As a child, I was fixated with Hans Christian Anderson’s story of The Little Mermaid. At the end, the mermaid disintegrates, becoming a part of the air and the water of the world. I think of this story when I think about death.

Although death is universal, our feelings surrounding death – including grief, guilt, loss, melancholy, and fear – are among the most private of human emotions. In recent years, many have experienced both private mourning and public grief surrounding the COVID-19 death-toll.

Grief was changing even before the pandemic began. Solastalgia – despair and nostalgia in response to the climate crisis – has meant a double confrontation with death. We face accelerating extinctions and disasters, and a sense of mourning for the lost and altered futures of subsequent generations.

Contemporary deathscapes – ‘landscapes of the dead’, including cemeteries and roadside memorials – are also shifting. Cyberspace – including social media, games, and dedicated websites – offers new scope for commemorating loved ones.

Climate change is bound to shape deathscapes even further, as places we associate with loved ones alter irrevocably. Indeed, it is already leading to the slow collapse of gravestones in London’s Highgate Cemetery, and increased flooding in Louisiana has decimated graveyards. Valerie Wade notes that historically Black cemeteries – along with Black material culture including photographs and recipes, which constitute enduring memories of the dead – have been disproportionately destroyed by this flooding.[1]

Whether we are buried, cremated, or donated when we die, the matter of our bodies will continue to exist in other forms. Graveyard overcrowding, and burial and cremation practices have a huge environmental cost. Cremation releases around 400kg of CO2 per body into the atmosphere whilst burial pollutes soil with embalming fluid and other toxins. Widespread changes are therefore needed when approaching death, so that we can afford to commemorate the dead while tending to our living planet.

However, in Britain, a historical reluctance to plan and build for mortality has led to inadequate preparation for these changes. In 2001, a Parliamentary Report suggested that the government’s ‘hands-off’ approach to cemeteries’ was ‘presenting a substantial obstacle to the development of public policy on cemeteries’. More recently, in 2013, the British Social Attitudes survey recorded that only 45% of respondents had ‘discussed what their wishes would be... if they didn’t have long to live.’

Christien Klaufus, who studies deathscapes across Latin America, observes conflicts and injustices in death, such as the divide in Brazilian cemeteries between ‘aristocratic’ tombs and short-term, shallow ‘pauper graves’, and the inequalities arising in Bogota, where cremation ovens in the urban Cementerio del Norte have polluted the surrounding area. ‘In a way,’ Klaufus writes, ‘deathscape planning epitomises the socio-spatial conflicts generated by rapid urbanisation’, including gentrification, segregation, privatisation of public space, and environmental pollution.[2] Just as urban planning can be used to mitigate injustices arising from urbanisation, deathscape planning is crucial in ensuring more hopeful, more sustainable and more equitable societies.

Technological developments in dealing with the dead are happening around the world. Designers are grappling with the material properties of the body to create respectful methods of disposal. In Mumbai, solar concentrators – large mirrors which direct light – have recently been installed in Dakhma, Towers of Silence, by the Parsi community in order to dessicate human remains. This replaces the ritual of laying out the dead to be consumed by carrion birds, since artificial toxins have entered their food chain and led to a steep decline in numbers. The concentrators do not require external agents or burning, and thus are in line with Zoroastrian tradition.

Academics in DeathLAB at Columbia University propose placing bodies in bioconversion vessels, generating energy in the form of light through anaerobic carbon cycling. DeathLAB envisage new deathscapes: public spaces illuminated by bioconversion vessels, with the intention of ‘desegregat[ing] the landscapes of conventional burial and cremation from active, public terrains’. Like organ donation, DeathLAB’s proposal asks that the body perform a social function, even in death. It also requires us to overcome our squeamishness about the material realities of bodies – the ‘ick factor’ as Sandy Sullivan, a proponent of resomation, which uses pressurised water to dispose of human remains, calls it. Resomation itself, already employed in North America, and hopefully becoming more common elsewhere, has a far smaller environmental impact than conventional burial or cremation.

In Malaysia, Mohamad Reza Mohamed Afla advocates the planning of green spaces in which the dead can be buried, and the living can walk and sit peacefully. He recommends the building of park cemeteries, with trees and extensive green spaces, which could also ‘serve as a natural habitat to small wildlife’ and ‘regulate the local weather and mitigate extreme urban climate.’ Afla also advocates for more accessible burial grounds: with multiple entrances, and an improved pedestrian network facilitating wheelchair users’ access to all graves. This would allow intimate private mourning close to individual graves, whilst also opening the park cemetery out as a public space.

Elsewhere, Australia’s Other Architects have proposed reforested cemeteries, replacing headstone with trees and traditional burial with natural burial, with bodies buried directly in the soil without embalming fluid or coffins. These forested ‘Burial Belts’ would loop around Australian cities, ‘halt[ing] further development and protect[ing] agricultural land and remnant habitat on the other side’.[3]

The sociologist Richard Sennett writes that, ‘[c]ities do not build linearly over time: their shapes twist and turn as historical events alter the ways people live in them.’[4] He observes the importance of urban planning in creating spaces which are liveable and equitable. The same is true of sustainable, enduring deathscapes which allow for collective as well as personal grief. Take Nunhead Cemetery, initially a private graveyard consecrated in 1840. Abandoned and overgrown when it was bought by Southwark Council in the 1970s, has slowly been renovated and now serves the dead, the living, and the environment. It is still an operating burial ground, with clearings in the trees providing intimate spaces for mourning; but it is also a designated Local Nature Reserve where vines and trees grow upwards out of old graves. There are 207 species of insects, including a large number of rare beetles and 12 types of ladybird, living within its 52 acres. Through these twists and turns of incidental and intentional regreening, it continues to serve the people and wildlife of London.

Death is something we all share. When we die, we may leave grief, memories, children, buildings, cities in our wake. We will almost certainly leave bodies. As a society, in which climate change is also a common certainty, we need to plan for death by confronting the importance of public and private grief in our plans for the future. Through actively planning our deathscapes, and through accepting greener funerary practices – from natural burial, to resomation, to anaerobic carbon cycling – we can regreen existing cemeteries, and create new spaces which serve the dead, the living, and the planet.