Let’s face it. We’re all compost in the end.
When the day comes to meet our maker, we can stave off the inevitable with embalming fluid and a $3,000 satin-lined mahogany casket, but deep down we all know the truth. Unless you’re the pope or you have the money to get yourself cryogenically stored, chances are good you’ll still end up like the rest of us: As Earth’s bountiful fertilizer.
It might be our best work yet. However, we can do one better, say the environmentalists, and with Earth Day upon us, it is timely, then, to reflect upon the idea that our green efforts needn’t stop at the graveyard. There are green options even in the afterlife, and they’re being touted by a group of pioneers who run green-burial alternatives above ground and below sea level. One even involves freeze-drying.
These funerary trailblazers are motivated in part by the following statistics, gathered by Cornell University science writer and green cemetery president Mary Woodsen:
- There are 22,500 cemeteries nationwide. Every year more than 1.6 million tons of concrete goes into the ground because coffins are encased in vaults. Add to that more than 90,000 tons of steel and 827,000 gallons of embalming fluid that gets buried each year.
- As for cremation, you could drive 4,800 miles on the energy used to dispose of just one corpse, figures Woodsen.
So, what now? You recycle your soup cans, you’ve seen 'An Inconvenient Truth.' You’re an environmental do-gooder, and you do not want your dead body messing up the planet.
There are a few options out there, all designed with nature in mind.
That’s What Friends Are For
The first thing green-burial advocates will tell you is that they’re not doing anything new. People were burying loved ones au naturel long before funeral directors got in on the action.
In rural southern British Columbia, there is a community of former hippies and farmer types who bury their dead in the old-fashioned, DIY way. Bodies are not embalmed; graves are not lined with concrete or steel. Residents have access to a public cemetery and, usually, someone in the community who knows how to knock a pine box together, if a shroud isn’t used. Prior to burial, families can either clean and dress the body themselves or have a funeral home do it. They decorate the box, help dig the hole and add a distinctive grave marker later, if they wish.
The total cost of burial is about $70, not including the death certificate. Compared to a commercial funeral, which can average $6,500 (not including plot and grave marker), the back-to-basics method reflects rural community and pragmatism.
In New York’s Finger Lakes region, Woodsen is president of the nonprofit Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, 100 acres of rocky old farm meadow and the first of its kind in the state. Conventional beliefs about burial are folklore, she says.
“I know of no state that requires embalming, or even a coffin,” says Woodsen. “And with traditional burial, a lot of it is about the tombstone. And we don’t do tombstones.”
Save a Coneflower
At Billy Campbell’s Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., all graves are dug by hand, about three feet down, with a mound of dirt over the top, in order to preserve the delicate ecology of the 33-acre protected habitat.
Campbell, a rural doctor, and his British-born wife, Kimberley, are meticulous in their efforts to marry green burial with land conservation. It’s what sets them apart from the other green cemeteries.
They go so far as to scatter ashes in an area where they will nourish the endangered coneflowers. “People need to recognize that everybody will-nilly scattering ashes is not necessarily the best thing either,” says Campbell, a bit of a stickler.
Eighty people have been buried at Ramsey Creek; another 20 have ashes there. But in the last year alone, up to 100 more plots have been sold.
“We have had more sales in the last year and a half than in the previous eight,” says Kimberley Campbell. “It is definitely picking up.”
The couple has secured more land and soon will oversee 100 acres. Plots sell for $1,950 each, with a $300 grave-digging fee. Cremated remains are scattered for $250, buried for $500.
The Campbells go green, but they don’t go so far as to make family members remove Grandpa’s pacemaker. Some people are buried in biodegradable caskets, homemade quilts or natural-cloth shrouds; others go straight into the ground wearing a favorite outfit.
If business has picked up for the private, rural cemetery, it may be due in part to the tendency toward all things natural, organic and unprocessed. The trend is a spin-off from the green movement, based on the idea that we’ve lost touch not just with our sense of community but with ourselves.
“This guy who came out to the preserve said the problem he had about being buried naturally is that he wanted to make sure he was really dead,” marvels Kimberley Campbell. “It’s something deep in our biological being, that we have a problem.”
