The Centre for Natural Burial

Pushing up daisies is nature’s way, after all
By Betty Booker, Times-Dispatch

Green burial is a new trend that’s as old as death itself.

Let’s not mince words: It’s the disposal of a corpse so that it merges quickly with nature. In other words, ecological in this world, and presumably the next.

Instead of the typical American burial — embalmed body in metal or hardwood casket inside concrete grave liner or vault in turf-covered commercial cemetery — green burial options include:

* Shrouded body in winding sheets, robe or plain garment, placed in a hole.

* Biodegradable soft wood, cardboard, bamboo or wicker casket, preferably minus slow-to-decay nails and polyester.

* Corpse lowered into the soil in his or her birthday suit.

* Cremains (ashes after cremation) buried or sprinkled in a favorite location, natural preserve or memorial garden.

Think simple pioneer burial with winds whispering through trees and grasses and you’ve got a general picture of a green burial.

“This is what our great-grandparents did,” says Lisa Carlson, author of “Caring for the Dead: Your Final Act of Love” (Upper Access, $29.95).

That was before the Civil War, when American embalming was introduced and the modern funeral industry began, she continues in a phone interview.

Then, families cared for the dying, prepared bodies for burial, held wakes at home with the deceased in attendance, made caskets and buried them in churchyards or private cemeteries.

Burial on Virginia farms and private cemeteries is still a common practice.

Charles City County, for example, hasn’t added much to the state code that permits the burial of kin on private land, says William R. Britton, county development director.

The burial site can’t be near a house or a well, and the county requires an easement to give access to such plots.

“Realistically, people aren’t going to be buried in their backyards,” says Isabel Berney, executive secretary of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of the Virginia Blue Ridge. When property is sold, “you’re supposed to disclose if there’s a body, and not many people would want to have to do that.”

The Blacksburg-based organization is one of four state affiliates of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA), a national nonprofit information and advocacy group.

FCA is looking for volunteers to organize a Richmond affiliate.

Jews, Muslims and Latter-day Saints (Mormons) also practice many aspects of simple burials.

Some Richmond funeral homes, such as Bennett and Bliley, have long accommodated such religious traditions.

Some commercial cemeteries also have special sections devoted to different denominations’ burial practices.

Bob Clapp, of Virginia Beach, president of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Tidewater, says “funeral homes that are friendly to us” — and to some families’ desire for simple, low-cost funerals — will help customers without tacking on extraneous costs.

Word of mouth or asking the national FCA or its affiliates are the best ways to glean information.

Americans are gradually becoming aware of green burial, says Susan Motley, executive director of the Virginia Funeral Directors Association.

“In Virginia, it’s in the early stages,” she says. “It’s a trend that will come to Virginia later, but now it’s out there on the periphery.”

In most states, including Virginia, embalming, caskets, vaults and concrete grave liners aren’t necessary, or even required.

Many commercial cemeteries, however, require concrete liners to keep the soil from sinking into a grave.

“You can dress the body, but most people are squeamish about that now,” Clapp says.

“People just call the funeral home routinely, not knowing that it’s not required,” Clapp says.

But relatives can get a death certificate, a transport permit and haul the body to its legal place of burial.

Green burial is an outgrowth of the ecological movement — back-to-nature, in this case literally.

“We got the natural childbirthing movement from England and the hospice movement,” Carlson continues.

“And now we’re getting the natural death movement from England. It’s a logical extension of the other end of natural childbirth,” Carlson says.

If you don’t have a family cemetery, farm or nearby natural burial preserve, cremation is an alternative.

Between a quarter to a third of all body disposals are now through cremation: It’s a cheaper alternative to traditional funerals, says former Virginian Joshua Slocum, the FCA’s executive director.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the average funeral in the U.S. costs about $6,000. Many exceed $10,000.

Cremation typically costs more than $1,000.

Cremains are easy to dispose of buried, urns take up little space; scattered, cremains take up no space.

An alternative to traditional cemeteries is green burial spaces such as the one Dr. Billy Campbell, a 50-year-old family physician and environmentalist in rural Westminster, S.C., started there in 1998.

A funeral and burial there can cost $2,000 or so.

He also co-founded the Green Burial Council last year to promote environmentally sensitive, lower-cost burial options.

Campbell’s wife, Kimberly, says she, the doctor and helpers dig a four-foot hole in the Ramsey Creek Preserve’s 32-acre woodland, mound the dirt and stabilize the site with stones.

They eschew expensive tombstones, known as monuments, in favor of flat engraved stones.

With green burial, Berney notes matter-of-factly, “the body just degrades in about four years, especially if there’s enough moisture in the ground.”

Sort of like the bumper sticker that says, “Old gardeners never die, they just compost away.”

Carlson, who founded the Funeral Consumers Alliance, predicts that cremations, particularly, will be an ever-increasing choice “because of price, mobile society and changing family rituals.”

“The boomer generation wrote their own wedding vows, demanded the right to natural childbirth, home schooling, alternative medicine, blended families and they will take control of this critical life event as well,” Carlson says.

“They’re telling me, ‘I will honor my mother’s wishes for a traditional funeral, but it’s not what I want.’”