The issue of GPS and other such ideas in my opinion are simply nonsense – not any better that the wooden crosses and makers used not only in the past but today for those who can’t afford stone or metal. A large part of the reason for markers is to allow immediate family and friends a way to honor their departed. A secondary reason for markers is for folks like me who wants to find their families more than a living memory span back.

Man does not allow perpetuity – as cities grow cemeteries are dug up and relocated and the prior comentary about the European grave recyling treatment are testaments to the day when the living has no more room for the dead.

What a shame. Making a “green” statement at the end of ones days is and admirable choice, but what good are monuments if no one knows about them?

I think green funeral alternatives are a great way to combine wildlife conservation and reducing your eco-footprint and I am looking into this for my own funeral planning. I found this website http://www.agreenerfuneral.org that has a list of green funeral providers in the US. The list is still very short but it is a start I guess.

Firstly, it is naive to imagine that GPS will be future-compatible in 50 or 100 years. Who knows what will happen between now and then?

Secondly, graves that cannot easily be visited will be forgotten even faster than those “around the corner in the village cemetery”. Goodness knows, hardly anyone visits these family graves anymore – imagine when they go underwater!!

It might well be an environmentally friendly idea but in the end it is only an idea, not a workable reality.

I don’t get this concept at all. Better something like what Mr. Friese seems to be aiming at – making memorials both lasting AND environmentally-friendly.

There is no better statement of who we are than by what we leave behind.

1. Forbidding enduring markers. A natural stone marker is not environmentally-unfriendly. If gloomy Victorian cemeteries have negative associations, let’s create a new aesthetic! Time-resistent individual markers provide a subtle but important continuity and symbolize hopes of transcendence – they categorically do not hurt the earth.

A tree as marker is anonymous and short-lived. A woodland cemetery without stone markers will evolve into a beautiful but anonymous forest – not a cemetery anymore than a forgotten mass-grave in the forests of Eastern Europe. Here too families will wander directionless through beautiful forests with nothing tangible to identify loved ones with… why not an engraved boulder AND a tree?

Relying on current-technology electronic marking (e.g GPS) is naïve – Windows98 is already unusable! Moreover, a fundamental psychological difference exists between contemplating a name or image on a grave marker and electonically relocating an anonymous location with no visible connection to the person buried there.

3. Land consumption. We are 7 billion and growing. Burying us all in low-density green cemeteries will consume too much valuable arable or wild land – the needs of the living must come first. (If we want perpetual graves, not European-style recycled grave plots, space needs will be even greater.)

4. Perpetuity. The green burial concept does nothing new to guarantee the perpetuity of our graves. If land needs already threaten traditional cemeteries, what of marker-less woodland cemeteries which in a few decades will not even look like cemeteries? Another solution must be found to assure our eternal rest.

Elimination of ground pollutants in burial is the first step; the space needs for billions of green burials and the grave perpetuity questions remain. We must find ways to ensure the graves of our families rest undisturbed in perpetuity, without sacrificing the earth’s environment.

Thomas Friese
http://perpetuasgarden.org