Autumn is a good time to think about death, I find, so although the news about Prof John Aston recommending that we line motorways with linear wildlife burial corridors broke sometime back in summer, I'm going to think about that proposal now.
I'm going to come straight out and say it; I don't like the idea of being buried. I'm a burn-me type, really. Hot composting seems to split the difference - a slow fire that burns for 30 days, releasing a cubic yard of compost. It's in pre-launch at the moment, attracting investors and deflecting comparisons to Resyk. But I might last long enough that it could be on my menu, and more to my taste than a green or natural funeral, and less polluting than going up in flames, no matter how much more attractive that idea is, and if so, I'd be fine with that, I think. Compost away. Use me to mulch my allotment.
But getting back to the motorway and the delightfully evocative suggestion of of linear wildlife burial corridors, well. There is already quite a lot of dead wildlife lining our motorways. Car-popped badgers, flung-aside foxes, deers smashed on the deercatchers on the front of someone's much-needed SUV. Birds backdrafted onto the hardshoulder, hedgehogs pancaked and flipped into the gutter. Some will be will be food for kites and buzzards, but plenty rots down into the broad verges, planted with trees and shrubs to swallow the thrum of traffic, colonised by insects and flowers, untouched and undisturbed, apart from by our pollution...
... and herein lies my problem. Cemeteries are busy places. Lots of people there all the time. The only animals that thrive are the ones that want to hang out with us. Carp in the ponds. Cats on the benches. And people, contemplating, saying farewell, visiting, remembering. Far from giving this space to wildlife, we'll be taking it away. Sorry wildlife, we need the verges. You can't have them any more.
If we want our deaths to give back to wildlife, rather than just contribute to turning yet another wild space into a garden, we really need to be using our bodies to construct something wildlife needs and doesn't have yet. And when that comes to motorways, what wildlife really needs is more opportunities not to be on it.
Given that the main problem wildlife has is not in walking along motorways - there are already pretty good wildlife corridors in the verges - but in walking across them, what we really need to be made into is wildlife bridges.
These bridges of the dead - and I don't really think my proposal is significantly more modest than the prof's here - could be taboo for living humans to walk. They would need to to remember their dead as they pass beneath them, automatic headlights flickering into life in the dim of the underpass. The broad wildlife bridges would encompass all funereal approaches; accommodating the cremated in construction materials and hardcore, the composted in the soil lining and the planting, and those who prefer to be buried whole in gravespaces in the embankments and secluded approaches.
And it would also create a genuinely new ecological space, rather than nibbling further into the wild, in the name of being green.
I'm going to come straight out and say it; I don't like the idea of being buried. I'm a burn-me type, really. Hot composting seems to split the difference - a slow fire that burns for 30 days, releasing a cubic yard of compost. It's in pre-launch at the moment, attracting investors and deflecting comparisons to Resyk. But I might last long enough that it could be on my menu, and more to my taste than a green or natural funeral, and less polluting than going up in flames, no matter how much more attractive that idea is, and if so, I'd be fine with that, I think. Compost away. Use me to mulch my allotment.
But getting back to the motorway and the delightfully evocative suggestion of of linear wildlife burial corridors, well. There is already quite a lot of dead wildlife lining our motorways. Car-popped badgers, flung-aside foxes, deers smashed on the deercatchers on the front of someone's much-needed SUV. Birds backdrafted onto the hardshoulder, hedgehogs pancaked and flipped into the gutter. Some will be will be food for kites and buzzards, but plenty rots down into the broad verges, planted with trees and shrubs to swallow the thrum of traffic, colonised by insects and flowers, untouched and undisturbed, apart from by our pollution...
... and herein lies my problem. Cemeteries are busy places. Lots of people there all the time. The only animals that thrive are the ones that want to hang out with us. Carp in the ponds. Cats on the benches. And people, contemplating, saying farewell, visiting, remembering. Far from giving this space to wildlife, we'll be taking it away. Sorry wildlife, we need the verges. You can't have them any more.
If we want our deaths to give back to wildlife, rather than just contribute to turning yet another wild space into a garden, we really need to be using our bodies to construct something wildlife needs and doesn't have yet. And when that comes to motorways, what wildlife really needs is more opportunities not to be on it.
Given that the main problem wildlife has is not in walking along motorways - there are already pretty good wildlife corridors in the verges - but in walking across them, what we really need to be made into is wildlife bridges.
These bridges of the dead - and I don't really think my proposal is significantly more modest than the prof's here - could be taboo for living humans to walk. They would need to to remember their dead as they pass beneath them, automatic headlights flickering into life in the dim of the underpass. The broad wildlife bridges would encompass all funereal approaches; accommodating the cremated in construction materials and hardcore, the composted in the soil lining and the planting, and those who prefer to be buried whole in gravespaces in the embankments and secluded approaches.
And it would also create a genuinely new ecological space, rather than nibbling further into the wild, in the name of being green.
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