The Centre for Natural Burial

Trail Times

In what may be the ultimate expression of back to nature, three entrepreneurs are creating what they say is California’s first organic cemetery, hoping their ban on floral arrangements and formaldehyde will serve as a national model.

Embalming fluid, metal caskets and marble headstones won’t be permitted at Fernwood Forever. Instead, the dead will be placed in biodegradable boxes or shrouds and interred in nondescript graves that mourners can dig themselves.

To ensure visitors pay their respects at the right spot, the cemetery will provide global positioning system devices and native boulders as markers.

The partners think their business model can be easily replicated in other crowded areas where space is at a premium.

Co-ownerTyler Cassity said they already are scouting potential sites in Oregon, near Seattle and outside Chicago.

Besides offering environmentally conscious San Francisco Bay area residents a green alternative to identical plots on heavily landscaped grounds, the new cemetery will preserve 13 hectares of open space between San Francisco Bay and Stinson Beach, Cassity said.

Some proceeds from each funeral will be used for restoring and maintaining the meadows, oak forests and scrub hills that make up the property, a portion of which has been in use as a conventional cemetery since the 19th century.

“The idea is returning to the land what we have taken from it,” said Cassity, 34, a second-generation veteran of the mortuary business whose family renovated the celebrity-rich Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery in 1998.

“If you talk to someone about this concept, they will often say, `I always wanted to be buried naturally under a tree.’ It just rings true to them.”

Fernwood Forever still must clear state and local regulatory approval, but its owners expect it to open later this year. It would be the country’s second eco-cemetery, according to project partner Joe Sehee, a Los Angeles writer.

The first was opened in South Carolina by physician Billy Campbell, who has joined Cassity and Sehee for what they are calling their “memorial nature preserve” in this Marin County town.

About 50 people have chosen to spend eternity at Campbell’s 14- hectare Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., since it opened in 1996. Cassity and Sehee see a bigger market in the Bay Area, where they estimate that 80 per cent of the deceased are currently cremated. They say they already have a waiting list of about 100 interested customers.

The owners aren’t sure how much room they’ll have — they’re doing an ecological survey that will determine how many people can be buried on site. Prices haven’t been set yet either, but Sehee said he expects the cemetery to cost less than a traditional venue.

In attacking the expense, trappings and “obsolescence” of the funeral industry, Cassity said he also hopes to provide survivors with more meaningful bereavement rituals. Relatives will be encouraged, for example, to accompany the bodies of their loved ones to the crematorium or to participate in candlelit memorial services sitting in circles with an urn in the centre.

Along with a GPS device, visitors will be given hand-held audio- video units that display mini-documentaries about a dead person’s life. Staff members will be called “stewards” instead of funeral directors and — when they aren’t assisting grieving families — will build trails and remove nonnative plants.