ONE WEEKEND IN 1991, Steve Nygren, a restaurateur, and his wife, Marie, took a weekend drive in the country. They had read an advertisement in a preservation newsletter about a property for sale, barely thirty minutes from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and they were curious.
Wandering through the fields and deep woods, they fell in love with the sixty-acre farm and bought it. “We started coming out on weekends. And when we saw the effect it had on the kids and also on us, it changed our priorities,” Nygren recalls. At the time, their kids were three, five, and seven, and the Nygrens lived in Atlanta’s prestigious Ansley Park neighborhood, in the center of the city. “We had all these material things, all that anyone could imagine needing, and yet we found ourselves packing up every Friday night, anxious to get out to the country. We rented out the big main farmhouse and fixed up a little cottage nearby. Out there, the kids had one box of puzzles and toys for rainy weather, and that was all they had, except nature—which was a bigger draw to them than we had ever imagined.” After three years of weekend visits, they put their city house on the market. Steve sold his group of thirty-four restaurants, took early retirement, and they moved to the country full-time. The family planted an organic garden, cut trails into the woods, started restoring the 1905 farmhouse, and converted an old horse barn into guest rooms. “We found that no matter how stressful life gets, or how difficult certain talks can be with your kids, a walk in the woods can change the whole tone of life,” Nygren says.
Then one day while jogging, Nygren was horrified to see bulldozers chewing across an adjacent piece of farmland. So he bought nine hundred more acres. The restaurateur became an activist, then a developer. He began by contacting most of the landowners in the forty-thousand-acre Chattahoochee Hill Country region, “all told more than five hundred individuals, including “a mix of generational landowners, land speculators, and developers,” Nygren says. “A leadership body was needed to shepherd the process of finding a balanced solution; thusly the Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance was formed.” After two years and countless public meetings, the county adopted a new land-use regulation precluding large-acreage estates in favor of a series of hamlets, tightly clustered villages surrounded by forest, farms, and meadows.
Today, Nygren, a youngish sixty-four-year-old with a shock of white hair, is a soft-spoken evangelist for a new—or, rather, old—kind of suburban development. His Serenbe, with 240 residents, is organized around principles of land preservation, local food production, energy efficiency, walkability, clustered buildings, arts, culture, community, and most of all, immersion in nature. Serenbe (a play on the words be serene) is one example of what suburban life might look like in the future. In a modified form, it could also be applied in the redevelopment of decaying urban and suburban neighborhoods.
This approach extends beyond traditional green design, which is essentially about conserving energy and leaving a small footprint on the Earth; the emerging design philosophy is about conserving energy and producing human energy.
In his book Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection, Stephen Kellert uses the term “restorative environmental design,” which he says “incorporates the complementary goals of minimizing harm and damage to natural systems and human health as well as enriching the human body, mind, and spirit.”1
Serenbe is the name of the full one thousand acres, including planned and current hamlets, the nineteen-room inn, organic farms, and planned art farm. So far, two hamlets have been built, Selborne, with a focus on the arts, and Grange, with an emphasis on agriculture. A planned third hamlet will focus on health and healing. Nearly all of the residences are directly adjacent to natural or agricultural land. Post boxes are stationed in the central commercial district; front porches are placed within six to eight feet of the sidewalk; walking paths connect the homes.
One might argue that any impact on the natural world, especially on valuable farmland, is too much impact. But this prime land would otherwise have been targeted by developers favoring either large estates or grading and filling the roll of the earth and packing in as many interchangeable units as possible. Instead, Serenbe leaves 70 percent of the woods and rural acreage intact, and devotes thirty acres to the Serenbe farm. Certified as organic and biodynamic, the farm produces more than 350 varieties of vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruits, and mushrooms, and sells all of this within forty miles of the farm through a 110-member Community Supported Agriculture program, a Serenbe Farmers and Artists Market, and local restaurants. The community’s wastewater is treated using bioretention and constructed wetlands. The designers claim that monthly water usage for Serenbe is 25 percent lower than the national average. The compact little town, with no strip mall, will eventually accommodate as many or more people on 30 percent of the total land as would a traditional development using 80 percent of the land. This high-tech/high-nature configuration is arguably more economically sustainable than the current rural American landscape, which is emptying out as farming consolidates and rural tax bases deteriorate.
Nygren believes Serenbe has already stabilized the local tax base. Still, he faced lender disbelief in the economic model. “I tried to tell them we were creating the premium of a golf-course lot without the negative impacts of a golf course. They weren’t buying it.” Eventually, Nygren and his family financed Serenbe’s development themselves. “We ended up having to pledge our real-estate holdings in Atlanta, in addition to the land at Serenbe, as collateral to guarantee the development loans,” he said. “We had a family meeting, when it became obvious this was our only choice if the development was to move forward, and I presented to Marie and the girls the situation we were in. I had their college funds in a safe account, but other than that, we would have to put the balance of our financial holding at stake. They all voted to move forward, and we have.” Now Nygren hopes to prove the economic viability of this kind of development.
Others share that hope. In 2006, the New York Times reported on a small but rapidly growing brand of second-home communities targeted at baby boomers who prefer nature trails to golf courses and tennis courts. Amenities offered by the 3 Creek Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, for example, include raptor rehabilitation and bird-banding programs. In South Carolina, the Spring Island community offers mountain biking trails, plant and bird identification, and nocturnal wildlife walks.2
Are these just dude developments for the rich? Nygren acknowledges that most of the residences in Serenbe are executive homes, but a few smaller cottages are now available. I reminded him that many of the planned communities of the sixties and seventies were built with government subsidies, based on the promise that they would include modest-income housing. That promise was seldom kept. But Nygren contends that most developers and financial institutions will refuse to move in this direction until they see ample proof that wealthy people will forgo a large rural estate in favor of a town home on an eighth of an acre adjacent to large tracts of natural land.
Another danger is that such attractive communities will be Trojan Horse developments, literally paving the way for a deluge of traditional housing tracts. That, in fact, is a likely outcome, unless residential zoning regulations are rewritten to promote compact hamlets surrounded by natural or agricultural areas.
Nygren points to the English countryside as his development model, with its combination of nature, local farming, and village living. I recently traveled by train and car from the southwest corner of England to the middle of Scotland. Contemporary English countryside draws strict lines around old villages and newer cities so that farms and forests closely encircle nearly every residential area. The preserved countryside is a legacy of feudal landownership and post - World War II greenbelt laws enacted in part to direct new development into the bombed urban centers. With few exceptions, one rarely sees that pattern in America. However, in Britain, dense cities are filling up and nearby nature is disappearing. So some movement of population into the countryside is probably inevitable. Two scenarios seem likely, either the kind of suburban sprawl common in the United States or the creation of more rural villages, similar to Serenbe. In the UK and the United States, such settlements could combine local food production and preserved natural areas with high-tech communications, including more advanced teleconferencing. This would theoretically decrease some of the need for car travel.
The Urban Land Institute (ULI), a major U.S. nonprofit education and research institute focused on “smart growth,” envisions such a future. A ULI report, published in 2004, projects that by 2025 the U.S. population will have grown by almost fifty-eight million people.3 Infilling—adding households within revitalized city neighborhoods or inner suburbs —will meet some of the demand for housing, according to Jim Heid, a sustainable-development expert and the report’s author. But development will still occur on and beyond the edges of cities. Portland, Oregon, projects in its metropolitan regional plan that 70 percent of near-term growth will be greenfield development (urban planner jargon for open land), and other U.S. jurisdictions predict numbers closer to 90 percent. “While it is often lumped with sprawl, greenfield development offers the most practical, affordable, and achievable chance to build without sprawl, given its potential to create large-scale, conserved open lands and sustainable modern infrastructure,” writes Heid. Good greenfield development relies on three prerequisites: a region-wide system of sustainable open space; more and higher concentrations of walkable, bikeable, mixed-use development; and a diverse mix of housing types, sizes, and prices.
To these requirements, Nygren would add close access to nature, local food production, and sometimes looser restrictions. Serenbe avoids the typical standardization of housing styles by encouraging multiple builders to offer variety. The community does have constraints, including one stating that every house must have a front porch at least eight feet deep that spans 70 percent of the first floor. “We determined that’s the size that you can get a good rocking chair on. Even with indoor air-conditioning, people will use these porches when they’re large enough and close enough to the sidewalks.” Serenbe is far less restrictive of children’s play than many planned communities. “We purposefully have no playground,” Nygren says. “We’ve got ball fields, natural woods and streams, and miles of hiking trails, picnic tables, tire swings and horseshoe pits and a tree house.”
Could a child build his or her own tree house or fort in the woods? “Absolutely. Interestingly, we’ve not had one child injured in the woods.”
Some environmental visionaries consider such developments counterproductive, for one main reason: they still depend on the automobile. Serenbe-ings may walk more locally, but who’s going to tell them they can’t drive to Atlanta?
Richard Register has been promoting the idea of ecocities for nearly four decades. By ecocities, he means cities upzoned “for more density and diversity in the centers,” a wholesale rejection of the automobile, and a complete withdrawal from the addiction to sprawl. The author of several books on the topic, including Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, Register rejects the New Urbanism and Smart Growth movements because, he told the Web site Treehugger, many of the proponents of those urban planning philosophies “speak out of both sides of their mouth saying transit, especially rail, is great (it is), and cars have to be accommodated too (they don’t). . . . Cars or car-free cities. Choose.” In Register’s view, as long as we plan for automobiles, we’ll be out of balance with nature, whether in re-natured cities or new edge country.
Ironically, a motorized machine was one of the first twenty-first-century signals of a potential human-nature reunion. For many hybrid drivers, at least the early ones, the definition of the good driving experience shifted from speed and muscle to other measures of experience.
In 2003, a friend of mine, a dedicated conservationist, parked in our driveway to show off his new hybrid Toyota Prius. For some, at the time, hybrids were rolling bumper stickers that said, “Go to war for oil? Not in my name.” You almost expected the GPS unit to tell you, in Ralph Nader’s disembodied growl: “Turn Left at the next available election.” I admired the car and wanted one. The last time I had applied my ecological views to car buying was in the 1970 s, when I bought the first edition of the low-emission, rotary-engine Mazda. That engine melted. Nonetheless, I was willing to try again. Today, Kathy and I share one car, a hybrid.
There’s room for debate about the environmental righteousness of hybrids, or the all-electric or hydrogen-powered cars. Register and other like-minded visionaries worry about, well, Trojan horsepower. The more efficient our cars become, the more likely we’ll live in suburbia or farther from cities, even as fuel prices rise.
Unintended consequences aside, from the moment my friend parked his Prius in our driveway, I considered hybrid engines good news. Fighting global warming finally seemed . . . cool. Not just environmentally, but psychologically, the Prius spelled gain. To many, before the Prius, the work of someone like designer William McDonough, who proposed that we could create factories that would turn out cleaner water and air than they take in, would have seemed like fuzzy-thinking utopianism. After the Prius, not so much.
My friend, by the way, began to drive his wife nuts with his new driving habits. He watched the dashboard indicators like a nurse watches the instrument panel on a life-support system. He took pleasure in racking up more miles per gallon than advertised. This gain was not just a product of a different engine, but of his revised technique, which the hybrid’s psychological imperative encouraged. At the time, I laughed at his obsession. But when we bought our own hybrid, I caught the bug. I’ve scoured Web sites devoted to this “new” kind of driving: to maximize mpg, the hybrid driver should “surge and coast” and “feather” the gas pedal, and so on. One might assume that such driving habits would deflect attention from the road and the environment around us. But for me, the opposite has proven to be true. One day, I realized that I was even aware of headwinds and tailwinds, and their impact on the dashboard readout on average mpg. I learned that the contour of the terrain, outdoor heat and cold, and other environmental factors also affected the mpg. The usual numbness of driving was replaced by a different mental state, both calmer and more aware. Call it the Zen of Prius, or the Hybrid High.
Well, slow driving only lasted a few months for me. Today, my wife still practices it, but I’m pretty much back to speed, though with reasonable gas mileage.
Despite a few glitches along the way, hybrid engines and other new technologies do encourage a different view of transportation. Hope rolls. But Register is right. It won’t roll far without a more complete transportation transformation, including environmentally cleaner, quieter public and private vehicles in walkable cities and suburbs, with transportation pathways, including hiking and biking paths, through natural corridors.
Dan Burden describes his bicycle as the “learning machine.” “As a child, I was skinny as a rail, had severely impaired physical coordination, scoliosis, myopia, and shyness,” he recalls. His physical and mental condition began to change when he began to ride a bike. This learning machine transported him “to distant places never seen by car, foot or any other means. From nearly sunup to sundown the city and the countryside, as far as I could go, were mine.”
By the time he was eighteen, he was off riding through farmlands, river valleys, and nearby woodlands. He learned how to find quiet roads, old farm paths, and trails. He rode in all weather, into foggy farmland nights and pelting rain. On warm summer nights, he could feel the layers of cooler air. He inhaled the scents of nature while descending or climbing undulating farm roads. He came to know the small changes in geography, in the seasons and even subseasons. “I became an acute observer of all things that made up the Ohio countryside,” he says. “With the bike, and later my feet, I began to explore everything rural, everything urban, to appreciate what made each unique and distinct.” On a bike, he adds, “You go at nature-speed.”
When it comes to outdoor exercise, Burden wants us to think beyond physical health, to mental acuity and more. He argues passionately that free-range exploration, on foot or by bike, expands our civility and confidence, and our humanity.
Today, Burden is director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute, a Washington State - based national organization. He has worked as a bicycle consultant to the United Nations in China, served as bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the state of Florida, and has photographed transit conditions in more than twenty-five hundred cities around the world. He promotes urban traffic-calming practices, better intersection design, waterfront trails, parks, land-sensitive clusters of homes, shops, and work centers.
Throughout human history, and up until around 1925, cities and suburbs were designed to accommodate the human foot, says Burden. “Then the city pattern and scale became extended with the combined added mobility of the car and the desire to embrace Modernism.” After World War II, the United States had sufficient money to dismantle city cores and move outward. In time, all cities became vast land consumers as they abandoned their inner layers of Main Streets, downtowns, and historic centers. “This added mobility paved the way to filling in vast [parcels of] land with parking lots, taking out nature and farm fields as they were extended. Creeks were buried, estuaries filled in, many nearby woods taken out.”
Baby boomers may be the last generation to remember the Sunday drive, that staple of family life that lasted into the early sixties, when mom and dad piled the kids, grandma, and the family dog into the car, perhaps after church, and went on a leisurely drive out of the city. Windows down, the dog’s muzzle into the wind, dad’s elbow on the car’s windowsill, maybe a picnic basket in the trunk. The point was to slow down, take time to see the countryside, breathe it all in. Perhaps we could bring back a refined version of the Sunday drive. Imagine regenerative mass transit—alternatively fueled buses, trolleys, and trains —slipping quietly through a city, traveling transit corridors naturally buffered by forest and into the countryside, connecting inner-city neighborhoods with exurban ecovillages. Instead of taking that Sunday drive by car, you could take it by biophilic transit. Bring your picnic basket.
When I first considered that scenario, it seemed like another utopian dream. Then I visited a new nature center at Oregon’s Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, a few miles southwest of downtown Portland. I noticed a public bus stop at the refuge’s entrance. Not long after, the Oregonian newspaper reported that an AmeriCorps volunteer at the refuge was translating plant and animal names into Spanish, and planned a similar project in Russian, since at least sixty thousand Russian-speaking residents live in Portland, where an increasingly diverse population works in the region’s booming plant nursery/grass seed industry. Tualatin River Wildlife Refuge, as it turned out, had “partnered with the regional transit system to provide a bus stop exclusively to access the refuge.” Kim Strassburg, outdoor recreation planner at the refuge, also told the reporter, “Now anyone can hop on a bus in downtown Portland and be on the refuge trails in less than an hour.”4
For decades, Burden has remained devoted to his learning machine, and to creating new ways for others to ride theirs in cities. He’s about to make a radical change. A reversion, actually.
He and his wife, Lys, were car-free until they were in their thirties. As a young Navy man, he found it easy to live in Pensacola, Florida, without a car. On forest and swamp trails, he daily trekked two and a half miles from his base, Ellyson Field, to the University of West Florida campus. “My walk to school prepped me for unfettered thinking; my walk back, almost always under star-studded skies, was energizing, enriching my soul,” he recalls.
He and Lys married in Ohio in 1970, and hitchhiked to Missoula, Montana. Unable to afford a car then, they walked and biked everywhere. The social circle they established there decades ago is still stronger than in any place they have lived since. He credits their feet. And their bikes. Now, Dan and Lys plan to return to the car-free lifestyle. Later this year, they’ll move to Port Townsend, an eminently walkable, nature-immersed seaport in Washington, that calls itself the launching pad to the Olympic Peninsula and beyond. “Okay, there will be a truck for Lys’s community gardening,” he admits. “I’ll still drive, of course, for my national and international work. But, as city designers and city planners we’re duty-bound to try to live in and build great places—where living car-free does not mean a loss of independence, but new freedom, fitness, and happiness.”
Burden’s next move illustrates a conundrum of our time. At core, we know that dense but re-natured cities are essential—but small towns and suburbs, or what suburbia could be, still call.
The creation of new towns such as Serenbe will help, but only the redevelopment of suburbia, the re-naturing of existing neighborhoods, along with the creation of restorative transportation, will result in meaningful progress.
The words urban and suburban are losing their meaning. Growth of the original suburbs offered the illusion of healthy country living. Even before that, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century planners believed that cities and suburbs could and should be places rich with nature. That philosophy inspired the urban parks movement. The industrialists who pushed for the creation of New York’s Central Park weren’t concerned with gas prices. Their priority was worker productivity, linked to the health benefits of nearby nature. Unfortunately, planners and consumers lost touch with that philosophy. Today, too many of our urban and suburban neighborhoods are de-natured, and in some cases decaying, and that pushes many people even deeper into exurbia. Suburbs are a fact, and, just like inner-city cores, they can be improved.
“Postwar American suburbia is the largest and most costly undertaking in world history,” says Tom Martinson, author of American Dreamscape: The Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia. “It is high time we moved the suburbs to center stage of our national attention.” The need for suburban redevelopment is increasing; the growth rate of suburban poverty is now twice that of cities.
In Subutopia, as I’ll call it, aging shopping malls are replaced by or refashioned into more economically viable mixed-use centers; affordable and even luxury housing is placed on top of stores and in parking lots; “hedges” of small shops circle the blank walls of the big-box outlets; disconnected streets are stitched together and narrowed to discourage speeding; mom-and-pop corner groceries and other pedestrian amenities are placed throughout the residential neighborhoods. Martinson suggests that mixed-use strip malls and residential neighborhoods incorporate “architectural imagery —sculpture, art —that comes from the place itself.” Subutopian redevelopers will plant a lush landscape, reminiscent of older neighborhoods, but redevelopment will also incorporate native plants, home or nearby production of food, and new and more unobtrusive solar technologies that will make each home as energy-independent as possible.
To encourage creativity and variety, we’ll need to loosen the draconian covenants and restrictions imposed by developers and enforced by excitable community associations. One woman tells me the community association of her planned community decided that there were too many potted plants in front of their homes, so it came up with a new, private regulation: no more than two flower pots allowed, and they could only be ten inches across. Flower pots: the enemy within. In Subutopia, life is better but less than perfect.
To argue for suburban redevelopment is not to argue for sprawl or against the density seen in some urban settings —but for neighborhoods that have both higher human density and more natural habitat, rooftop gardens, walkability and hike-ability, and so forth. Traditional zoning has seldom encouraged a mix of nature, homes, and workplaces. As rings of suburbia begin to decay, natural community redevelopment zones could be established to encourage redevelopment that would combine the best features of, say, Serenbe, with the more compacted ecovillages of Western Europe. An endorsement of this approach comes with a caveat. How unfortunate if the rigidity of some current suburban developments were to be replaced by a greener, more efficient rigidity.
I once met Navajo rug weavers in the far, high desert of the Southwest—from Two Grey Hills, Ganado, Wide Ruins, Chinle —and looking closely at one of their rugs, I noticed they often were missing a line of wool on one edge. One woman explained: “The weaver places a spirit line in the rug, an imperfection through which all labor and concentration can escape.” A spirit line is needed in the weaving of these greener, re-natured neighborhoods. Once the Nature Principle is brought into play, fear and compulsive order should give way to variance, to biodiversity and cultural diversity; there are no neat rows in the rain forest, no tight clustering of same-species life. The pattern is fractal —complex beyond the understanding of the science of economics. A tree gives us comfort not because its branches and leaves are formed in perfect and predictable order, but because it is unique within a larger, unseen pattern —like us.
The larger pattern is sensed; we feel it but do not see it, says artist and home designer James Hubbell. Hubbell and I were walking one day along a path through his family enclave of houses and studios. He showed me the first structure he had built, a diminutive cavern made of adobe with cedar beams. Now over eighty, he and his wife, Anne, live in a complex of hobbit-friendly structures near Julian, a mountain town east of San Diego that is nestled in pines, manzanita, and live oaks. This was the place where I spent time in shared solitude with my younger son. He began to build these structures, which seem to bubble out of the earth, over four decades ago. His place, burned once by wildfire and rebuilt, is touched with whimsy. Everything is curved, flowing, almost free-form. Stained-glass windows filter light so it seems you are on another planet; sculptures made of the local rocks and mud anchor the place. His art and architecture are praised around the world as examples of how to do what Frank Lloyd Wright advised, but did not always do: create human habitats that blend into nature, but do not disappear. As we walked, he suggested that the people who live in suburban neighborhoods could declare their individuality through signs and pieces of public art that spring from nature and the idiosyncrasies of their own cultures. “Each neighborhood is like a person: unique,” he said. “For people and neighborhoods, small changes count.”
Hubbell’s approach reflects his respect for beauty and organic complexity.
It also suggests the role that artists can have in reconnecting humans to nature. Some artists now thrust masks on sticks, and other pieces of art, into the ground of urban lots that have been allowed to return to a natural state. In addition to linking the idea of art to the reality of nature, these art pieces and installations protect the land. People may dismiss open space —throw trash into it, ignore it, see it as something without value. However, the art changes perceptions and behavior by signaling that this is a place of value to human beings.
“I believe a culture builds what it believes,” Hubbell said. “Right now, in our culture, we believe mainly in fear. In the beginning of [the twentieth] century, in art and architecture, you saw such beautiful, imaginative, organic expressionism in Germany and Austria.” Then came the Bauhaus movement, all glass and steel boxes. Everything changed. “The feeling in Europe then was that something was wrong —something was coming. When you’re afraid, you regulate. You make the angles equal.”
Thinking of our highly regulated walled communities across America, Hubbell asks: “Can there be a sustainable future without beauty?” He has written: “The context that sustainability must exist in, is an infinite compassion for the world we live in, and a balance of the many parts. Beauty can be an arbiter of the myriad decisions needed to build a whole, ecological, truly sustainable solution, whether it is a building, a sewage system, an agricultural plan, or a wilderness system. . . . We have lived in a century that has made technology and information, and what we think are its benefits, God. Technology devoid of a sense of the whole is an attempt to dominate life, nature and knowledge. Can we build a sustainable world and leave out the mystery of our world?”
Hubbell believes that the best thing an architect or planner can do is communicate that the universe is exciting, and that mystery should be sought: “If we somehow find that feeling again, we would stop doing gated communities, because we wouldn’t need them.”
Here’s one more way—a final way for some—to slow urban sprawl, to be rooted in the land, to repurpose our role with nature. This is not for everyone.
Edward Abbey, the great contrarian writer, author of the classic Desert Solitaire, knew how he wanted to be buried. He asked that no undertakers be hired, no embalming be done, that his body be transported in the back of a pickup truck, and that state laws be disregarded. Bagpipes would be played, corn on the cob served along “a flood of beer” and “singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and love-making.” His friends and family made sure it happened. One friend, Doug Peacock, wrote an account of the send-off, which was published in Outside magazine.5 “He’d wanted to nourish a plant, a cactus or a tree. He was buried illegally, deep in the desert, and just moments before we laid him to rest, I lay down in the grave to check out the view. There was blue sky and a faint desert breeze stirring the blossoms of a brittlebush. We should all be so blessed.” A rock near the grave is said to be chiseled with this message:
EDWARD PAUL ABBEY
January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989
NO COMMENT
Billy Campbell, a physician, proposes something similar. I walked with him one day among the coastal live oaks above the valley of Santa Ysabel, California. With its gentle, grassy hills, clusters of oak and rock upheavals, this is one of the most beautiful spots in my county.
The nonprofit Nature Conservancy had recently bought a ranch here and optioned another, and intended to turn it into a nature preserve. Campbell hoped to convince the Nature Conservancy to acquire additional adjacent land and establish a combination nature preserve and memorial park. The time is right for a new approach. Space is so tight in Greece, for example, that people lease grave space; after six months, bones are dug up and moved to packed storage vaults. The British Home Office has considered mass exhumation of graves over one hundred years old, disposal of the remains, and reuse of the land. Cemeteries in the United States now favor higher-density mausoleums or double-occupancy graves. (“They’re like bunk beds. If you’re the first to die, you get the bottom bunk for eternity,” said Campbell.) Some cemeteries only have room for ashes.
So Campbell believes new space can be found by protecting natural space in cities, suburbs, or the countryside. “You could buy a plot here, say over along that little trail, and you’d know it would never be touched,” said Campbell. If developers ever wanted to turn this land into another Rolling Hills Estates, they’d have to do it over your dead body. By choosing to be buried in such preserves, people would be able to stand up for their environmental values long after death. Well, maybe not stand up.
By the time I spoke with him, Campbell’s company, Memorial Ecosystems, had already created one such park in his home state of South Carolina. His goal was then, and remains, to establish similar burial preserves around the country, using the generated profits to help preserve threatened habitat elsewhere. Natural burials (sometimes called green burials) cost half the typical rate of a traditional funeral and burial. His company uses no crypts and requires biodegradable coffins. Natural burials don’t use embalming fluids, which include carcinogenic chemicals.
In a nature preserve/memorial park, protected from development, grave plots or ash interments would be marked by small, engraved stones, if anything. The graves would be located at the fringes, or along existing trails.
Campbell envisioned a chapel for burial services, a “native plant propagation center” instead of the typical flower shop, and a small visitor’s center. Weddings could also be held there. Computerized kiosks would provide information about the land’s natural history, the native tribes that once lived there, and profiles of the people buried in the preserve. Visitors would wear earphones, much like those worn at art galleries, or carry handheld computers or smartphones equipped with GPS, which would guide them to the exact location where their relative is buried, thus avoiding the need for a marker. The GPS device would then offer a menu of memories: photos, videos, maybe a piano piece played by the deceased. An e-commerce Web site might offer virtual tours and online plot reservations. Campbell isn’t the only entrepreneur thinking this way. At the far edge, a new Georgia company called Eternal Reefs uses human cremains mixed with concrete to help create artificial ocean reefs, which attract life.
Though the Santa Ysabel plan never became a reality, Chris Khoury, an Escondido psychiatrist and former president of the San Dieguito River Valley Land Conservancy, was rooting for it at the time. He hoped that money from a memorial park would help his organization buy additional land adjacent to the preserve. “I find the notion ‘dust to dust’ a comforting thought,” he said. “This could be one way to bring back a sense of sacredness to our relationship with the earth.” Khoury remembers trying to convince a recalcitrant landowner to sell his land to the park as part of a natural burial area by arguing: “Just think, you could make money burying dead environmentalists.”
Campbell remains committed to his cause: natural burial grounds as a way to protect open space from development while offering a way for citizen naturalists to be, like Ed Abbey, part of the land they love for a long time. Maybe forever.