The Blue Mountains City Council in New South Wales (NSW) has gone where few dare tread: the afterlife.
Or, more precisely, the administration of it. In their new master plan, they’ve decided to streamline the afterlife which, in practice, means that when you finally shuffle off this mortal coil, you’ll be sorted not by faith but by aesthetic.
Out go the Catholic and Anglican sections of the cemetery; in comes the “inclusive zone (pdf),” where everyone can rest in equal confusion. The Resurrection, once about rising from the dead, has been rebranded in policy terms as environmental renewal.
It’s bureaucratic poetry, a brave new world in which even salvation must now meet its emissions targets.
Wicker Coffins Are In
In this carbon-neutral afterlife, embalming is out (too many chemicals), synthetic fabrics and metal handles are out too, and any varnish is definitely out.
Biodegradable cardboard, wicker, or untreated wood is the order of the day, along with your final outfit in the ultimate eco-retreat.
It’s all very Byron Bay meets Book of Common Prayer: ashes to ashes, compost to compost.
The council reasons that natural burials are respectful of the environment and minimise the carbon and chemical footprint.
Denominational Boundaries in Cemeteries Are Out
While Sydney runs out of burial space, the Mountains appear to be running out of faith.
The new plan dissolves denominational boundaries. There’ll be no more tidy divisions between religious beliefs.
Now you may be buried beside anyone, provided your coffin meets the environmental code.
Faith, it seems, has been absorbed into the broader category of land use. Not banned, just quietly filed under “heritage item,” alongside war memorials and old sandstone buildings.
It’s a small, tidy echo of a much larger shift. Across the Western world, secularisation has steadily airbrushed the sacred from public life. As one Catholic commentator put it, we’ve replaced transcendence with convenience and moral absolutes with moral composting.
Theologians call it a loss of the sense of God; councils call it sustainability planning. In a culture that has swapped sermons for strategy papers, the cross has become less a symbol of redemption than a zoning complication.
Human Composting
The movement does not end here.
In parts of the the United States, death itself has gone green. California has joined Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and Colorado in legalising human composting—turning human remains into soil inside steel vessels filled with wood chips and flowers.
It’s marketed as an eco-friendly, emission-free alternative to burial or cremation: “giving back to the earth.” Critics call it reducing the human body to a disposable commodity.
At roughly US$5,000 a pop, it’s death’s answer to Tesla, not cheap, but carbon-free. Families can even take home the soil, scattering their loved one into the garden or, in one case, returning a farmer’s composted remains to his paddocks.
Coffins Made From Fungi
Meanwhile, in Canada and Europe, death has gone fungal.
A Dutch company, Loop Biotech, has designed the Loop Living Cocoon, a coffin made from upcycled hemp fibre and mycelium, the root structure of fungi.
“It’s quite soft, like a blend of Styrofoam and cotton,” said one funeral director, “but it grows in a week and biodegrades within 45 days.”
Mushrooms, its inventor notes, are “nature’s greatest recyclers.” The mushroom coffin, priced at around US$4,000, promises the ultimate luxury for modern life: ethical decay.
A Coral Reef Burial
For the truly adventurous, there’s also coral-reef burial, the final frontier of sustainable resting places.
In Florida, a company called Eternal Reefs mixes cremated ashes into perforated concrete domes that are sunk to the seabed to create artificial reefs.
Families receive the GPS coordinates of their loved one’s new aquatic address. One retired academic, an avid scuba diver, described the idea of fish darting through her reef ball as a second life on the ocean floor.
It’s part environmental restoration, part oceanic Airbnb. The memorial domes attract coral, crabs, and schools of fish, with one site near Florida now home to more than fifty species.
Advocates call it life after life, though the Catholic critics might call it cremation with accessories. Still, the appeal is easy to see: What could be more 21st-century than spending eternity regenerating a marine ecosystem and saving Nemo on the side?
Has Death Been Rebranded as A Consumer Category?
But maybe, in our rush to make dying greener, we’ve turned it into just another lifestyle choice.
Death, once a mystery best handled by priests and poets, has been rebranded as a consumer category, part of the same moral economy that sells oat milk and carbon offsets.
There’s a mushroom coffin for the ethical minimalist, a coral reef for the ocean lover, a compost vat for the sustainable purist.
It’s thoughtful, it’s tidy, and it’s utterly modern, but somewhere in the drive to return gracefully to the soil, we seem to have misplaced the soul.
