Very interesting post, and I’m heartily in support, as you can read in my online excerpt of “Be a Tree” at beatree.com.

I have only one change I’d make to what you’ve written above, and that is to suggest that — if the desire is to provide nutrients for the tree and be a space-saving measure — a vertical burial is unnecessary, and even counter-productive.

The microbes that decompose the body, and especially the mycology capable of breaking down bone, generally colonize the upper 20″ of soil. A vertical burial will put too much of the body out of reach of the decomposing microbes and simply petrify, as opposed to transmute and redistribute, the body’s elements.

Additionally, a tree needs more earth than the footprint of its trunk to survive, so confining the body to a ‘trunk sized’ width is unnecessary, from the space-conserving perspective. Generally, the root system of a tree will extend out to the width of its canopy – on many mature and healthy trees, the feeder roots actually create a mirror image of the branches below the ground. As a result, in the more thoughtful natural burial grounds, a number of horizontal burials can actually take place in the “drip zone” of a single tree, serving folk and tree alike.

The ‘vertical burial’ is striking because of its difference – since our minds tend to note difference more readily than sameness, I like the vertical idea because it does beg the question “why not?”

However, as I promote natural burial in the various places I go, a common response from environmentalists is “well, I still don’t want to take up space and anyway, if we buried a tree for every person, wouldn’t we eventually run out of space?”

I’m still working out the math for this. I haven’t been able to find a good estimate for how many trees there are in the world right now. I’ve read a guess of one billion. If that’s true (and 1 billion doesn’t feel like enough trees to me!) then that means there are 6 people for every tree — since we know that we don’t have enough trees currently to hold soil, transpire moisture, provide habitat and shade, and survive our current clear-cutting mania, it seems to me like it’s a very easy case to make that perhaps 1 person/1 tree is a really, really, really good idea.

So I say to folks who worry about trees displacing people:

1)I’m willing to support (at least!) one tree for its natural life in return for all the support I got from trees for mine

2)The day we’ve got too many trees and not enough room for people, if it ever comes (which I doubt), is a day we could happily deal with when it arrives.

3)I would love to see what a world with “almost too many trees” would look and feel like, and I’m certain that future generations might like to see and feel that, too.

4)And once we got to feeling a bit crowded out by all those trees, we could just cut a few more down now, couldn’t we?

Thanks for providing this comment and thought space.

in trees,

Cynthia

Cynthia Beal
Natural Burial Company
http://www.naturalburialcompany.com
author “Be a Tree, the natural burial guide for turning yourself into a forest”
http://www.beatree.com