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VALERIE WADE: I realized that there
is just so much in cemeteries that people don't realize.
Sure, there's the sentimental value.
There's lots of information, lots of data.
And they also serve to anchor communities
in very important ways.
The erasure of cemeteries or the neglect of cemeteries
is important.
And it says something about which communities we value
and which communities we don't value.
Where people who do care about their family cemeteries
or their neighborhood cemeteries,
they just may not have the resources or the people power
to keep them up.
What does that mean for that local cemetery
and that neighborhood?
So these are the questions that I've been wrestling with.
Because I think that climate change
has these ripple effects.
People don't automatically think about these things.
But it does have a cultural impact,
it does have an economic impact.
People who have more resources are able to bounce
back from these things.
The way society was set up, it effectively
meant that some people are worth remembering
by nature of having the resources
to have a big nice headstone.
And other people were not worth remembering.
So it's just a reminder like, wow,
like our great great grandparents may
have led these wonderful lives.
But a headstone was a luxury.
Katrina really highlighted that, caskets just floating.
And people's relatives just in the water,
just history has literally been uprooted
and is literally being swept away
in the aftermath of this storm.
So if the people who maybe established a cemetery all
live miles and miles away now, well, what
happens to that small cemetery?
All the people who cared about it aren't near it anymore.
So in some ways like the growth of this city
and changing economics does directly
affect lost cemeteries.
It's just that I think we caution against just building,
building, building without thinking about the long term
effects of that building, like we're seeing with climate
change, like we're seeing with like I
say, all the concrete in Houston,
in a city with a lot of water.
We're just asking to just pause and think
about maybe some more sustainable ways
that we can grow.
And I think that that's the intersection
between preservation and building for the future.
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