An expert calls for a strategic initiative to develop "green burial corridors" along England's major transport arteries.
Let's put it short: cemeteries and graves in the UK are close to saturation. With over 500.000 deaths per year between England and Scotland, estimates say that in 5 years there will be no space left for burials.
In a scientific article in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Professor John Ashton focuses on many aspects. First of all, on the recent project to plant 130.000 trees in urban areas to help reduce pollution and global warming. While lacking ambition, he writes, it gives us a key to finding ways to combine the desire for a cleaner environment with the need to manage the people who pass away.
Here is an excerpt from Science Daily.
The impact on the atmosphere and health of fluids and materials used in the preservation and burial of bodies is a topic that is generating ever-increasing interest.
Professor Ashton notes that the desire to find more natural, simpler and more sustainable ways of celebrating and honoring the dead (I also talked about it here) can gladly accept green burials.
Offering the possibility of "being part" of a long tree-lined avenue after life can help to positively change the whole situation. More than what was done, writes the professor, in the Victorian era with the Metropolitan Burial Act of 1852. An act that accompanied the industrial revolution by placing limits on the too "easy" exhumation of previous decades.
In his “appeal” Ashton concludes: “There is an idea of what would be possible with political will and imagination. It can be seen in the recovery and redevelopment of urban routes. Making them capable of hosting green, clean burials integrated into the urban environment will help shape a new vision of the planet and our role within it."
As if to say that jogging in the morning along tree-lined avenues, and knowing that each tree represents a relative or a person who has passed away, would make us feel part of universal harmony, and would avoid the collapse of cemeteries.
