Summary
Sweden’s burial associations are seeking land to prepare for potential mass wartime burials, prompting new crisis readiness guidelines following the country’s decision to join NATO amid rising tensions with Russia.
In Gothenburg, officials aim to acquire 10 acres for emergency burials and 15 acres for regular cemetery use.
Sweden’s neutrality ended after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, prompting civil defense measures and NATO membership.
In theory, wouldn’t this eventually become a problem for every country? That is, an infinite parade of people dying and finite land area?
Russians had mobile crematoria, just saying.
It’s ridiculous that this is back on the agenda, why can’t we just stop killing people?
Putin wants what they’ve got, and he’s willing to [send people to] kill for it.
If you have a stable population, and a fixed amount of time graves are used you could just have a certain amount of cemetary space set aside and be fine. Mass casualty events like wars and pandemics can change these things, of course.
Not quite, as corpses eventually decay completely.
Lol, good point. So what I hear you saying is… instead of a simple hard limit, there is a kind of ‘tipping point’, and we will be fine so long as bones are produced at a lesser rate than they decay. Since the bone production rate is [probably] proportional to population, as long as the population is not increasing without bound…
At some point someone will stop paying for the cemetery plot and that plot will go to somebody else, usually 50 years after the person is dead and all their direct relatives don’t care anymore. The old bones are buried deeper or cremated and the grave stones will be recycled. Corpses don’t become permanent owners of cemetery land. Maybe in some honorary great war cemetery as a recognition of the sacrifices, but not as a norm. They’re leased for the purposes of decomposition.
Some families can buy mausoleums, which are like little houses on the cemetery, where they end up keeping all the bones of several people all piled up in jars after the bodies are decomposed, but these mausoleums have to be paid for by someone who is alive and at some point there are no descendants or the descendants are too poor to pay or don’t care to pay thousands of euros every so often for the plot and maintenance dues on dead people, so they are torn down and the bones put into the deeper parts of the cemetery with everyone else, where, depending on the soil, it takes between 30-50 years to decompose the bones, provided the cemetery is built on appropriate decomposing ground, but sometimes over 100 if the soil is not appropriate for a cemetery.
Not everyone is buried like that. Cremation, green burials, body donation, and other options exist.
And a grave lot may be reclaimed after a period of time, usually either a set duration or when there’s been no activity on the lot (e.g. further burials on a family lot).