Burial Pods Could Turn Cemeteries Into Forests

[Agnosticsherbet]

Burial Pods Could Turn Cemeteries Into Forests
Cemeteries take up a lot of space, and cremating one person can take as much energy as that person used in a month back when they were alive.
Now, two Italian designers want to transform tombstone-filled cemeteries into memorial forests. According to the Capsula Mundi website, the idea is to place the body in fetal position into an egg-shaped capsule made of starch plastic. Once the pod is buried (like a seed), a tree is planted on top and subsequently cared for by relatives and friends.
“As designers we have asked ourselves what is our role in front of a society distant from nature, satisfied and over loaded with objects,” Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel write. “No designer ever thinks of a coffin but this becomes a way of reflecting on how distant we are from mother nature.”

***SNIP***

Several decomposable coffins and biodegradable urns that allow you to return to the earth are already available. Depending on the cemetery’s restrictions, you can pick from paper, wicker, or coconut shells with compacted peat and cellulose. You can even be buried wearing fabric embroidered with mushroom spores. For more ideas about what to do with yourself when you’re dead—from artificial reefs to diamonds—make sure to check out our handy guide here.

We all have to go sometime. As much a I like visiting old graveyards, this is the way I think I would like to go. Instead of a million graves topped with granite, we have a million trees. It also saves the energy of cremating a million people.

Flesh to trees is green.

[yeoman6987]

1. I don't know

I can see the positives, but my family is buried at an old church and I can go back to relatives who died in the late 1700's. to me that is valuable too. However to each its own.

[NaturalHigh]

3. I fully understand that point of view too.

[Agnosticsherbet]

5. I don't anyone is going to go and dig up the old graves.

But trees, too, endure for centuries or more. And a suitable marker could be made as part of the forest.

I think this is an excellent solution to the problem with vast numbers of dead and the destruction of forests.

[jwirr]

8. That is one drawback - there is a cemetery in Iowa like that and when we go back to visit the whole

family go together and most of the graves sites in the cemetery contain one or more of our relatives. However, I can see how this idea could be incorporated with the about idea. So mom's ashes are buried under her tree and a memorial plaque is placed at the foot of the tree. As it is we have planted her favorite flower - lilies - on her site.

I think that incorporating the idea of food could also be part of this - my dad would have wanted an apple tree.

[NaturalHigh]

2. Cool.

I think this is a great idea.

[Politicalboi]

4. I would rather be cremated

I don't like the idea of being a bug fest. But I would also like my ashes to end up a tree.

[Agnosticsherbet]

6. I think we evovled to be bug fests.

And bugs evolved to feast on us.

That aspect doesn't bother me, long as I don't have to see a decomposing corpse.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. Excellent idea. I would like to be buried that way.

“You do not have a soul. You ARE a soul. You have a body”

I am comfortable seeing death as simply leaving my once useful corporeal body, and it seems fair to "dispose" of it in a sensible manner.

[sue4e3]

9. A forest of the dead, that brings some interesting thoughts to mind