ABSTRACT
For many, death marks a final moment: an embodied end from which nothing returns. However, as Gaian principles begin to emerge in our social and political epistemologies, previously conceived-as-dead matter becomes re-animated as part of a vital network of ecological exchanges. The process of ‘natural burial’ actively yearns for such a re-animation, purporting to encourage the generation of a ‘natural’ landscape through the application of ‘ecological principles’. This approach to burial hopes to avoid the ecological harms that are associated with processes such as cremation, with its high carbon intensity, and graveyard burials, with their associated ‘sterile ecologies’, and marks a final effort to ‘die well’ in a damaged planet. This chapter explores a new form of burial practice that is becoming increasingly prominent in the Anthropocene – reflecting shifting cultural relationships to the surrounding environment – and the ecologies that emerge with it: necroecologies. Through this discussion, the chapter outlines how an ecological framework may offer important insights into the place-making process of burial, and the important cultural relationships that people have with sites of burial and processes of memorialisation.
