The Centre for Natural Burial

Burials returning to the practice of days past
Frank Fisher, Park Record

Green burials at green-burial sites have become almost as common in English communities as the corner pub and are now drawing interest in the United States.

This futuristic trend is a practice from the past. Picture a funeral where a loved one is laid to rest in the woods, attended by a gathering of friends. The handmade pine casket is lowered into the hand-dug earth, environmentally friendly, with no embalming of the body and no cement vault. A simple headstone - if any - marks the grave.
“We’re all part of this cycle,” said Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

The burial site may be in a forest, a farmland setting or a desert with cactus. Not even the sky is the limit with the scattering of ashes.

The Green Burial Council is an independent nonprofit organization that encourages environmentally-friendly burial. The council propones burial in designated lands with minimal disturbance of natural settings. Burial in a biodegradable casket or wrapping a body in shrouds has a minimal impact on the earth, Sehee said.

Discouraged are environmentally unfriendly practices such as embalming, the use of concrete burial vaults, and the creation of unnatural settings with non-native vegetation.

Sehee is also a consultant, bringing together land trusts, open - space organizations and park-service administrators. He advises communities, cemeteries and individuals how to designate land as green burial sites for perpetuity. Ideally, he said, such entities and individuals work together to create such a site.

He said that burial in cemeteries has become a purely commercial action.

“Think about a walk through a cemetery,” he said. “Why is it people don’t want to come back?” He spoke of the early cemetery practice of planting a tree atop each gravesite. “It looked like a bad hair transplant,” he said.

He spoke of alternatives to the manicured, green grass cemetery, which he believes “feel void of life.”

The latest concept in burial grounds is the establishment of land trusts and conservation easements on natural lands. The trusts establish rules that must be followed for every burial to keep the burial ground “green.”

Green burials are more common in other countries. Great Britain has more than 200 green burial sites in a relatively new practice, begun in 1993. Four such burial grounds have been established in the United States. Currently, there are no green burial sites in Utah.

“Locations tend to be in natural settings,” Sehee said. “Many are in the woods. You have no development costs and few maintenance costs. Still, it has to make sense economically for the concept to work.”

“Cemeteries do not have good records as stewards,” Sehee said. “A lot of owners are saddled with underperforming older cemeteries.” As a result, some cemeteries fall into disrepair.

He does feel local cemetery operators would do a good job with low-maintenance natural burial grounds and could make a profit because of low overhead costs. Endowments to maintain the green-burial grounds can be established using a small percentage of burial-plot costs.

Green burials also avoid the common practices of embalming.

Sehee said the practice of using embalming fluid dates back 140 years in the United States. He said 823,000 gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluids are used a year, poisons which leach into the ground and eventually, the water tables. Refrigeration is an alternative to preserving a body prior to burial.

Joe Maynes, a funeral director at Olpin-Hoopes Funeral Home in Heber, said not embalming a body is an option. “We try to accommodate all peoples’ needs,” he said.

The cement vaults used to contain caskets also are unnecessary, Sehee said. More than 1.5 million tons of reinforced concrete is buried in cemeteries throughout the country. “People should have a choice,” he said. “Vaults also violate some religious beliefs.” Because a body wrapped in shrouds or a casket displace less area, he said, there is little sinking of land.

Maynes said that burial vaults are required in existing Summit County cemeteries. One reason: Backhoes sometimes have to pass over grave sites to access new sites.

Sehee said about a third of the people who die in the United States are cremated. Newer crematoriums use far less energy than older ones. He considers cremations as environmentally friendly, although others would disagree, saying the process produces greenhouse gases.

Sehee thinks that burials in natural settings are welcoming, turning death into a natural process of returning to the earth.

“Some people see green burial as their last act to heal the planet,” he said.

“Death can look as beautiful as life.”

For more information on green burial, visit www.greenburialcouncil.org or call (888) 966-3330