Attunement

In the United States, which serves as the primary site for this chapter's study, the early part of the 21st century has witnessed several disruptions to nearly one hundred years of relative stability in deathcare. Since the turn of the century, cremation has surpassed burial as the preferred form of final disposition in the United States; multiple new, environmentally conscientious disposition technologies (including alkaline hydrolysis, green burial and natural organic reduction) have emerged as legally and commercially viable options; and home funeral guides (Olson, 2016) and end-of-life doulas (Krawczyk and Rush, 2020) are developing ‘counterprofessional’ (Goldensher, 2020) practices and social roles in deathcare. Meanwhile, a global pandemic has forced individuals, communities and institutions to confront mortality and retool deathways with unwelcome rapidity, urgency and intensity. These recent developments in deathcare coincide with, and are often attuned to, increasing awareness of the abiding perils of global, anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation. Indeed, deathcare practices – and discourse about death and deathcare – are being shaped by concerns about ‘the climate and ecological emergency’ (Walter, 2022: 1) in ways that draw attention to death at large scales.

In How to die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton declares that we human beings must now learn ‘how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization’ (2015: 21):

Death studies scholar Tony Walter, too, has argued that ‘climate and ecological emergency discourse entails a (new) death mentalité’ (2022: 2), one that ‘re-focuses attention from the death of personally known individuals to the climate-induced collective deaths of millions, perhaps billions, of humans in coming decades, along with species extinctions on a scale [my emphasis] hitherto unknown during homo sapiens’ time on Earth’ (2022: 13).