How to become a tree |
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‘When I consider the short duration of my life,’ wrote the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, ‘I am frightened.’ Human history is riddled with such examples of our struggle with mortality, from ancient mortuary practices intended to grant safe passage through an uncertain afterlife, to the uncountable stories of loss that fill our libraries. As René Girard observes in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), human culture itself arises from the brute fact of our ending: ‘There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol.’ Death, it seems, has always been a problem for us.
Yet in the past decade, human mortality has become newly troubling in unexpected ways. Each year, roughly 3.6 billion kg of human flesh and bone must be disposed of worldwide, and it is becoming clear that the dominant methods we rely on for that task – burial and cremation – significantly impact the Earth. For example, the emission of nitrogen oxides during a single cremation is roughly equivalent to driving a car almost 3,670 km. Human death and human remains – not only human life and livelihoods – may now be contributing to planetary decline, a problem intensified by anthropogenic climate change. These conditions have given rise to what Tony Walter, emeritus professor of death studies at the University of Bath in the UK, calls ‘a (new) death mentalité’. That is, a new shared attitude in which our attention has shifted from the loss of individuals or communities to ‘species extinctions on a scale hitherto unknown during homo sapiens’ time on Earth.’
The problem of death seems to demand different answers – new methods. And now, you can take your pick: would you like to become a tree? Perhaps you would prefer to transform into soil? Maybe you’d rather feed a microbial network?
These are some of the ecological afterlives promised to those in search of a ‘green death’. In the past two decades, funeral directors, cemeteries and start-ups in the UK, the US and other parts of the Western world have begun offering a range of ecologically friendly options for body disposal, marketed with organic aesthetics and lush imagery. These options envision different returns to nature – imagine shrouded bodies decomposing in rich, moss-covered soil under sprawling tree canopies.
In recent years, interest in green death has surged in the West, as the human impact on the Earth has become clearer. Far from a destructive or polluting act, human burial is being reframed as a chance to mend our relationship to nature. The dream of green death is that of a gentle end: a death that is aesthetically beautiful, nourishes the planet, and restores community. Composting your remains or allowing your dead body to feed a tree seem like noble responses to the problem of our toxic bodies – a way to participate more fully in the flourishing of future life on our planet.
However, closer examination of contemporary eco-death technologies reveals that this dream is not so easily realised. It remains plagued by a lack of reliable empirical evidence, inflated corporate claims, and unequal access to new technologies. Can we truly hope to die green? Or is it all just greenwashing?
In 1993, a forward-thinking bereavement services manager in Cumbria, England, named Ken West responded to requests from people asking to be buried among the 20 acres of wildflowers that had been planted on a cemetery where he worked. With this decision, Carlisle Cemetery in Cumbria became the first place to commercially offer a natural ‘woodland burial’, in which bodies were interred in soil without technical interventions that would hinder decomposition, such as embalming. The goal was to create a kind of nature reserve with no headstones or non-biodegradable ornaments. In place of these memorials, family members planted saplings (mostly oak trees). Each spring, beneath the growing trees, the cemetery ground would fill with snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells. In this way, burial became a return to nature, whereby decomposing corpses would bestow a final nutrient gift to other forms of life.
Such green death practices are nothing new. In fact, they are really the first forms of body disposal, from the time when many of our ancestors dug shallow graves or left bodies exposed to the elements and scavengers. An openness to decomposition continues in many traditions: consider the widespread use of biodegradable shrouds rather than coffins in Islamic and traditional Jewish burials. The woodland burials at Carlisle Cemetery are an extension of these earlier practices. But in the context of the Western funeral industry, and its fixation on slowing decomposition, such approaches can still appear innovative – even radical.
A dominant narrative is that decomposition is a return to nature, and should be reframed as positive
At the turn of the 21st century, green death practices expanded. They appealed as technical solutions for handling the disposal of human remains, but also as new ways of envisioning the dead human body, its value and relationship to the Earth. Today, though the green deathcare movement remains largely in its infancy, there are thousands of providers around the world who offer these kinds of burial options.
One dominant narrative promoted by such providers is that death and decomposition constitute a return to nature, and that this return should be reframed as something positive. As Caitlin Doughty, a mortician from the ‘death-acceptance organisation’ The Order of the Good Death, said in 2011: ‘If we work towards accepting, not denying, our decomposition, we can begin to see it as something beautiful. More than beautiful – ecstatic.’ In some cases, this revaluation of decomposition adopts quite direct scientific language, describing the processes by which our bodies break down as we gradually disappear into the surrounding earth.
Occasionally, a ‘return to nature’ is facilitated by water, not soil. Some funeral companies offer alkaline hydrolysis – variously known as resomation, aquamation, or water cremation – which reduces the body to its basic components via an alkali-based solution that can be heated up to around 160 degrees Celsius. As with cremation, the resulting bones are then crushed into ash, while the residual fluid is released into the wastewater treatment system.
Alkaline........