An Interview with Dr. Hannah Rumble

Dr. Rumble: For a start the UK is the home for this burial innovation that we’ve all come to know as ‘natural burial’. It began very informally in 1993 and since then has grown into a legitimate alternative to cremation or cemetery burial, with over 200 natural burials sites spread throughout the UK.

I think the proliferation of natural burial sites in the UK is what distinguishes the country from its European partners. Germany has about 36 or so sites and so comes closest to the UK in availability of this type of burial provision.

What distinguishes Britain from America in the main is in the title: ‘natural’. In the UK this tends to be imagined and realized alongside landscapes that encompass the pastoral, such as farmers’ set-aside that turns to meadow, or woodlands. But in the US, I get the impression that the natural landscape incorpated into natural burial provision can encompass more of the ‘wilderness’. Also, I gather that in America, concrete lined vaults or graves are common, whilst they’re not at all used in the UK. So in a way, natural burial is much more of a radical break with ‘tradition’ in America, whereas I don’t think it is so much in the UK. We’ve always buried people in the soil directly. Also ‘tradition’ is an interesting subtle difference too. In America, natural burial is aligned with the ‘traditions’ of the  American settlers in the popular imagination. In the UK, our cultural imagination tends to align natural burial with pre-christian ‘tradition’ and practices.

Dr. Rumble: Natural burial began as a political and ecological alternative to cremation but overtime became more the norm. Due to public demand, a greater number of natural burial sites in the UK have had to accept ash scattering and/or interment as one of the services they offer, which from an ecological perspective could seem counter-intuitive or redundant. But these days natural burial isn’t necessarily a ‘green choice’; it’s also about people identifying somewhere peaceful and tranquil where they want to secure their final place of rest. There are even a small number of natural burial grounds that now allow their clients to be interred with their pets’ ashes. I suspect that over time, natural burial in the UK will increasingly become less of a class-based choice or a green choice and simply an inclusive option alongside cemation/ash scattering and cemetery burial.

Dr. Rumble: For a start, the Arbory Trust’s natural burial ground — called Barton Glebe — isn’t the only Church of England affiliated natural burial ground. There are one or two others.

This site was the focus of my research simply because it was written into the remit of the research project, as my PhD was funded through a collaborative doctoral award, which meant that there had to be a partnership between an academic institution, in this case the University of Durham, and a non-academic institution — the Arbory Trust.

The Trust had approached my supervisor, Prof. Douglas Davies, a few years before saying they thought their natural burial provison was worthy of a sociological study, and like all good ideas, it began with a flippant remark over a drink and the next thing you know, it’s a reality! But I should stress that I found in my research that faith has little to do with their provision. Yes, the Trust is affiliated to the Church of England, because the Diocese in which the natural burial ground is located helped the Trust set up logistically and financially, but people with any faith or none at all can, and are, buried at the natural burial ground.

Dana: How do various religious beliefs support or conflict with the practice of natural burial?

Dr. Rumble: I never found any forms of confliction between my interviewees’ personal faith and natural burial. What I did find however, was that those who had a faith would speak of ideas such as earth stewardship and respecting God’s creation/kingdom to explain their choice for natural burial. Ideas of stewardship cut across all faiths and has been written extensively about in relation to faith-based ecological behavior. But equally, if you’re a non-believer, you can associate a kind of ‘spirituality’ with natural burial and I write a lot about that; how we make meaning of our lives and death through the natural world and how we project and embody our identity and memory through nature as well.

Dr. Rumble: I found that people tend to have an irrational fear about fire, worms or being buried underground that inevitably influences their initial preference for burial (of all kinds) or cremation. Prof. Davies did some qualitative research about this a while ago and wrote about it in Reusing Old Graves: A report on popular British attitudes. Kent, Shaw & Sons, (Davies, D. J. and A. Shaw, 1995).

• environmental values
• aesthetic values
• religious-spiritual values
• consumer values
• family values
• romantic values

Obviously there are links, cross-cutting issues and complements between these groups of values that influence people’s decision-making around natural burial in the UK, and most interviewees would refer to two or three of these. It would be interesting to know how a different culture may prioritize these values or identify them differently (that’s the anthropologist in me!). So for example, when I speak of ‘aesthetic values’ in the UK and ‘romantic values’ I am referring quite a bit to the notion of the pastoral idyll that has a long history in British landscape art and Romanticism.

Dr. Rumble: Yes! Theoreticlly and empirically there was a lot given to the therapeutic nature of the natural burial ground that led me to conclude that a number of natural burial sites in the UK are the contemporary therapeutic landscape for the bereaved; just as garden cemteries were deemed to be in the 19th century in Britain. Natural burial sites materially embody all those cultural ideas about renewal, healing, peace, tranquility, memory, etc. People were able to make creative links quite easily between the deceased person they were grieving for and that person’s continuing identity and memory in the life presented within a natural burial ground. Also, the sometimes cruel, sometimes sublime cycles of the seasons here in the UK provided a motif for people’s cycles of mourning and understanding of life and death. ‘Nature’, whatever that ultimately means, is a powerful cathartic tool for the people I spoke to.

I also talk about the ‘gift’ of giving ourselves ‘back to nature’. A ‘gift’ for generations to come and a means of projecting one’s identity beyond death. It relates to gift-theory in anthropology, and I use it to talk about the unarticulated motivations people have to choose natural burial. I think there’s similarities in the idea of ‘utility’ of the self that prompts people to donate themselves to medical science or choose natural burial — a recycling, reusing of the body for the greater good.