Stanley Spencer; The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7.
‘In the four or five million years since their development, humans have colonized virtually every terrestrial environment of the planet. Humans everywhere are virtually the same biologically (in spite of visible but superficial differences) but have been able to adapt to the enormous environmental diversity of the planet through culture, an incredibly flexible and adaptive mechanism that other animals lack. Thus, humans have been a very successful species. Human activity has a wide range of impacts on the environment, however, from exceedingly minor to catastrophic. Today, human activities are having huge impacts on the very environment on which we depend, ultimately threatening our own existence. Understanding and dealing with these challenges is a daunting but essential task’
Mark Q. Sutton and E. N. Anderson
1 Garden cemeteries
There is no better place to contemplate on humanity’s unique flexible and adaptive cultural mechanism than the cultural diversity of a graveyard. Culture brings people together from varying backgrounds who all share a similar belief system. Thoughts on death and what may or may not come next have varied greatly from culture to culture, with each group expressing unique opinions. However, every individual’s belief will vary and can be on a spectrum even if they identify with a certain practice.
Urban cemeteries were conceived and designed in the 19th century as gardens of the dead and as memorials to local people. They were a major cultural adaptation in the West to urbanisation with respect to disposal of the dead. There was little dispute about the means. Burial was the norm; cremation a peculiar foreign custom. The difficulty lay in finding room in expanding cities for an ever-increasing number of corpses. The burgeoning population of cities was filling up its small churchyards, burial grounds and vaults. This need for burial space was met by large planned graveyards combining architecture, sculpture and landscape. It makes these cemeteries like no other place in the historic environment, where culture and ecology may be seen as one conservation management system.
Now, the inscription on memorials, the design of monuments, the choice of stones, the architecture of building and landscape design have all been adapted to shed light on past social customs and cultural events. They combine to make a cemetery an irreplaceable historical resource and an important record of local social history. Each cemetery is also the biography of its surrounding community. Today, they are valued as places for quiet reflection, as semi wild green spaces managed for human well being.
The anthropologist Julian Steward (1902-1972) coined the term ‘cultural ecology’ to describe the ‘ways in which cultural change is induced by adaptation to the environment’. Developing this definition and referring more specifically to ‘culture’ as expressly manifested in artistic works, cultural ecology is an interdisciplinary educational framework to unite and mobilise people who share the conviction that radical and widespread cultural change to bring people and nature together is vital to combat the climate emergency.
In particular, a garden cemetery is an educational example of cultural ecology. It is a small segment of the biosphere for reflection and action. It is part of Earth’s open system, which because it relies on outside sources such as the sun, will eventually have an end. The big picture is that stars die because they exhaust their nuclear fuel. However, death by total obliteration of life, was not an end for the majority of Victorians, but the beginning of a new future. As the Victorian Tennyson wrote in his poem “Crossing the Bar”:
‘I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the Bar’.
“Crossing the bar” refers to the death of a mariner. The phrase has its origin in the fact that most rivers and bays develop a sandbar across their entrances, and ‘crossing the bar’ meant leaving the safety of the harbor for the unknown.” The moral lesson of this poem for Victorians was that we should not fear or mourn death because when we die we are going to meet our “Pilot”, alias God, on a voyage to eternity and resurrection. The Victorians who bought or leased plots in their local municipal graveyard believed in the biblical stories regarding the nature of resurrection, such as;
“Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.”
John 5:28-29
Thus, belief in bodily resurrection, which reflects the Biblical resurrection of Jesus in the flesh and bone, together with Christian belief in a ‘world without end’, are both against scientific understandings of the cosmos where matter is finite. What about the promise that death and judgement will be the final destiny of the soul and of humankind? According to scripture, Jesus was resurrected in flesh and bone;
“Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
The belief in resurrection and ascension to Heaven, which sustained the graveyard mourners was accompanied by a growing interest in séances and spiritualism as a way to remain in contact with the dead.
Jesus’ tomb was found empty and the post-resurrection Jesus that was encountered was not a spiritual body but a physical ecological one. Thus, the dualism of body and soul, which allows for resurrection of the soul in popular Christianity today, counters both the Biblical and ecological narrative.
We can reflect on these contradictions whilst musing in a graveyard where, according to Nathanial Hawthorne, romance, poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow. Graveyards are a place where different human concerns about bereavement meet: sadness, loss, history, tragedy, and uncertainty for the future.
2 Making a garden cemetery
John Claudius Loudon had a major impact on the design of the cemeteries within the Victorian period. His book ‘On the laying out, planting and managing of cemeteries‘ (1843)
was the “goto manual” of the period. He reasoned that the most efficient layout of burial plots was a rectangular grid system, connected by a series of tree-lined drives and paths. Where the cemetery site was hilly, he recommended broad sweeping drives to nullify the gradients, resulting in a more undulating layout.
Loudon expected grand cemeteries to attract a ‘certain class of people’ so he recommended a boundary wall 10 to 12 feet high, in addition to a main keeper’s lodge to keep undesirables out. He also suggested a combination of chapels at the centre, including both an Anglican one and Non-conformist one. He admired the principles of Jewish and Quaker burial practices, such as the practice of burial as soon as possible after death, and a prohibition on limited burial rights, and used them to advocate against the re-use of graves. He deplored the use of lead lined coffins, due to the problems of methane gas arising from putrefaction in a closed space. “Even in some of the public catacombs of the new London cemeteries explosions have been known to take place, and the undertaker was obliged to be sent in to resolder the coffin”.
He was a strong advocate for certain types of planting too. Concerned about the annual leaf fall of leaves from deciduous trees, he recommended pines, cypress, yew, and juniper, particularly those with “conical shapes, Evergreen trees have been associated with places of burial from time immemorial because they symbolise notions about the ephemerality of human endeavours and the sublime power of nature.
The horrific state of parish churchyards particularly in London had led to their widescale closure in the early decades of the 19th century and the creation of a huge wave of new privately-run cemeteries outside urban boundaries. Most of these new burial grounds were being laid out in the style of parks but Loudon was highly critical of this. He argued that cemeteries should combine moods of quiet repose, solemnity and grandeur and have a mixture of architecture and landscape that was instantly recognisable, and never be mistaken for a public park or a country residence. Cemeteries should also be considered to have a moral and educational purpose, where “architecture, beauty, scale, and style were not only connected with aesthetics , but with fitness for function”.
Everything about the design of the new cemeteries, from the flora and fauna to the monuments and pathways, was aimed at eliciting feelings, and awaken memories of the dead. Cemeteries would thus in turn encourage people to think about their own mortality and place in the world, or as Loudon himself put it, “the delight with which we recollect the traces of their lives, blends itself insensibly with the emotions which the scenery excites”.
It was the intention of the designers that the very purpose of the cemeteries was to be an amenity for the surrounding population. Although most fell into disrepair, ironically today they are still valuable within their communities. The formation of ‘Friends’ groups and Restoration Societies has given people the chance to volunteer and contribute to their community’s use of a repurposed urban space. Most cemeteries have now been re-instated to commemorate the dead and are still religiously active. Many are maintained to support local fauna and flora, providing a haven for wildlife in the middle of a city. Above all, Rutherford cemeteries remain a valuable cross curricular educational resource for architecture, ecology, history, geology and other subjects”, which was in fact what Loudon had always envisioned. He was also concerned that burials should be conducted;
“—– in such a manner as that their decomposition, and return to the earth from which they sprung, shall not prove injurious to the living; either by affecting their health, or shocking their feelings, opinions, or prejudices. The secondary purpose was thought, or ought to be the improvement of the moral sentiments and general taste of all classes, and more especially of the great masses of society”.
Translating this into present times, graveyards can be places where people learn to locate themselves in cultural ecology to equilibrate society with changing times.
3 Heart-ware.
Cardiff’s Cathays Cemetery, originally known as New Cemetery, occupies 30 acres of arable farmland purchased by local government on the 7th March 1859 from Wyndham William Lewis of the nearby Heath Estate, at a cost of £4,500. The ground was laid out and chapels built during that year. The cemetery was consecrated 28th October 1859 by the Bishop of Llandaff. As a garden cemetery, Cathays Cemetery (Fig 1) has a substantial tree collection, which began with planting in the early 1860s.
Fig 1
Trees are an important part of a graveyard’s ecological assets. There are also very large numbers of listed buildings in cemeteries, according to the National Monuments Records including lodges and houses, boundary walls, gates, mortuary chapels, cemetery chapels, tombs, headstones and mausoleums. Taken together these cultural assets define a community’s heart-ware and there is a strong case to be made that cemeteries have especial architectural and landscape interest because they have often been trapped in a time-warp, and have not been modified, adapted, overlaid, or even destroyed, as has so much else in the historic environment.
The spirituality pedestal that the brain currently occupies used to belong to the heart. For much of history, the heart was the seat of what made humans human. As a mental toolkit, heart-ware enables us to reflect and think about where we are going, why we are going there and what really matters. It allows us to explore how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency. Heart-ware supports a wide range of human concerns, including,
- material culture and spiritual teachings;
- sustainability and the spiritual perspective;
- traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality;
- notions of meaningful design;
- and how particular material things can have deeper, symbolic significance.
Heart-ware also supports reflections on cultural issues, such as the language of design and its relationship to wisdom, social disparity and traditional sacred practices. This is why the heart is so often used metaphorically in spiritual writings to encapsulate a primary source of so much that happens in our spiritual lives. It also explains why love is associated with the heart, as authentic love comes from the “core” of our being, not something that is on the “surface”, and reintroduces us to our physical and spiritual selves..
The path to spiritual integrity lies through the way we use material things. Therefore, every aspect of our relation to what is around us is significant. The challenge for us as human beings is to work out how we live humanly, taking our part in a larger and more mysterious set of processes. It’s not about trying to stand above or outside the world that makes us real. Life is about addressing critical aspects of dominant material cultures and the associated devastating production-consumption systems. These systems offer new insights for designers to explore alternative approaches to the world of objects, including ones that can lead to human fulfillment and well being. In this connection, economic development can lead to the loss of one’s social structure and culture causing a grief reaction, described by Eisenbruch as cultural bereavement. Detachment from nature involves the loss of the familiar, including language (especially colloquial and dialect), attitudes, values, social structures and support of migration. Eisenbruch has defined extreme cultural bereavement as;
“the experience of the uprooted person – or group – resulting from loss of social structures, cultural values and self-identity: the person – or group – continues to live in the past, is visited by supernatural forces from the past while asleep or awake, suffers feelings of guilt over abandoning culture and homeland, feels pain if memories of the past begin to fade, but finds constant images of the past (including traumatic images) intruding into daily life, yearns to complete obligations to the dead, and feels stricken by anxieties, morbid thoughts, and anger that mar the ability to get on with daily life“
Cultural bereavement is at the centre of the loss of biodiversity so it should be an integral part of conservation management where it carries spiritual valuations of local communities into the planning process..
4 What now?
As beautiful as the Victorian Garden Cemeteries were, and some still are, they became a victim of changing times. More recent changes have given them another role to play – that of contributing to the recording of local social and economic history’. This is important in the context of the need to educate for the adoption of a new economic system, which only takes from Earth what the planet can regenerate. From this point of view, it has been argued that the range of environmental and social benefits that urban cemeteries potentially deliver might have a great educational impact on the population at large as a resource for lifelong learning. Fundamentally, graveyards now have a function as communicative symbolic places where an individual can construct and express an individual and collective ethnic and cultural identity which centers on one or more features of its heart-ware.
Because a burial ground’s cultural assets bridge the gap between past, present and future, it is a toolkit for the construction of individual and collective identity. The deceased and the bereaved become anchored in a specific common culture, in a specific value system and world-view, which is expected to persist, regardless of the demise of its singular constituents. Central to this argument is the graveyard’s urban location and its expression of the ecological principle that makes it imperative for humanity to operate a globally sound ecological economy. Defined as a circular economy (Fig 2 ) it is a more natural alternative to a traditional linear economy of capitalism i.e. a sequential process of make/use/dispose. A circular economy keeps resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them while in use, then finally regenerating products and materials at the end of the life of each service. The educational model is the decarbonising ecosystem, which in an urbanised human culture is visible in fragmented green spaces. Cemeteries are metaphors for the linear global economy, which is causing humanity so much grief because of its emphasis on consuming fresh resources to make things that we eventually bury or burn. Managing grass above graves by hand-scything (Fig 3) as a hay meadow is a metaphorical circular economy, generating increased biodiversity and a meditative experience for the community volunteer workforce.
Fig 2 Two kinds of economy
Fig 3 Meadow scything workshop. Hampstead Graveyard.
Municipal cemeteries are fragments of the biosphere typically located within towns and cities and might be larger and older than many municipal parks. Within this urban context, cemeteries can play a key role modeling the infrastructure of cities and deliver a wide range of ecosystem services (ESs). ESs can be defined as
- supporting (e.g. soil formation, photosynthesis, primary production, nutrient and water cycling);
- provisioning (e.g. food, fibre, fuel, freshwater, genetic resources, natural pharmaceuticals and chemicals),
- regulating (ecosystem processes including regulation of air and water quality, climate, pest and disease)
- and cultural (including cognitive development, spiritual enrichment, recreation and aesthetic experiences) (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005).
Climate change is challenging us to reconsider how we manage urban green spaces to deliver more robust and resilient cities. In future, lawns, which are now a major management feature of tidy graveyards, may become an unaffordable luxury (see, Webster et al., 2017) Even the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who pioneered the development of the Lawn Cemetery after the carnage of the First World War, have been experimenting in its removal as part of their climate change strategy (CWGC, 2017). Large, urban cemeteries could therefore play an important role in helping to move public acceptance towards a less intensively managed landscape that is aesthetically more messy and less manicured. If this can be achieved within a highly invested landscape where communities have chosen to bury their dead, we might ask what contribution it could have, for example, in changing attitudes towards the acceptance of less intensively managed public parks in order to deliver greater ESs. For those who might once have chosen a traditional grave for their deceased, the presence of natural burial or scattered remains of cremations within the urban cemetery might also provide an opportunity to experience and benefit from the different spatial and temporal qualities and integration with nature that they afford. This process of education could be promoted as part of the Local Agenda 21.
‘Local Agenda 21 (LA21) refers to the general goal set for local communities by Chapter 28 of the ‘action plan for sustainable development’ adopted at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Chapter 28 is an appeal to ‘local authorities’ to engage in a dialogue for sustainable development with the members of their constituencies.
- Local Agenda 21 is the process that aims to involve local people and communities in the design of a way of life that can be sustained and thus protect the quality of life for future generations. It originates from the Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992 which led to the agreement of an Agenda 21 document detailing a series of strategies for action worldwide.
- Local Agenda 21 is a process that aims to integrate the social, environmental and economic aspects of development in order that all future development is ‘sustainable’. It requires all of us to consider the effects – on the local economy, the local environment and the local community – of every policy and project and then to seek a solution that achieves a realistic balance.
- Local Agenda 21 is a highly democratic, consensus-building and empowering process. It seeks to strengthen the role of all major groups in society, including children, youth and women. It sets out to develop and build on partnerships between groups in the local community and to make linkages between parallel processes such as Social Needs and Health for All policy work.
- Local Agenda 21 is essentially about ‘quality of life’: which is perhaps a more friendly term to describe its primary goal. It is a process that asks those of us in local government to work in partnership with the local community to develop a strategy comprising a series of action plans which will set out how we will work together towards the goal of sustainable development in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Chapter 28 explicitly states that the whole local community should be actors in an LA21 process, including both typical citizens and major stakeholder groups. In practice, however, there are quite a lot of variations between LA21 processes. Although stakeholder groups are involved in the majority of Local Agenda 21 processes worldwide, under- or over- representation of certain groups presents a danger to the quality of decision-making. From the worldwide survey one can conclude that local government is the most important formal partner (60%), followed by individuals (57%), community groups (46%), NGOs (46%) and the business/ private sector (42%). The groups least commonly recognised as formal partners include ethnic minorities and trade unions.
Taking this route, the Environmental Scrutiny Committee of the City and County of Cardiff produced a document in December 1999 to progress the Local Agenda 21 in Cardiff. The LA21 has now become focussed on the Local Agenda 2030, with its target set on decarbonisation of the city’s economy by 2030. Cardiff today is a THREE planet city: If everyone in the world consumed natural resources and generated carbon dioxide at the rate people do in Cardiff, the city would need three planets to support it. This is not sustainable or equitable to those who Cardiff’s citizens share the planet with. Cardiff’s aspiration is to become a One Planet City by 2030, living and thriving within Earth’s environmental means. Embedding Agenda 21 in the management of a municipal cemetery is an important objective for Friends groups that are important champions of their local cemeteries. Many started as pressure groups concerned about neglect or development threats. They are often involved in recording, research, producing leaflets, guided walks, fund raising, and practical conservation tasks. It is a small step to mobilise a graveyard’s heart-ware to promote cultural ecology of a small segment of the biosphere as a model of future world development.
The National Federation of Cemetery Friends (NFCF) is a support organisation for all Friends groups. They offer guidance on starting up a new group.
There is also the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe (ASCE).
Caring for God’s Acre also provides advice on organising volunteer tasks.
Organisations like TCV (The Conservation Volunteers) can help with advice on conservation projects, tools, health and safety for volunteers, and insurance, and publish handbooks on various topics.
5 Epilogue
“It is a fine spring morning in early May. I am standing next to the largest of the veteran ash trees in Abney Park Cemetery with my camera aimed towards a “rot hole” in the hope of catching a glimpse of the rare hoverfly Pocota personata. As I lean my right hand against the tree, to steady the lens under low light conditions, I can feel the contrast between the rough texture of the exposed bark and softer patches of moss. Looking more closely at the tree trunk I can see that it is teeming with life: single files of ants snake their way across the surface, some carrying fragments of leaves or other organic matter, whilst shafts of sunlight reveal small dancing clouds of midges. This living landscape is comprised of an infinite series of intersecting micro‐realms where moss meets vision amid a jumble of rot and decay: an endless process of breaking down, circulating, and re‐emergence”. Mathew Gandy, 2019.
These sudden eye-opening moments generate biosphere ecoscopes. (Fig 4)
Fig 4 Mind map of a collection of biosphere ecoscopes. They are starting points for observers assembling a personal body of knowledge.
