group, Mokshda, has invented an eco-friendly wood-burning crematorium that uses just over 200 pounds of wood per body, but it has yet to catch on.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Political cartoons for February 22Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include Black history month, bloodsuckers, and more
-
The mystery of flight MH370The Explainer In 2014, the passenger plane vanished without trace. Twelve years on, a new operation is under way to find the wreckage of the doomed airliner
-
5 royally funny cartoons about the former prince Andrew’s arrestCartoons Artists take on falling from grace, kingly manners, and more
