Why I Want a Green Burial
By Lisa Cullen
After they learned I had just written a book about funerals and burials, folks would invariably ask me: How would I want to go? That was easy. “I’d want a green burial,” I’d answer.
“A what?” they’d say.
I would have said the same thing a couple of years ago. Not that I’d given it a lot of thought, but I went into the reporting of this book thinking I’d prefer cremation. My main reason for that choice is that I’m cheap. Full-body burial incurs all sorts of what I thought of as unnecessary and extravagant costs: the fancy casket, the cemetery plot, the layers of pancake to make my dead face presentable at the viewing. The average funeral costs over $6,000, according to the National Funeral Directors Association, whereas direct cremations can cost under $1,000. A savings of five grand for my loved ones? No brainer.
Then I came across a wooded preserve in South Carolina. A country doctor and his British-born wife in a tiny town called Westminster showed me around 28 acres of forest cut through by a babbling creek. As we hiked its winding trail, Billy and Kimberley Campbell would point out faint mounds along the way: a Mrs. Jones here, a Mr. Abernathy there. The preserve, it turned out, was the final resting ground of about 50 people who had opted out of a traditional burial in a formal cemetery. Instead, they refused the embalming. They were laid in plain pine caskets or wrapped in shrouds. They were then lowered into shallow holes in the ground and covered over with dirt. They became fertilizer for wildflowers.
The process isn’t free, or even all that cheap. It can cost about $3,000, all told, once you include shipping your body cross country. But most of the money goes toward the preservation of the land above you. The Campbells had come upon an ingenious environmental plan: by designating vast tracts of nature “cemeteries,” they would then protect the land from development (most regions have restrictions against building on top of Grandma).
The thought of laying a loved one straight into dirt might strike Americans as odd, used as we are to the many layers of separation imposed by the funeral industry: the coffin, the vault, the tomb. But is there anything so simple and beautiful as returning to the earth-benefiting it, even? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I hope I’m a long way from that conclusion, but my decision’s already made.