What if we could solve Australia’s burial crisis by healing its natural environment?
The increasing scarcity of developable land within Australian cities has lead to an urgent shortage of burial space. At the same time, the edges of Australian cities have become progressively denuded of vegetation. Land clearing rates in Australia are amongst the highest in the developed world, and the livestock industry will alone consume 3 million hectares of native bushland between 2010 and 2030.
Let’s reimagine how we dispose of our dead not as an end in itself, but as a reaffirmation of our place within a finite ecology shared by all living things.
Burial Belt rethinks the environmental impact, logistics and experience of burial. Responding to dwindling reserves of urban cemetery space and rampant deforestation, this project envisions the gradual acquisition and transformation of sparse grazing land on the city fringe to create beautiful landscapes for natural burial.
In this proposal, burial plots are ‘planted’ in the earth along with native vegetation, allowing re-forestation to occur with animals and insects gradually reoccupying the area. Cemetery sites are managed like natural parkland, complete with low-impact walkways, with timber periodically harvested to capture atmospheric carbon and create space for clearings.
Over a short span of time, burial spaces would be subsumed by forest. Eventually, individual cemetery sites could join together as a continuous green ‘belt,’ linking areas of remnant habitat and constraining urban and industrial sprawl. While those interred in this progressive model of burial ground would have no lasting monuments and would slowly decompose into the soil, leaving little trace behind, burial spaces would be protected in perpetuity, providing a permanent covenant over the land that preserves the forest for eternity.
Often misunderstood as an environmentally-friendly process, cremation accounts for more than two-thirds of all Australian interments. But every cremation requires the energy equivalent of 40 litres of petrol, while emitting concentrated pollutants like mercury and dioxin. Dispensing with headstones, hardscaping, coffins and preservatives, natural burial minimises ecological disturbance, with plants and wildlife supplanting the dense rows of graves found in traditional cemeteries. Not only is natural burial significantly better for the environment than cremation or conventional burial, its cost is comparable to cremation and cheaper than other burial options.
Burial Belt is a big-picture idea for simultaneously addressing burial space shortages, providing a replacement land use for carbon-intensive livestock grazing, reversing deforestation, filtering emissions, introducing an affordable ecological alternative to cremation, limiting urban sprawl, and improving the enjoyment of burial spaces for all by offering green, vibrant, majestic and calm landscapes that grow and change over time.
Widely applicable for cities across Australia and around the world, the implementation of this idea has been demonstrated at Sydney’s Camden Park, an area particularly vulnerable to the loss of ecological habitat and agricultural land due to suburban growth. Using commemorative spaces to plant permanent forests and deter rapacious development, Burial Belt is intended as a final safeguard for Sydney’s fragile environment.
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Burial Belt by Other Architects
Exhibited at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale
Project team: David Neustein, Grace Mortlock, Lindsay Mulligan, Rowan Lear, Jack Gillbanks, Sora Graham
