The cemetery where I walk is being groomed one last time for the season. Men on riding lawn mowers cut the grass, weaving expertly between the tombstones. Following that, three men outfitted with string trimmers, safety goggles, and earplugs, waltz in circles around each marble stone and placard, and around each tree in order to cut the grass that the mower was not able to reach. Industrialization has made short work of landscape maintenance, reducing the number of jobs available for the ever growing human population. Perhaps at some point in the future, the burial of our dead bodies will become a sustainable practice where according to permaculture design, they are fed back to the earth to emerge into new life.
Can you foresee a future in which cemeteries are a thing of the past, replaced with sustainable forests and habitat for other species? Precious space that is now a virtual wasteland – a monoculture of grass requiring enormous amounts of water – could be recycled into rich, organic soil. Dead bodies, after having been wrapped in a thin, biodegradable material by loving family members, could be laid in the ground without the cumbersome and highly overpriced coffin. The polluting practice of embalming, that has become common in our current time, would be obsolete in the new age. The world would have come to the realization that death is natural and the decay of a body that is no longer inhabited, is inevitable. People would have the option to be buried on their own property, to become part of their family’s garden, or contribute to the forest of their choice. Instead of spending money on a meaningless tombstone, they could choose the tree that they would like to nourish as their body decomposed beneath it. They could choose to be composted first, or simply put directly into the ground. Family members left behind would no longer have to pay thousands of dollars to greedy funeral parlors that prey on the grief-stricken.
In this new scenario, more jobs might be created, employing workers to plant trees and understory plants, creating habitat for thousands of other species. Fewer people would choose cremation since it requires large amounts of fossil fuels and the resulting carbon gives very little back to the earth. Some might choose to be buried at sea, naked, as they came into the world, to feed a hungry shark.
I have always found it strange that people visit cemeteries and talk to a marble stone as though it were an actual person. They bring fake flowers as if to placate the dead for some perceived wrong. They erroneously believe that their departed loved one is simply hanging out in the cemetery waiting for them to visit. Would it not be more pleasant to walk in the forest and talk to the trees? How much more lovely could visiting your loved ones who have passed on be, if you walked among them and the trees, accompanied only by the sound of birdsong? You can talk to the dead at any time and in any place. They have discarded the trappings of the human flesh, and so should you.
