How to Be Reborn as a Tree

When I was 16 years old, my father’s mother, whom we called Meemaw, gave up the ghost. We all flew down to Fort Worth, where, per her wishes, my dad hosted a wake filled with live music, stiff cocktails, and loose stories. (Meemaw was, among other things, a former vaudeville performer and the sister of a legendary jazz drummer.)

The next morning, we drove to the cemetery. In the surreal haze of my grief-softened, hangover-warped brain, the place struck me as bleak and strange and sad, but not in a gothic or gloomy way. It billed itself as a “garden of memories,” but upon entering, I saw there was nothing gardenlike about it. It was essentially one huge lawn, composed of scratchy, heat-tolerant Texas grasses, like the upper surface of an enormous kitchen sponge. Here and there, far from Meemaw’s grave, a few small trees attempted, unsuccessfully, to quell the rage of a Texas sun. The only flowers I saw were made of plastic, and the only animals, other than us, were flies.

The day turned out to be a fiasco, in a darkly comedic way that my grandmother, who was an inveterate smartass, would probably have appreciated. First the florist failed to arrive, so there were no flowers. Then, looking over the headstone, my sister Alexis noticed that someone had gotten the date wrong. It said, erroneously, that Meemaw had died at the age of 95, rather than 85. There was some discussion that day of having it fixed, but it was ultimately deemed too much trouble. The error was written, as they say, in stone.

At the site of Meemaw’s grave, each of us read a short letter we had composed, telling her how much we loved her and how deeply we would miss her. Then we placed the letters inside the grave. While we went about this solemn little ritual, the gravedigger, an off-puttingly upbeat guy in his thirties, stood off to the side, watching us with evident curiosity.

After we had all finished, he spoke up.

“Now I know it’s not really my place, but I had a suggestion for y’all,” the chipper gravedigger said. “I’ve got some Ziploc bags there in my truck. What if you were to put the letters in them Ziplocs, and that way, if the young one there”—and here, he pointed to me—“ever wants to come back with kids of his own one day and read these letters again, they’d still be intact.”

My dad, who had inherited his mother’s preternaturally razory wit, thought this suggestion over for a moment, then replied: “When my mother went to the grocery store, she always chose paper over plastic. So I think we’ll just stick with that.”

At the time, what struck me as farcical about this suggestion was the notion that I would one day want to return here, kids in tow, to dig up my own grandmother’s grave. (One can only imagine the stares this would draw from the gentle people of Fort Worth.) But now, with the benefit of two decades of hindsight and a lot of time spent thinking about land and human bodies and how the two commingle, what seems even more absurd to me is the idea that I—or anyone, really—would ever want to visit that hot, dead, rot-resistant landscape ever again.

America’s death-management system, concludes a sharply worded 2012 report published in The Berkeley Planning Journal, is “ecologically problematic.” Harsher words spring to mind: wasteful, expensive, poisonous, grotesque. Every year in the United States, enough steel is buried in caskets to build the Golden Gate bridge. Enough wood is wasted to build four million homes. The embalming fluid alone could fill 40 swimming pools. The money we spend on burials could fund the EPA twice over. Hell, it could almost fund NASA. And more corpses are being made every year. As the bodies pile up, the cost of burying them will go up, and their graves will continue to crowd out the few remaining trees and other plants that make cemeteries feel like anything other than what they are: repositories of human remains, hidden away like so much toxic waste—sealed, turfed, and soon forgotten. This is not how cemeteries once were, and it is not how they are meant to be. It is simply the unsatisfying compromise that has been struck among capitalism, organized religion, and the law.

Consider an alternative. Instead of tucking chemically mummified bodies beneath unnaturally green lawns, imagine that we placed our dead in living forests, with each family purchasing a small swath of land near a tree. The surviving family members would periodically revisit that forest, to commune with their ancestors—now atomically reborn, as it were, as trees—but also simply for the pleasure of being there. Over time, in the minds of the surviving family members, that land would then become sacralized.

If this had been our tradition all along—if every cemetery in America were a wild forest instead of a mown lawn—those forests would now cover roughly one million acres, an area larger than Yosemite. A burial would cost less, it would feel better, and people would develop a deeper emotional relationship with wild land.

Happily, this is no mere thought experiment; it is already taking place. Over the past few years, I have visited a number of these forest cemeteries—one in Japan, one in Germany, one in Australia, and one in San Francisco—which are finding greener, wilder solutions to the ancient task of returning ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

One foggy, cool summer day, I drove three hours north from Oakland—yellow farms on one side of the road; the distant ocean, stone-blue, on the other—to arguably the world’s most successful forest cemetery. As I neared Mendocino, a stand of redwood trees engulfed me, their mammoth, fire-scarred trunks pressed right up against the road.

In a modernist wooden building amid that forest I met Sandy Gibson, the founder and CEO of Better Place Forests. He’s a hale, bearded Canadian with a confident, upbeat, slightly bro-y mien. Which is to say, he looked nothing like an undertaker, and this place looked nothing like a cemetery.

Gibson, who grew up in Ontario, lost both of his parents at the age of 11, which forced him to think hard about mortality in ways few kids do. He recalls standing at his mother’s grave one day in his twenties and seeing a bus pass by in the reflection of her gravestone. In that moment, he thought, “There’s got to be a better place.” That same day, he says, he called his longtime business partner with a new startup idea.

If this sounds less like the genesis of a cemetery and more like the tidy origin story of a disruptive tech company, that’s because Gibson is very much That Kind of Guy. He believes he has created a better, cheaper, greener—and, just as important, scalable—alternative to a $20 billion industry. Since founding the company in 2015, it has ballooned in size: Better Place now has nine burial forests across six states. Gibson hoped to one day build woodland cemeteries—and later, desert cemeteries and mountain cemeteries, perhaps even swamp cemeteries—all across the country. (Note: since my visit, Gibson has stepped down as CEO, but Better Place remains in operation.)

Gibson led me on a hike along mulched trails through a second-growth stand of redwoods, Doug firs, and tan oaks. It was one of those spectral Norcal summer mornings; seaborn fog phased through the branches high above our heads. Each tree was marked with a different color of ribbon, indicating its price, which ranged from roughly $1,000 to upwards of $30,000 dollars, depending on the size of the tree. The most expensive option is to purchase an ancient tree (what Better Place calls a “monument tree”) for a single individual. Whole families could pitch in to buy a tree where they will all one day be spread together, which Gibson punnily calls a “family tree.” Or, for a more affordable option, people can opt to share a “community tree” with strangers.

Once the ashes are placed in a narrow trench and covered with soil, the area is marked with a polished bronze marker bearing the name of the dead: a tiny, tasteful headstone. Better Place also offers to make a “digital memorial” for each of its clients—a 12-minute autobiographical video—to serve as a 21st-century improvement upon the (typically, dry, cautious, and hastily written) obituary.

The fact that Better Place’s clients are willing to set aside hours of their time to talk about their lives—and grapple with their own mortality—highlights one of the peculiarities of forest burials. Arranging a funeral is typically a decision people put off until after their death, leaving their spouses and kids to deal with it. (When my husband recently asked his mother, a Polish émigré living in Australia, what she would like him to do with her body when she’s dead, she replied, “Eh, I don’t care. Just don’t flush my ashes down the toilet.”) However, the proprietors of forest cemeteries unanimously told me that the vast majority of their clients were reserving plots for themselves. The idea seems to bring them comfort, even a measure of joy. Gibson says he has come to realize Better Place is not really in the business of death; it’s in the business of creating narratives. It gives its customers the chance to write “the ending of their own story,” rather than having their families or society make it for them.

I later talked with one such customer, named Debra Lee, who is in her sixties. When she began describing the experience of picking out her tree—a lonely, crooked old pine, growing in a quiet corner of the forest—she started to cry. “It was one of the most meaningful and beautiful experiences of my life,” she said. “It was just awesome, just fucking awesome. And I feel so grateful that someone made that kind of peace of mind possible for me.”

The forest burial movement was born in England, in 1993, before slowly spreading to Sweden, Germany, and beyond. It took root in the U.S. in 1998 when Billy and Kimberley Campbell founded Ramsey Creek, a natural burial site in South Carolina. When I spoke with Billy over the phone, he said that many of the locals were initially resistant to it, believing it was some kind of neo-pagan ritual or a Trojan horse for the environmental agenda. But when he explained what green burials actually involved—a simple, no frills interment in a pine box or cotton shroud in a natural environment—many conservatives came to see it as an expression of their values as well. “It seems foreign, but especially here in the southern Appalachians, this was the tradition,” Billy says.

For centuries in many areas of the United States, rural families buried their dead either wrapped in a cloth shroud or enclosed in a plain wooden casket, often in the forests or meadows bordering their farms. There was no need for formaldehyde, no makeup, no plastic-lined steel or composite wood caskets. After all, hunters, farmers, and ranchers looked death in the face every day; the brute fact of decay was no surprise to them.

Wealthier families tended to have a different relationship to death, land, and rot. They preferred to be buried in churchyards, close to the Lord (and the respectability He confers). In the 19th century, wealthy families would spring for embalming, which created a better-looking (and better-smelling) corpse. Some opted for lead coffins instead of wooden ones, while others bought marble tombs that sat above ground, sealed off from the soil. Over time, the rural poor gradually adopted the burial habits of the rich—chemically preserving bodies, trucking them into town, and burying them in genteel graveyards beneath ever more ornate headstones. Meanwhile, in one of those odd reversals that frequently crop up throughout history, a small but growing number of wealthy urbanites started to crave a form of burial that felt wilder and more natural—something not unlike what the rural poor had been practicing for centuries.

The historian Aaron Sachs traces a pivotal chapter of this long history in his book Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition. Sachs invited me to take a hike through a cemetery in Ithaca, New York, so he could illustrate his argument. We entered through an old stone gate, walking up along tree-shaded paths between headstones whetted thin by time. The first thing I noticed was how much more peaceful I felt here than in other cemeteries I’ve walked through. That, Sachs explained, was by design. “The early people who established cemeteries like this were going for a kind of deep connection to nature and natural cycles,” he said.

By the 1830s, the custom of churchyard burials was becoming increasingly untenable. The limited space forced undertakers to adopt a rather callous system—still prevalent throughout much of the world—in which families had to pay a regular fee to keep their ancestors interred in the churchyard. Once the family stopped paying, someone would dig up the body and heave it into a mass grave, opening up the plot for someone else. ( In some parts of Europe, the disinterred bones were arranged into intricate patterns lining the walls of ossuaries and catacombs—creating literal body art.)

However, a bigger problem arose if everyone did keep paying. Because cities were growing rapidly, churchyards became more and more crowded—with the caskets of the wealthy being stacked one atop the last and the mass graves of the poor growing ever more massive—until they simply could not hold any more corpses. The relatively minuscule yard beside Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, where Alexander Hamilton is buried, is believed to house more than 125,000 bodies, even though it contains just 100 grave markers. Repeatedly throughout history, the retaining walls of old churchyards have collapsed, sending bones spilling out into city streets and neighboring basements.

This grim situation gave rise to the “garden cemetery” movement in the mid-19th century. These new cemeteries, on the outskirts of cities and towns rather than in the center, were designed to evoke rural landscapes, complete with shady trees, open meadows, and winding pathways. The proponents of garden cemeteries saw them as facilitating a return to nature—both for the dead and for the living. In a beautiful speech commemorating the opening of a new garden cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “We give our earth to earth. We will not jealously guard a few atoms under immense marbles, selfishly and impossibly sequestering it from the vast circulations of Nature…; every family chooses its own clump of trees; and we lay the corpse in these leafy colonnades.”

To Emerson, the garden cemetery was sacred in a way no churchyard could ever be. Two decades earlier, while ambling through Mount Auburn, the nation’s first garden cemetery, Emerson had felt he was communing directly with “the noble Earth on which I was born.” All across the nation, beautiful garden cemeteries soon sprang up. Visitors spent long, lazy afternoons there, picnicking, painting, and pondering the eternal cycle of life and death. “They were really the first urban parks,” Sachs said. He believes this movement had a profound effect on the nation’s environmental consciousness. The design of Central Park was modeled after a garden cemetery, and the design of the early national parks were modeled in part after Central Park.

In Over My Dead Body, Greg Melville makes the case that cemeteries also came to inspire the layout of the American suburb. For example, while designing the nation’s first “planned community” in 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted—who helped design both Central Park and Yosemite National Park—drew inspiration from garden cemeteries. Many early suburban properties were designed to look like idealized, miniaturized versions of country estates, with sweeping lawns and meadows amid strips of wild forest. However, capitalism abhors a vacuum. So beginning in the late 1940s, as developers scrambled to cram ever more houses onto ever less land, all those suburban meadows and woodlands eventually got crushed down into neat little green squares of easily mown lawn, placed side by side, jammed right up against the road. Graveyards, being subject to even more intense spatial constraints, underwent an exactly analogous evolution, resulting in what are today known as “lawn cemeteries.”

In an interview for a book called Natural Burial, a funeral director named Ken West recalls how England underwent a similarly bleak evolution. Prior to the 1940s, English cemeteries—rich with wildflowers and voles and “clouds of butterflies”—were still cut by scythe. His work included destroying one such ecosystem in Shrewsbury in order to make it easier to mow. “We sprayed that old cemetery, took out all the wild flowers,” he said. “The insects and butterflies disappeared…and the place is now as dead as a dodo.”

West had a brainstorm one day while talking with two old women who were considering having their bodies buried in their own garden. They said that they disliked the look and feel (and cost) of cemeteries. He asked them, “If I could provide some form of tree burial, like a nature reserve—would that be better?”

They loved the idea. So in 1993, the world’s first forest cemetery was born.

In 1999, half a world away from England and wholly unaware of the revolution Ken West had sparked seven years earlier, a Japanese monk named Chisaka Genpo began performing jumokusō, or “tree burials.” While hiking through the countryside near his home, he had begun noticing, with a growing horror, that most of Japan’s forests had been replaced with monocrop timber plantations. To fight back against this quiet ecocide, he decided to open a natural cemetery, filled with a wild profusion of native plants.

Shorn-headed and gray-robed, Chisaka’s serene appearance belies an owlishly intense intellect. Before his ordination, Chisaka was a professor of Chinese literature and an avid naturalist. His office—tucked away inside a Zen temple complex in a rural corner of Iwate Prefecture—resembles the stacks of a university library, complete with sliding metal bookcases; while we talked, he frequently stopped to pull books down for reference. At one point he opened a desk drawer. I expected it to be filled with documents, but when I peered inside, I found it contained an extensive collection of dead cicadas.

I spent the morning walking through the cemetery. The forest itself was almost supernaturally lovely, with a thousand varieties of local plants—including spindly cedars, pale birches, and louchely flowering cherries—all of which Chisaka could name by sight. In a nearby pond, amid pink lotus flowers, acid-green frogs croaked out their wooden mating calls. At one point, we passed a sign bearing the image of a scary cartoon bear. Chisaka said he installed it to warn the locals not to visit the cemetery after dark. From 9 A.M. to 4 P.M. was “human time,” he said, but after that was “animal time.”

Atop each grave was planted a young tree, none of which had yet grown higher than my chest. Families can choose from 22 different species of native trees or shrubs. (For aesthetic as well as cultural reasons, Chisaka had decided that most of the plants on offer would be of the flowering variety; hence the cemetery’s official motto: “The dead reborn as flowers.”)

Sebastian Penmellen Boret, an anthropologist who has written an excellent book on this cemetery, argues that tree burials have transformed some Japanese people’s understanding of death, from a form of “social immortality”—the traditional belief being that one’s memory remains alive so long as one’s descendants pay their respects—to one of “ecological immortality.” He notes that some family members believe that their loved ones have been reborn as the tree growing atop their grave. Others hold a broader, more ecological view. When a woman named Michiko lost her husband, she chose to have a blueberry bush planted on his grave. She visits that bush often, but she noted with evident disappointment that it hadn’t produced any flowers or fruit yet. “However, she adds that every time she has visited her husband’s grave, a black insect has been sitting on one of its branches,” Boret writes. “As her husband was always wearing black, Michiko likes to think that this insect could be the reincarnation of her husband.”

There is another, more practical appeal to forest burials: the cost. In crowded, urbanized Japan, with its inverted age pyramid, the cost of paying annual fees to keep one’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (and so on) from being relocated to a mass grave has become unaffordable for many people, writes Boret. The same is true in nearly every wealthy country, even in those that grant the dead “perpetual tenure” over their graves. The cost of a traditional burial in the United States, including a casket and embalming, is estimated to be around $20,000. Facing this sticker shock, the majority of people in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany are now opting for cremation instead of burial, which typically costs somewhere around $2,000. Where these ashes end up is not well documented. Some are spread in wild landscapes, like the ocean or the mountains; some are kept in fancy urns atop mantelpieces; and some are simply placed in people’s attics or basements next to the cardboard boxes of old photographs and childhood trophies. (A writer for the Times of London recently admitted that her mother’s ashes reside in a cardboard tube in her office.) A shocking percentage are never picked up from the crematorium at all.

Forest cemeteries provide the best of both worlds: they are affordable (they typically only cost a few thousand dollars, with no recurring fees) and they provide a formal resting place. This rationale is powerful enough to sway even the most nature-averse urbanite. One German woman, who chose a forest burial for her husband, explained her steely logic this way, “The advantage is that there are no subsequent costs and I don’t have to tend the grave.”

Still, the forest burial movement faces stiff challenges, both legal and financial. I recently visited Walawaani Way, an old dairy farm in New South Wales, Australia, that is being converted into a forest cemetery by a woman named Fiona McCuaig. We wandered through her property—a hilltop covered in lush grass beside an aromatic eucalypt forest—one sunny summer day. McCuaig hopes to one day fully rewild this land, creating a habitat for yellow-bellied gliders and koalas. She will also ban plastic flowers and other non-organic objects from the grave sites. Most cemeteries are “dead places,” she said; she wants hers to be bursting with life.

McCuaig told me she was inspired to open a forest cemetery on her family’s land after seeing a documentary about the ecological horrors of how bodies are typically buried. In most Western countries, corpses are injected with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, then placed within caskets with plastic linings and rubber gaskets, which, rather than allowing the body to break down naturally, seal in moisture and microbes, so the body slowly liquefies into what one expert calls a “human soup.” When the plastic liner finally degrades, that soup—formaldehyde and all—then leaches into the soil.

To McCuaig, a lifelong eco-activist—amid other campaigns, she spent six months living in Antarctica fighting Japanese whaling ships with Sea Shepherd—this system was clearly in need of reform. She loved the idea of combining nature conservation with natural burials. The hard part was deciding which kind of natural burials to choose. Should the bodies be cremated, buried, or composted? Each option, it turns out, has its downsides.

The problem with cremation is that cremains—the industry term for human ashes—are laced with a number of heavy metals (including, in some cases, mercury from dental fillings) and a hefty dose of salts. They are also highly alkaline; I was told they have roughly the same pH as bleach. All of this can radically inhibit plant growth. “What happens is that the tree will grow around the ashes to survive,” says Warren Roberts, the founder of the first forest cemetery in Australia, Living Legacy Forests. His team has solved this problem by devising a patented formula —a bright blue liquid—that, when poured over the ashes, neutralizes the alkalinity and reduces the sodium content, ensuring that the body actually begins to feed the roots of the tree rather than killing them. (In the U.S., a roughly similar product, called Let Your Love Grow, can be purchased online.)

McCuaig is open to this method, but because of the carbon emissions involved in cremation, she would prefer to avoid burning bodies at all. She intends for mourners to bring the deceased to a special room on her property so that they can wash and prepare the body—possibly over the course of multiple days, which was once the tradition in many cultures—before placing it directly into the soil wrapped in a simple cotton shroud or a plain pine box. The obvious problem with this option is that it’s logistically cumbersome and, if done incorrectly, dangerous. A human corpse contains a host of pathogens that, if not buried correctly—placed too close to the surface, for example, or too close to a nearby waterway—can proliferate long after we have died.

A third compelling option McCuaig is considering is “human composting,” wherein the body is placed inside a special capsule and converted into soil. One major catch with this practice, she said, is that it is quite expensive; a composting device like the one sold by Recompose, a company based in Washington State, would cost her upwards of six or seven figures. She recognizes that some people might find the idea of composting their bodies off-putting, since it is associated with food waste. There’s also one other tiny issue, which is that in Australia, as in most parts of the U.S., composting a human body is currently illegal.

Talking with McCuaig, I began to realize why forest burials haven’t caught on faster. Both the costs and the bureaucratic hassle of creating a forest cemetery are staggering: McCuaig has already spent nine years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and her property still isn’t quite ready to begin accepting burials. One reason the funeral industry is so heavily regulated is that the government wants to deter people from opening new cemeteries only to go bankrupt a few years later, forcing the new occupants to relocate the bodies. However, one upside to all this red tape is that once a forest cemetery is established, it seldom closes down. And in many places, even if the cemetery goes out of business and the land is sold off one day, the dead are legally granted “perpetual tenure” over their plots, meaning that they own their little sliver of earth forever. McCuaig told me that her mother often worries about the financial implications of these laws, because it makes cemetery land incredibly difficult to resell. “And I’m like, ‘That’s the point!’” McCuaig said. “I like it because it does lock up the land.”

Decades from now, McCuaig hopes her land will look something like the forest cemeteries—known as Traumwald, or “dream forests”—that the bestselling author Peter Wohlleben has established in Germany. I went walking through one of those dream forests one autumn with Wohlleben’s adult son, Tobias, who helps manage it. Each of the graves—up to ten of which can surround a single tree—was marked only with a discreet metal tag on the tree’s trunk. My feet shuffling through a papery mess of fallen leaves, I was struck by the fact that if I’d wandered blindly onto this land, I never would have guessed it was a cemetery. Tobias said that was the whole idea. “We don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, that’s a funeral forest.’” he said. “We want them to come out to the forest, and they won’t see anything.”

As we walked deeper into the shady, gently swaying beechwood, I asked Tobias if his clients ever expressed concerns about their tree dying—especially now, in this time of intensifying climate chaos. It seemed to me that if we had buried our Meemaw beneath a beech tree, and then that tree died the following year, it would have been like losing her all over again.

Tobias said his clients don’t typically worry about that, and if they do, their anxieties are easily put to rest. A dead tree, after all, will simply be reabsorbed into the larger ecology of the forest.

“It’s a part of life,” he shrugged. “In one hundred years, there will be another tree. It doesn’t end with death.”