LRB: Letter to Editor

Saving the World
From Ken Worpole

Although Andrew O’Hagan doesn’t mention them, dead human bodies are also technically waste, and for the past 150 years have been subject to much the same regulatory frameworks and strategies for disposal (LRB, 24 May). Burial and cremation are simply different terms for landfill and incineration, similarly enacted beyond the city limits where disposal creates less anxiety and less environmental harm.
In the early 20th century town planners were among the most fervent advocates of cremation, fearing that towns and cities would eventually be surrounded by a ‘white belt’ of cemetery land, separating town from country. Some 61 per cent of public open space in the London Borough of Newham is still made up of cemetery land (as is much of Queens seen from the A Train that goes from Manhattan out to Kennedy Airport). Cremation saved the day but at some psychic cost, as well as contributing to the ‘toxic canopy’ that O’Hagan describes.
As with the removal of all other waste, public opinion and professional expertise are turning against incineration, though cremation still accounts for some 70 per cent of disposals in the UK. The Department for Constitutional Affairs recently established a working party to draw up guidelines and forms of accreditation for the growing number of ‘green’, ‘natural’ or ‘woodland’ burial sites (the terms are confusingly interchangeable), where bodies are disposed of with minimal environmental damage. The owners and managers of a number of these sites claim that they will be returned to publicly accessible woodland within three or four generations, leaving no trace of former use. This is the zero waste option.
However, ecological burial marks a major shift in public attitudes. Most cultures have traditionally regarded burial places as hallowed ground in perpetuity, places of permanent memorialisation and public ritual. The question which then arises, as O’Hagan reminds us in regard to waste in general, is how to commemorate an absence? A number of urbanists and landscape architects are currently puzzling how best to create places of public inscription and memory in contemporary towns and cities: a presence of the dead at ‘the table of the living’ when those who are to be remembered are not only located elsewhere but have effectively been recycled.
Ken Worpole
London N4