A employee at the Necropole Ecumenica Memorial cleans the surface of crypts in Santos, Brazil, on Oct. 13, 2014. When completed, the five-building memorial known as a vertical cemetery will hold 180,000 bodies.At 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 6, 1876, a penniless Bavarian nobleman was slid headfirst into a blazing coke-fired oven – and history was made.
With populations having exploded dramatically around the world since the 1800s, sprawling cities have engulfed what were once “rural” cemeteries. Those large populations also mean more people are dying than ever before, and now, historic landlocked burial grounds are nearing capacity, with the rights to permanent resting places being generally, well, permanent.
Cremation didn’t catch fire right away in the West. But while the popular hypothesis is that belief in the Christian dogma of resurrection held back its growth, the real reason may have been one of supply. How exactly that happened is hard to pinpoint. The activation energy – to use another scientific metaphor – needed to propel cremation on its meteoric rise began in the 1960s, after Jessica Mitford’s scathing exposéreported that the funeral rite had been boiled down to a mere financial transaction.
This new form of disposition has struck a chord in the public consciousness, likely because it offers the same value as cremation – but not in the monetary sense. Whereas there’s permanence in a traditional burial site, NOR offers America’s increasingly mobile population flexibility in how they memorialize their loved ones and – in what is increasingly a selling point – an opportunity to be greener, too.