The Centre for Natural Burial

By NICKI THOMAS, SPECIAL TO SUN MEDIA

Proponents of environmentally friendly burials are encouraging people to give back to the earth - by becoming part of it.

Green burials, which involve no embalming or grave lining, and biodegradable containers, “connect people to a larger story of rebirth and regeneration,” said Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, based in New Mexico.

While conventional funerals are still the norm in Canada, Sehee told Sun Media that green burials are “moving into the mainstream quickly.”

The Royal Oak Burial Park in Victoria will become Canada’s first provider of green burials this fall. “We’ve always tried to respond proactively when we get the sense the community wants another option,” said Royal Oak executive director Stephen Olson.

The cemetery will have a separate section for green burials, which will be set in a natural clearing and will appear more like a meadow than a traditional cemetery.

Olson suspects people may object to the comparatively unkempt appearance of the site as well as to the restriction of individual grave markers.

Names of those buried on site will be inscribed on a granite, boulder-like memorial near the entrance of the clearing.

The cost of the grave will remain the same, he said, but a natural burial will cut the costs of caskets, grave liners and headstones.

The last 100 years have been a blip in history in terms of death care practices, said Sehee. Embalmment became a cornerstone of the funeral industry when manufacturers of embalming fluid started the first mortuary schools.

Chemicals used in the process, primarily formaldehyde and glutaraldehyde, can then seep into the groundwater through grave linings, which are not airtight.

Sehee said people need to know their options when it comes to death care and he hopes that green burials will provide a context in which to discuss death, a subject most people avoid.

“In our society, we don’t think about death. But as we get older, death is an inevitability,” said Michael Kalmanovitch, owner of Edmonton’s Earth’s General Store.

Kalmanovitch has not one but three plans for his own post-death placement.

He said he would like his body to be rendered, which he readily admits is not a possibility, buried on an organic farm, or cremated.

“I don’t want to be part of the funeral business. I don’t want to waste that land,” he said.