Since the beginning of civilization burials have been apart of cultures of all different kinds. This is a way of the living to honor their loved ones and help both the deceased and the living to move on. This is a beautiful concept but there is a nasty side effect of doing this and that is graveyards/ cemeteries. There are millions if not billions of grave sites around the world and these sites take up space which adds up.
On my way home for Thanksgiving break and I had to drive up parkway North and I just took notice to this huge graveyard around Newark. Later I do research on it and find out that there are four different cemeteries in that area, the biggest being one called Fairmount Cemetery. This cemetery is takes up 150 acres of land which is pretty substantial. This made me wonder how much space cemeteries take up in our country and world wide. Space is such a limited resource and as a humans we must use it wisely.
– image from FindAGrave.com (Micheal Holmes)
When I saw these cemeteries in Newark I just thought about all of the things that this space could have been used for, specifically I thought that is could be a park or some type of recreation area and even more so a site for housing. Newark is an city filled with poverty and I just thought that there could be more projects to help them if there were the space and the funds. Cemeteries take up the potential and they are nothing more than just space for bodies to lie in forever doing nothing. Cemeteries are just for the living relatives of the decease to feel some temporary comfort but there will be a time when that body put six feet under is forgotten and now it is just space taken up to sit. Space should be used for the living, we are the ones directly effected by the use of space. Its a harsh thought but space and the way we zone it is for the people living in today so we should be efficient about how we go about this. I know it would be very difficult to remove existing cemeteries but there should be some regulation of how many people get buried and where this happens. If we continue to fill space up with bodies we may end up over-saturating our world with negative space. We as a society and world need to make sure all of our space is used in the most beautiful and most efficient way.