Tropical Salvage and Earth-Friendly Natural Burial Vessels with Tim O’Brien

Kim Allchurch Flick: Hello everyone. This is Kim Allchurch Flick, and I am delighted to have a dear friend on this particular podcast, Tim O’Brien, who runs Natural Burial Vessels and also a company called Tropical Salvage Role as Director of Operations. Tim O’Brien is a serial entrepreneur who has worked in Indonesia for over 25 years.

He has focused on working with artisan communities to apply natural renewable materials to craft distinctly beautiful, multifunctional and earth friendly furniture and homewares. This history of design and craft segued into his current work, designing and marketing completely earth-friendly funeral equipment, including burial vessels, carriers, shrouds and urns.

Tim’s design instincts are influenced to some extent by George Nash’s work and strongly by the mesmerizing beautiful forms and textures offered by nature itself. He believes that environmentally circumspect and supportive product choices should be available in every marketplace. He also believes that people evolve to prefer natural materials in forms to characterize their living and workspaces.

Tim leads the natural burial vessels design team, and he also offers an experienced hand in logistics and management. Today’s topic is a lasting last and lasting gesture of peace within nature. Welcome, and thank you so much for being here. 

Tim O’Brien: Hey, Kim. Good to see you. Thank you for having me on your podcast.

It’s flattering and I’m inspired. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I’ve been inspired for years because we met a couple of decades ago. 

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Because I found out about Tropical Salvage and I’d love the furniture and friendship has since blossomed and I’ve been following you into natural burial vessels. 

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: So I’m always inspired social enterprise at the very least, with environmental care.

What inspired you in the beginning? What things did you see in life that helped you create tropical salvage and what are just, what are some of the values that led you along the way? 

Tim O’Brien: I think in terms of my my determination. To work in capacities that are supportive of, environmental integrity.

I think exposure to environmental tensions and dramas when I was a young kid that, predictably were man driven. One that I always found pretty interesting was just the I grew up along Lake Michigan in the suburbs of Chicago, the North suburbs of Chicago. And the Great Lake system has been artificially connected to the Atlantic Ocean, right through the St.

Lawrence Seaway. And when I was a little kid, I liked to fish. And there was a period when a species called the Alewife, which is a kind of herring, that likes to. It’s sea going, and then it spawns and fresh water. It was just hordes of them were coming into Lake Michigan where they had never reached before because there was, there were too many, geographical obstacles along the way.

There was just never there. But it was one of those things that occurred because we monkeyed with the ecosystem. And so when I was a kid, I remember these huge, really huge piles of this fish, that had died after spawning, piled on the beaches. And it was really awful. It looked very, it looked like a great disaster, which it was an ecological disaster.

And in order to, and the reason that occurred, of course, is that. Another group of species has been, had been compromised by an also seagoing fish that had gotten into the Great Lakes because of that St. Lawrence Seaway. And that was the Lampre eel, and it was killing all of the big fish that ordinarily would eat the, but it’s a, it’s a very interesting series of ecological disasters that humans reacted to, to try to, fix.

And so that, that was one of my early inspirations to understand how ecosystems work. Alright. And in school I’m certain I took some courses that focused on that my sort of inclination to, and readiness, to, to start tropical salvage. Was to some extent influenced by my mother, who always appreciated old wooden antiques and yeah.

Oh yeah. She was a, wonderful sort of celebrant of old wood before it was a popular thing for, it was popularized, for example, by Martha Stewart or something like that. But in any case times were different. When we were young Kim, it was easier, this is pre-internet.

It was easier, for example I think America had, though we have economic strength today, we had yet more strength in some of those earlier decades, late in the 20th century. My point being, I was able. As a young man who did not have debt from college to save enough money, you could afford your own apartment, you could save enough money to travel frugally in parts of the world that were extremely charismatic, not yet disturbed by the heavy hand of capitalism.

And and I took advantage of that rather than seeking a, like a corporate job or something like that, as a lot of my friends did. And so during that time, traveling around Southeast Asia in particular, I became aware that there were all of one, you become acutely aware of biodiversity, right?

Because it’s, especially back then, think of it. Between the time when I was about 10 years old and today the population of the world has approximately doubled, right? So there were many less, many fewer people back when I was adventuring, if you will. And you could do it so easily and affordably Back then, I many times I would stay in simple but clean, shared rooms, with several people for a buck or two a night, traveling in Laos or Thailand or Vietnam.

But when I did finally make it to Indonesia in mid 1990s. I became aware that one, it’s one of the most biodiverse places on the planet then and continues to be today, though much has changed. And also within that scope of biodiversity, it had the most, most diverse number of tree species because of all the speciation that occurs on the world’s largest archipelago.

It was a very foresty woody place. And yet it was, it’s wood resources were being recognized for such a narrow scope of species for the international market. And by that I mean they had vast teak plantations, they had mahogany plantations, they had rosewood plantations and then paper pulp, acacia tree plantations.

They were not, they were creating all of these plantation scenarios for growing trees. And in order, ironically, a very common scenario in those days was they would cut down biodiverse old growth forest and then plant a plantation for the international market. And my feeling back then was, they’re wasting so much wood.

And then at about the same time they had be, one of the expressions of modernization in Indonesia was they were deconstructing all of these old wooden structures and then replacing them with concrete and rebar. And so all of this deconstruction would be, I’d be traveling around one of the, beautiful islands there and discover that.

Somebody had invested to expand or build new building, expand existing buildings, or build new ones. And they were deconstructing all of the old buildings, some of them three, four or 500 years old. And you just, you’d encounter these huge piles of beams and boards just sitting alongside of these dirt roads.

And I just started asking questions because at the time I, I was thinking, I want to get into, I guess I already was doing import business. I was buying at the time silver jewelry in Thailand, in India, and then in Bali to send back to the United States. The, the profit margin was pretty good, but it’s something that didn’t really inspire me.

It was just, I was chasing money around. It was reliable. It turns out that young people forever want to orate cement themselves with Bobs, right? So I’m selling lots of silver jewelry. But I started to see this as an opportunity that, I would encounter all of these wood opportunities, used wood, deconstructed wood.

And there was not, the ethic of recycling had not really infected that culture yet the way it had in the United States. So I came with kind of what eyes open to a possibility like that because I mean it’s pretty, I think it’s plain why Indonesia didn’t start to practice recycling wood as quickly as the United States because there was so much wood there.

And when people thought of. Acquiring wood for a project, they would just look at a teak plantation and gauge how many trees to cut, but in my opinion too, from my experience, my mother’s guidance of perspective when I was a kid about what is beautiful, right? I found old wood, particularly beautiful because of its history and its blemishes, its distress.

And so a lot of these woods already had a quite distinguished history. My first project actually was salvaging I many mosques that they had deconstructed in order to build much bigger mosques. And I found that very poetically. Enchanting, the idea that this wood had been used in houses of worship for sometimes three and 400 years, absorbing all of that passion of belief, and suddenly it was just cast to the side of the road, right?

And I just thought, wow, these beams were, they were like 15 inches square, five meters long. And they would sell ’em to me for a song. Sometimes they would be happy if I just would arrange to get them picked up. And I didn’t have any idea what I was gonna do with it, except that I knew that this wood was strikingly charismatic, strikingly unique.

You couldn’t really see what the woods looked like. But because wood over time, it all there’s this uniform grayness that it all will acquire when it’s left in the weather. But my, the logic that occurred to me then was that, look, they’re not gonna, back in the day, 300 years ago, to build a special structure like a house of worship, they certainly would’ve chosen the best woods that were available at the time.

And so I, not a big risk because just by lifting those beams, you knew that they were dip tarot carbs, which is a family of tree that grows in the Southeast Asian tropics. And and those are all really have always been sought after for their, integrity as wood. I just started acquiring all these piles of wood with no, of course I was already thinking we just have to make furniture out of this.

I examined flooring as well, but. Whereas in furniture, I discovered people are much more willing to accept a variety of woods carpentered together as one form. Flooring is not the same. They want more uniformity. And so we could never really get the flooring thing going. And also because the woods were so distressed there, there were lots of blemishes that were acceptable and I would say even beautiful in a piece of furniture, but on a floor, people might see it as a flaw that, you might trip over or something, right?

So anyway, we just started experimenting because again, it wasn’t expensive back in the day. This was pre-internet. This was, there were different sort of hierarchies of value in different parts of the world. Fine woods, which at the time were probably, fairly expensive in the United States, were regarded as just so many weeds.

And, especially if they’re recycled or deconstructed or whatever in Indonesia. And so it was easy to, back then to experiment, to make mistakes. Mistakes were not so overwhelming, the cost of them was not so overwhelming. And so we just went about making different furniture designs making mistakes along the way.

And eventually we started shipping containers to the United States. Of this, a hundred percent salvaged At the time it was deconstruction wood. I’ve been doing this for like 25 years. That deconstruction resource was cost-effectively available for about five years, and then many people recognized the resource.

And so people with of greater, capacity, business capacity came in and started driving the prices up. And I realized that for what my sort of price structure was, I could no longer afford to buy that. So we alone in Indonesia, I believe, started seeking other salvage wood opportunities in, we, first thing we did was go to some of the water resources, the rivers and the lakes in the area.

They were all full. Sinker logs absolutely full. In fact, I would say clogged in some places because nobody had ever salvage them, ever because there was no perceived need for it. But I was doing it to relieve stress, relieve impacts from existing forests, right? So I figured the more that people will buy these salvaged wood products, the less, impact there would be on forests.

And I’m sure that that has worked its way into the, that calculus in some ways. But, I became pretty quickly aware that look, each human has just such limited capacity. And you pick your pursuits, you pick your battles. And this is something that I could do, I could turn what was just the other day perceived as garbage into value.

Bring it to the United States, prove that value. Now, that didn’t come easy because I believe even in Portland, Oregon, which is progressive and has very woody aesthetics and everything, it was not an easy sell in the beginning to communicate to people, prospective consumers, buyers, that this is value, these, these distress, the history, the biodiversity of the wood itself, the different boards that are used, that, that has added value.

Most people. They were used to in the marketplace encountering wood furniture with uniform grain, straight grain, uniform color. If there wasn’t the precise uniformity of color that the company, you know, that the consumer wanted, the company would just throw some artificial dye on it to darken it or lighten it or whatever.

And my feeling was really the less we do to these beautiful representations of, these artifacts, of these ecological artifacts, these pieces of wood, the more beautiful they are. And that’s always been my perspective. It’s not shared by everybody, but I think we did turn the minds of many, many people, because tropical salvage today continues to have strong demand by a small.

Sort of sector of the furniture buying economy.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. 

Tim O’Brien: And I’ve noticed too many companies imitated us over the years. They, they started to bring distressed and story wood, this was from a burn barn in Iowa. This was from, and I feel like if I had some, effect on growing that perception, then that too is a positive outcome, right?

I think we were very, certainly in the Pacific Northwest influential in, fortifying that value perspective, that these old woods are actually added value rather than, not as good as these traditional perspectives on how wood furniture should look so 

Kim Allchurch Flick: well.

And as a consumer, I can attest to that because I know I own some pieces that are unique, that even though the style may be the same, each one is unique. Oh. And when people see it the compliments, but also the longevity. 

Tim O’Brien: Yes. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: These will last for years. 

Tim O’Brien: Absolutely.

Kim Allchurch Flick: And I was wondering if you could also tell us what I’ve learned about your heart and your values over the years is also how the people who are doing the craftsmanship.

Are treated and supported by you and also your desire to help save some of the forest in Borneo in other places. And how has that translated 

Tim O’Brien: Java and Borneo? So we did, to clarify the, my connection to Borneo, we were part of a group that was developing one of the world’s largest forest conservation sites.

It’s called the Kagan project. And it’s in Borneo central Borneo, I believe. It’s an amazing thing. I know the principles in that project. I worked with them in the beginning and our contribution was I was working there before they were even, maybe they were envisioning it, but I had discovered, my group had discovered that in.

South Central Borneo, the river salvage opportunities were like off the charts, amazing, huge sinker logs, and we did salvage many of them. And the reason they existed, of course, is because of the rapaciousness that people practiced in harvesting, the trees from those forests 40 or 50 years ago.

Again, Southeast Asia has some of the most it, it’s densest or richest biodiversity. And then also the range of tree species that are phenomenal. Within the Dip. Tarro carp family have always been sought after. Chinese concerns have always recognized the great value in those, but.

No one ever stopped to, these logging expeditions had occurred for throughout the 20th century, I’m sure. And nobody ever like dove into the rivers to assess what might have become cast off by those projects. I, so we started doing that discovered there again, so much wood salvage opportunity.

We brought that to the attention of the project and the people who were envisioning the Kagan project and they, for a time included us as a a facet of the broader project. And so we were salvaging and we had, the point to a lot of this is to create jobs. That are, that are environmentally reasonable, right?

So work on salvage wood was one of those things. What we did not anticipate was a cultural impediment. And this is, the world was so different back then, but Borneo to some extent was just in the parts where we were working. It was really only in a sleepy way beginning to participate in international capitalism, right?

Many of the people, they lived these, they were no, they were diac people who no, no longer were nomadic obviously, but they still lived with a certain kind of. Ease and comfort in the simplicity and purity of the natural place they lived in. If they needed food, it was easy to go catch fish, or it was easy to walk into the forest and, capture a wild boar or many of the other mammals that lived there, then the weather was, is beautiful year round.

And so you really just needed a shelter. The food, everything was there for you. And, as populations grew as business practices started to capture some of the natural resources, that ability to easily live life simply, diminished, right? So they began to participate in the the market economy.

And we engaged crafters from in this area to, to work on making furniture parts. And then we would compile all these parts and send them to our central production in Java, and then assemble all those parts and refine them. That was the business model and it would’ve worked, except what we didn’t anticipate is the cultural tendency to, when you’re, when they’ve decided they’ve worked enough, like they’d work a week, maybe two weeks, and then decide they want to take a week off.

And that was, that was a surprise to us. That was a cultural norm, because when you think of it of course people wanna do that, right? If you’ve never, if you’ve lived in a culture where life was, natural bounty surrounded you, what’s the point of working every day to scratch out a living, right?

For, as they over time integrated with the global economy and global cultures, of course, they would form these ambitions and aspirations. Okay I hope X child will go to school here or whatever. But at the time it was very simple in this place and so we could not really make that work even as the Kagan project.

Has continued to be a re like a world leader in forest conservation projects. And I think they can, they have modified the model, but I think they do have woodworkers on site now who are in a lesser, to respond to a lesser vision. I think they sell salvage wood objects at the site.

So if there are visitors who go there, they might be able to buy something or whatever. But I saw, I envisioned something little larger at the time. So that was my involvement in Borneo. We’ve acquired most of our land in Java and that has been fascinating because again, it was inspired more by.

Anecdotal observation over the years of working in Southeast Asia, intuition rather than deep and complex scientific calculation. So my view was, and the view of my associates was that nature is so driven to exist, to express itself in the tropics, with biodiversity and competition.

And there’s just species, back in the day you’d go into some of these hinterlands in Indonesia where there had been few people ever and there were still, primordial forests. There were trees that were just one after another. Huge diverse. I just thought that was Indonesia, my naivete.

I didn’t realize that this was the last gasp of this representation of nature right on the planet. Because I was visiting these places before the oil palm industry had yet really captured land. And but my experiences encountering biodiversity, in the mid nineties in the out, the far parts of Indonesia made it clear to me that if you just leave land alone, give it the time to make its, ecological decisions in a place that is.

More suited to, to growth to life than any place on the planet really. Because in Indonesia, especially in places like Java, you have tro a tropical climate, and then you have a sort of, soil fertility aspect that’s provided by the 21 active volcanoes on the island of Java. And by that I mean they are always, one or two of them is always spewing.

And we always, every year we read in the news here about a volcano that has erupted in Java, sometimes Sumatra, sometimes h Lui, but most of them are clustered in Java. There’s constant. Volcanic ash falling on Java. And that is some of the richest material for plant growth. So that plant growth begins and it attracts everything else, the insects, the, the birds, the reptiles, the small mammals.

And so intuitively we understood, okay, this is the most, the richest, most dynamic growth, natural growth that occurs on the planet. And so we were like, okay, so if we set aside, our first purchase was I think two hectares. What is that? Five or six acres or something? I’m not sure.

But a beautiful bit of land that previously had been a rice field, but had little sort of patches of forest still around it. And then there were other rice fields too, down to this beautiful and rare in Java, undisturbed small river. ’cause usually they’re, what happens to rivers in Java, which I think is the most densely populated place on the planet, is what happens to them in the United States.

They get polluted. But so it was just an idyllic little spot. And so we purchased this land with the idea of the only work we would do on it would be to plant a set of these dip carbs and just let it grow. And occasionally, it had some fruit trees on it. So we’d go and harvest the jackfruit.

The it had a mangus tree. It had a durian tree, but we bought it. Production was about two miles away. So we bought it in this like rural little enclave, very simple community and planted these trees. The, our local neighbors were pretty excited about an idea of somebody doing something different with the land that wasn’t agricultural, wasn’t usually growing rice, excuse me.

And sure enough, within five years, the trees were growing incredibly quickly and sure enough, all of these species found the little spot, partly prob, I think because, the biodiversity was generated so. Rapidly there probably, because so many places were displacing species at the, just like I said, when I was a kid, the planet was, the population of humans in the world was half as much as it is today, and Java is a very densely populated place.

But yeah, on six acres within five years, there were all these, insect species, reptiles. Within 10 years, we got C cats, we had squirrels, we had, small mammals and I believe, and within 20 years, the trees were really getting pretty big. Those that existed were huge and the local community took full advantage of the fruit that was grown on the property.

And, we said go ahead and harvest it, but then an issue occurred. We didn’t anticipate this. So often we just don’t. People who were growing rice around our little forest restoration project said the shade that was now cast onto their patties was making them less productive.

So the, as the trees grew bigger, the shade was making the rice patties less productive. And they had a local meeting, we weren’t violating any laws, but they basically at a local meeting and said, you have to cut down all the trees. It was really stunning and sad, but at the same time, just, this is what comes of.

Lots of people in one place, and so we compromised with them and cut down the trees that were casting, the shade that was the most onerous to them. But, it’s the site still exist, exists today, as does another much larger site. We worked with the Indonesian government on Mount Moria to create a 60 hectare restoration product project, and those trees continue to grow today, which is, but unless really you have culture wide agreement to the importance of.

Integrating our business pursuits with environmental rationality, right? We’re going to keep distressing the natural environment. And so what I do, what I’ve done with Tropical Salvage is just, a tiny example, a tiny demonstration of a person with an idea to do business without dis, with as few distresses, meet it out to the, natural environment as possible.

And in many ways, benefiting the natural environment with, thoughtful restoration work like yourself, your 10 acres in battleground. That’s huge. That because you’re approaching it. Thoughtfully sensitively, you’re informed, but you have discovered what hard work is. It’s really challenging to try to do 

Kim Allchurch Flick: it 

Tim O’Brien: right.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And so wonderful to have help and to have the resources. And I think about your story in Indonesian, how really beautiful and wonderful it is to create a company that supports you and your family and others and gives back. And yet it’s not a complete panacea in terms of Oh, the rice and I think the other thing I’ve seen is small is mighty.

And there are pockets of areas like Costa Rica for instance, re forested over 30 years from 25% only forest that was left to now 50. And a lot of it’s based on very small biodiverse. Farms not industrial and they’re connected together and it’s really made a difference. So like I have some hope there.

And I al I’m also so intrigued by your story with Tropical Salvage, which still exists, is still amazing. And you’re also going into a new industry. Yeah. 

Tim O’Brien: So this, so we have, as you mentioned, segued into weaving, using quickly renewable plant species to weave burial vessels and other funeral products.

And I’ll tell you how we got into that. But I, it’s an exciting sort of offshoot of tropical salvage. We continue to use naturally occurring materials. So a part of Tropical Salvage has always been creating handwoven accessories for the furniture. Handwoven from natural naturally occurring species like sea, grass and water, hyacinth and pana and raton and so forth. And we’re known in our little space in Indonesia as a company who does that, as well as making the salvage, which would furniture.

And a guy who I was acquainted with, who does his work in Europe, he asked us if this is now three or four years ago, he asked us if we could weave him. Some caskets and I was a little taken aback. I had never thought of that as a use of what we did. But after some practice we were able to do that to his satisfaction and it led me to consider something us of us who are living and life centric.

Rarely consider what goes on in the funeral industry. We don’t really become acquainted with that until somebody close to us passes. And it is either our responsibility or partly our responsibility to answer the needs of that milestone. And, but because of business, I started thinking about, wow, he was really happy with these woven caskets, what’s going on in the United States with woven caskets. So I started to do a little research and discovered that not enough was being done in the United States with respect to earth friendly funeral practices in general, including what handwoven caskets.

And while there was some established concerns, businesses, none of them had the craft ability or the range of material options that we were aware of and had used over many years in Indonesia and much of what was offered in the market for natural burial options or whatever. Were very simple and in my opinion, almost frumpy.

They were entirely concerned with the earth friendliness, which is greatly admirable that that was happening. But there was not, in my opinion, enough attention paid to the aesthetics, which we had become very good at least envisioning and practicing within a range. Like I’ve told you what my aesthetics are.

Not everybody loves ’em, but there, they’re rustic. They’re, but with an emphasis on fine craft, right? And using beautiful materials. And we envisioned those three years ago that we can. Bring our products to the United States and very, very cost competitively offer much better products. What I didn’t understand then, because in my mind it was just absolutely rational.

If we can practice something in our culture that is much more earth friendly than how we’ve been doing it, and it’s not causing any kind of sort of market distress, of course people wanna do that, but I didn’t anticipate, as with in Borneo not anticipating some cul cultural elements of the people who we employed, I didn’t anticipate cultural elements of my own culture, which is just how.

Committed to traditions. For example, one thing is committed to traditions. People are, even if they’re not particularly environmentally sensible and you gotta give people a lot of latitude when they’re interpreting what they want for the milestone of death, right? So whatever people want, we pretty much give them, but I figured if we get it into the, out, into the consumer awareness that, look, you can have beauty and earth friendliness if you choose to, bury your loved one, for example.

This is something you can choose and it’s very affordable too. So I figured just offering better elements. Would appeal to people. And it definitely has caught people’s attention. I didn’t realize how few people, many progressive people I know, were not even aware that these options exist, like woven caskets that are, entirely handwoven. And I should add, this is a bit of a non-sequitur, well, not a non-sequitur, but it’s a bit of a departure from what I’m talking about right now. What really excites me about this industry as well is that the weaver weaving community we work with, I’ve watched it absolutely collapse in 25 years.

There’s still little families who work here and there to make the furniture accessories that we produce. Storage vessels and floor mats and table settings, things like that. We still sell that stuff and they still make them, but there’s just not wide demand when you’re, when you have competition from, say China, where they have great government supported, machinery to do the weaving in any case the market.

But with the caskets that we now weave and the carriers and other woven products there’s such a demand that occurs in the world now, and it’s just growing, just beginning to grow in the United States that I’ve watched these little groups of family, cottage industry weavers. Begin to work with bigger weaving groups and get paid more money because they really do have a very clear, a lot of them have a very clear skill that is in demand.

Because when it comes to end of life, many people like myself, we were, and you Kim, we were raised on being, trying to be sensitive to the environment whenever possible, right? Even in a world where we’re jerked around to do many things that we know aren’t really the best thing for the forest around us or whatever.

But we have that sensitivity. It’s ingrained, we were raised in the 1970s, the eighties, and my feeling is that a lot of people, if they’re, oh, I was talking about that. So the demand is rising because more people are buying into it. It’s that simple, right? 

Yeah. 

They don’t want their last gesture on earth to be contamination of the soil and water.

And frankly, I know this is really it’s troubling to say it perhaps, but cremations are not really a great thing. Okay. The they’re 

Kim Allchurch Flick: actually really bad. 

Tim O’Brien: They’re really bad, right? But you don’t wanna be the one to get out. I’m not gonna get out on a street corner and start saying, cremations are bad and waving my finger because they are the most economical and maybe they’re not environmentally economical in the long term, but in, in the short term.

With respect to people’s, financial profiles. People don’t have a lot of money to spend on a, a burial plot and what other accoutrements, right? And so I think a lot of the choice of a cremation for people often is almost purely economical. But I am here to say that many people can’t afford alternatives that aren’t so expensive, but certainly are more expensive than a cremation.

And if they really, if the person who has passed really cared about environmental issues and the providing the kind of, ceremony that is appropriate to that person’s perspective during life is not too economically onerous for a family. They really should consider alternatives to a cremation Yes.

And but at the same time, somebody, some people are going to have to get out there to report that the system of cremations is not really good for us. All of these, particular matter is that occurs from cremation. It goes into the atmosphere. There are not, strong filtering systems that are applied 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. To 

Tim O’Brien: these 

Kim Allchurch Flick: criminal and I’ll add to the show notes, a blog that I wrote when my mother passed away, because it’s often, we don’t think about burial until something happens. And I have empathy for anyone who’s surprised by a death and they have to make a decision.

But when we know someone’s aging and there’s time to plan what my sister and I found out is that there weren’t many options until we asked and we started asking I knew that cremation is very heavy carbon load and it’s not environmentally friendly at all. So we asked for aqua mation and it took I think eight different mortuaries to find one that would actually do it because the competition is so heavy to keep the old industrial.

Burial paradigms going, there’s a lot of money there. And the other thing was, where are your green offerings as we walk past all these multi-thousand dollar caskets that, that never biodegrade and that and lots. I also researched, I’ve and found out that when people are embalmed, a lot of times that pollutes soil in the end as things over time start to leak, horrible things to think about.

But the thing that gives me optimism as as we wrap up this story, because what you’re doing is so innovative, even though it’s ancient and the thought that. Given the knowledge, people can make decisions even in the short term. And the optimism I find is in what you’re doing completely biodegradable, yet beautiful ceremonial ways of bearing people.

Also finding that there are cemeteries popping up that only are green. That’s all they will take. And then the other thing is the advent of many states approving and legalizing soil transformation, also known as human cremation. And that all these things are coming at the same time. And part of it is asking the questions.

And I’m hoping that in the future it doesn’t take somebody like my sister and I going to somebody and saying, where are your green offerings? And finding out that they’re tucked in the back corner somewhere, but they’ll be more in the forefront. This is what I believe you are doing with natural burial vessels and also the other two companies that are doing the the soil transformation are gaining traction.

Absolutely. So you’ve got a, a wave to ride. So I was wondering as we wrap up, if you can tell us what makes you optimistic and how can people find you and find out about these things? 

Tim O’Brien: They can find us. Just, you can go, our email is info@naturalburialvessels.com. Our website is natural burial vessels.com.

We are, so we’ve restricted our work to the Pacific Northwest thus far because there’s a lot of demand here. And as you just noted the, the numbers of dedicated natural burial cemeteries or sites have really, really grown dramatically in only like 16 or 17 years. I think 16, 17 years ago, there were two dedicated natural burial cemeteries in the United States today, I think it’s in the six hundreds and rapidly multiplying because consumers want this.

And another thing that I encountered that I didn’t anticipate is just these sort of resistance within the established industry to yeah, to paradigms that are not in accordance with what’s been established now for about 150 years. And. They, I think many of them thought they could just ignore it, just avoid it.

And it was a trend that would go away. But in fact, this is a deeply held feeling of many, of an increasing number of people. And I think because baby boomers are beginning to pass, right? And they really believe that we, when we can we should be an ally to the natural environment and not a, an impediment to it, smoothly occurring.

And

Kim Allchurch Flick: oh, what beautifully said, what a beautiful quote, be an ally to the natural envi environment, not an impediment. 

Tim O’Brien: Yeah, an impediment is a euphemism, right? We’re we have caused such contamination. And I know it was not intentional when a lot of these practices were formed and became habituated.

I don’t think we were even thinking about the repercussions within the natural environment. We were just thinking about ways that we wanted to celebrate these people who we love. I think many families, if they understood that these established ways of celebrating people who we love was not really in keeping with the perspective of this person who we love, who has passed, they might want to adjust some of the practices.

And I indeed, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I’m 

Tim O’Brien: absolutely sure that that’s true. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: What a beautiful way to, to wrap up this segment, be an ally to the natural environment, not an impediment. Then we both have optimism that people are catching on and also people don’t always live to be able to visit the loved one’s sites. So some of these other ways make memories and shrine’s different.

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. There’s so many things. I mean, it’s exciting time.

Kim Allchurch Flick: I concur. That 

Tim O’Brien: was at the end. Okay. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Let’s, I have a final question for you that I always find so intriguing and did I lose you? You are so amazing at doing such incredible things with two businesses to make the world better. But the last question is, if you could have dinner with anyone living in 

Tim O’Brien: deceased, I’ve lost you.

It happened to our.

Of course I think many people could think of many different people. Off the top of my head, I think this is a good time for satire in order to really needle what’s going on in our culture in the United States in particular. I think I’d really like to have dinner with Jonathan Swift.

One of the most what pointed satirists of what 18th century, I think wrote Gu Gulliver’s Travel and several other notable. I’m not sure they were books, but they were treatises on just some of the problematic ways that England was, behaving back in the day. And that I think of another English guy I’d like to meet, who his name is William Dampier, also from, I think 18th century, early 18th century.

He’s known as a a naturalist pirate. And the reason I’d like to meet him is ’cause he was able to witness much of Southeast Asia and Australia as well, those 300 years ago or whatever. And. What a wonderland at most. It’s a wonderland today, those places. But what a wonderland it must have once been.

And he was very, very in inspiring, because he decided to train himself, let his curiosity lead him. He was extremely resourceful and he was an, acutely interested naturalist botanist, entomologist who, who wrote some, and there’s been some great stuff written about William Dampier.

I forget the name of one particular historical novel, but definitely check him out. William Dampier. I would love to have met him. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, wonderful. 

Tim O’Brien: I think too I’d have to. Mentioned my grandfather on my father’s side, who I knew until I was about 13, but I just never had the wherewithal to asked, ask many of the questions I would ask him today because he was a very colorful and shrewd man.

He, as a young man, an 18-year-old, he was flying a, one of those double winged aircraft in World War I even did some bombing runs when they were basically throwing bricks with hand grenades tied to them. He also was tasked to take aerial photos. Of the battle lands of World War I, all of the trench warfare.

So he would be flying over it and taking these photos of the atrocities the destruction, that caused by war. Yeah. And later, oh my goodness, a story where as a tra traveling salesman for US Steel, he pulled up to a gas, gas stations were another thing back in the day. They’d always have a restaurant with them.

There would be in the in, and this was during prohibition, and he was asked to, when he was filling or having his car filled with fuel, they asked if he wanted to have a drink. And he unfortunately was a, quite a drinker for too long. But, at the time, he was a young man, a young traveling salesman.

His the gas station attended, asked him during prohibition if he wanted to have a drink, goes in back of the gas station where there’s a Betty, a gambling hall, and was able to meet Al Capone who was there too, having a drink. But anyway, there’s a lot of colorful stories of the life he led.

And he was an extremely wide and deep reader. So my, that grandfather, I’d like to have a chance to talk to him again, and I, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: wow. 

Tim O’Brien: There’s 

Kim Allchurch Flick: a book in 

Tim O’Brien: there somewhere. I think I’d really like to talk, I’d love to talk to John Muir. The wit the guy who witnessed California when it was still undisturbed,

Kim Allchurch Flick: yeah, your table’s getting even bigger. I think there’s a book in there somewhere about your grandfather and Tim, I really appreciate your time here and I want everybody to know about TropicalSalvage.com because the furniture is beautiful and natural burial vessels for a whole new look at how we can be kind to the planet while we loved on our deceased loved ones as well.

Thank you. Thank you. This is Kim Allchurch Flick

I am always so encouraged to be around people like you, Tim, who are doing great things for the world.