Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Environmental Leader and Innovator | Page 6

© Lilian Kemp, 1969
4 | Sweet Auburn
Savannah, Charleston, Richmond, Buffalo, Detroit, St.
Louis, Milwaukee, Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis, and
Cleveland—each of which consecrated a non-profit garden
cemetery between 1836 and 1853.
In Baltimore, in 1835, the preacher Stephen Duncan
Walker published a book in which he proposed that his city
ought to follow “a plan corresponding to that of Mount
Auburn.” “A public walk,” he explained, “is a common-
wealth, a kind of democracy, where the poor, the rich, the
mechanic, the merchant and the man of letters, mingle on
a footing of perfect equality.” And a public walk that was
also a cemetery represented an ideal place “where the ashes
of both the illustrious and the humble might peacefully
repose under the general shade of the fairest productions of
nature and art.” The ultimate goal was to create a society of
walkers who would inhabit a middle landscape that balanced
death and life.
That’s a powerful environmental ethic, to my mind. I love
national parks, have spent some wonderful vacations there—
but vacations are temporary. They’re privileges, luxuries; they
don’t necessarily speak to the way we live our everyday lives.
We soak up the beauty and sublimity of the parks and then
usually we just go back to the rat race and the pollution.
The experience of a garden-style cemetery is very different.
And in the antebellum period, the idea was truly to rethink
the idea of progress and development, to slow things down,
to keep everyone humble. By the time of the Civil War,
of course—and perhaps this is perfectly understandable—
Americans needed relief from the shadow of death, so they
turned away from cemetery landscapes and toward the
majestic scenery out West, which was seemingly untouched
by conflict and redolent not of limitation but of expansive-
ness. Today, in the twenty-first century, we’re still living out
that legacy in a culture of denial, and we do everything we
can to avoid thinking about our mortality.
The supporters of Mount Auburn, though, confronted
the darkness of death and life, and encouraged an ethic of
care and social connection. Cemeteries are spaces where,
as the literary critic Robert Harrison has put it, we might
ultimately discover that “loss is the rock bottom foundation
of the communal…. To live loss as a matter of fact means
to live poetically, knowing that we are not the possessors of
the world we inhabit.”
The Boston area was living loss in April 2013, in the
immediate aftermath of the Marathon bombing, and I will
never forget the day I spent wandering through Cambridge,
Watertown, Newton, and Belmont right after the second
bomber was arrested. Everywhere I went, the sense of caring,
community, humility, and gratitude was palpable. That kind
of ethic does not by any means guarantee a commitment
to environmental sustainability—not by a long shot. But
I think it’s a good start because it signals a certain kind of
groundedness, an attachment to place, and a recognition
that we’re all mortal and we’re all in this together. And