Walking through a place like Arlington National Cemetery, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by its sheer scale. Thousands of rows of white marble gravestones extend as far as the eye can see; their neat, grid-like patterns only occasionally interrupted by towering elm trees that provide welcome shade in the summer months. The lawns are lush and picturesque, immaculately mowed and trimmed every few days to prevent the grass from even hinting at taking over the markers.
How can places like this be toxic? While it may not be apparent at first (or even second) glance, the domesticated and moralized landscapes of places like Arlington - and the majority of American cemeteries - might not exist in their current disciplined form without intensive interventions, such as the rampant use of pesticides to kill weeds and insects and concrete burial vaults to stop the natural sinkage of graves. These techniques have historically been framed by funeral industry professionals through defensive, protective, and affective terms. As one funeral director told me during preliminary fieldwork in Boston, “We’re here to create beauty. It would be disturbing to think of your mother or your grandmother being ravaged underground, don’t you think?” However, this perspective has increasingly been contested by environmental justice and death positive activists, who argue that normative deathcare degrades environments, enshrines human exceptionalism, and marginalizes those forced to confront death in less idealized ways.
Understanding the dead body as fundamentally different from other material matter, these methods seem to frame the surrounding natural environment as an invader that must be kept at bay at all costs. Within such contexts, toxicity is not a condition solely marked by pollution that constitutes normative definitions of environmental beauty, but one that emerges as a specific genre of harm that comes from the ordering living systems, broadly defined to include scales from cells to ways of life (Liboiron et. al 2018). Such toxicity is emblematic of fantasies of power invested in the idea that “humankind shall have dominion over all things, including its own detritus” - such as corpses (Thill 2016).
Walking through a place like Arlington National Cemetery, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by its sheer scale. Thousands of rows of white marble gravestones extend as far as the eye can see; their neat, grid-like patterns only occasionally interrupted by towering elm trees that provide welcome shade in the summer months. The lawns are lush and picturesque, immaculately mowed and trimmed every few days to prevent the grass from even hinting at taking over the markers.
How can places like this be toxic? While it may not be apparent at first (or even second) glance, the domesticated and moralized landscapes of places like Arlington - and the majority of American cemeteries - might not exist in their current disciplined form without intensive interventions, such as the rampant use of pesticides to kill weeds and insects and concrete burial vaults to stop the natural sinkage of graves. These techniques have historically been framed by funeral industry professionals through defensive, protective, and affective terms. As one funeral director told me during preliminary fieldwork in Boston, “We’re here to create beauty. It would be disturbing to think of your mother or your grandmother being ravaged underground, don’t you think?” However, this perspective has increasingly been contested by environmental justice and death positive activists, who argue that normative deathcare degrades environments, enshrines human exceptionalism, and marginalizes those forced to confront death in less idealized ways.
Understanding the dead body as fundamentally different from other material matter, these methods seem to frame the surrounding natural environment as an invader that must be kept at bay at all costs. Within such contexts, toxicity is not a condition solely marked by pollution that constitutes normative definitions of environmental beauty, but one that emerges as a specific genre of harm that comes from the ordering living systems, broadly defined to include scales from cells to ways of life (Liboiron et. al 2018). Such toxicity is emblematic of fantasies of power invested in the idea that “humankind shall have dominion over all things, including its own detritus” - such as corpses (Thill 2016).