The Centre for Natural Burial

An eco-friendly, personal approach to death

By: Sharon Tregaskis, Urbanite

Under leaden mid-October skies, 150 mourners trek into a verdant hollow in upstate New York, sheltered by evergreens and a host of maples in their fall finery. No shiny black hearse idles nearby. No wreath of hothouse flowers lends its sickly sweet scent. No regiment of marble monuments marches across this green. Even so, there’s no mistaking what’s to come—a squat mound of earth rises beside a freshly dug grave.

A friend of the departed offers a eulogy; a pastor reads a psalm and sends up a prayer. The wind rises, but the rain holds off. Then, as an Algerian lullaby plays from a boombox, eight men step forward. Each takes the end of one of four stout grapevines that snake beneath the unfinished wood casket, etched with fingers raised in a peace sign and the words, “beloved son, brother, uncle.” Slowly, they lower the box into the ground. Before they leave, the mourners each drop a spruce bough atop the coffin.

Welcome to the latest frontier of the green movement, a light-on-the-land approach to disposing of our last remains. Green deathcare, which has its roots in Europe, is relatively new to the United States. It promises to catch on, however, as people seek to return to a more simple, personal, and eco-friendly approach to laying loved ones to rest.

The movement is most visible in the green cemeteries that are beginning to pop up nationwide. Most of these facilities ban embalming fluids and the concrete vaults that keep the ground above graves from settling. Some ban headstones altogether; others allow only those made of local stone, set level with the ground. Few permit metal caskets, and some bar even wood coffins if they’ve been joined with nails or toxic glues.

Consider the chemicals that keep the turf blanketing most cemeteries preternaturally perfect—herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers—and the fossil fuel burned trimming all that grass. But the seriously scary stuff lurks below ground. For every ten acres, the soil under your average cemetery boasts enough formalin (a standard embalming ingredient and known carcinogen) to fill a small swimming pool, according to author Mark Harris, whose book Grave Matters documents the modern funeral industry and the natural burial movement. “Enough metal is diverted into coffins and burial vaults in the U.S. each year to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge,” he says, “and enough concrete is diverted to build a two-lane highway running from New York to Detroit.”

Green cemeteries have another purpose: slowing the spread of sprawl through conservation easements and deed restrictions. The 100-acre Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in upstate New York, the site of that spruce-adorned October burial, links two 4,000-acre nature preserves. South Carolina’s Ramsey Creek Memorial Nature Preserve, the nation’s first green cemetery, has protected seventy acres since it opened in 1998. And at the soon-to-open Honey Creek Woodlands near Atlanta, a Trappist monastery aims to protect its grounds by selling burial plots and coffins crafted by the monks from locally harvested wood. The proceeds will also cover the aging monks’ health care costs.

Increasingly, even conventional cemeteries are getting hip to the trend. Many have set aside a back corner where concrete vaults aren’t required. In most states, including Maryland, embalming fluids are optional, and while each funeral home sets its own policies, many funeral directors will skip that step if asked.

The Historic Congressional Cemetery in Southeast Washington, D.C., has initiated low-impact grounds maintenance, with Bay-friendly native shrubs and flowers, and a tree-planting campaign. The thirty-two-acre cemetery is the largest privately held green space on the Anacostia River watershed, critical for migrating birds, according to volunteer board member Linda Harper, the executive director of Cultural Tourism, D.C. Turns out there’s a financial incentive, too: “We can go after historic preservation money all day long,” says Harper, “but where there’s significant new fundraising dollars is on the green side.” Last year, the cemetery won a grant to teach local schoolchildren about the watershed, and the board is investigating collaborations with birdwatchers and the local butterfly society.

But for some folks, burial in any form just doesn’t fit the bill. A solid majority of the nation’s seventy-five million baby boomers plan to be cremated instead. Greensprings discourages cremation. “You have to burn a body at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit for four hours,” says Greensprings Ecological Insight Committee member Andy Hillman, “so you create a carbon debt at the point in your life where you really can’t pay it back.” And for those with old dental fillings, cremation looses another genie from the bottle in the form of volatized mercury, a neurotoxin. Even so, Greensprings has set aside a place for cremains, nestled among a stand of Norway Spruce whose roots prevent digging grave-sized holes.

Coastal enterprises in Florida, Georgia, and California have sprung up to accommodate the boomers’ eco-sensibilities by working cremains into artificial coral reefs. Baltimore paralegal Carol Fox had her son’s ashes mixed into a concrete reef placed off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland. As a teen, Jamie had said he wanted to be buried at sea. He was a senior at Salisbury University when he drowned near the family’s vacation home. “The reef will last five hundred years, and there will always be something in the ocean for him, in his memory,” says Fox, who hopes eventually to dive near the reef.

Meanwhile, green cemeteries have developed the same issues that have afflicted organic farming and green building. “What’s to stop a green cemetery today from looking totally different thirty years from now?” asks Joe Sehee, executive director of the nonprofit Green Burial Council. In response to such concerns, Sehee’s group now certifies green cemeteries, much the same way that the Green Building Council provides LEED certification for buildings. “Certification and standards distinguish you from those who may not be doing it with the same level of transparency and accountability,” he says.

Ultimately, however, the movement’s appeal extends beyond saving the planet. Nationwide, funerals cost an average of $7,000, not including the cemetery plot. At Greensprings, a family could spend less than $1,000, including the $500 plot fee. That savings suggests a deeper truth, says author Mark Harris: “Green burial has been seen as an environmental phenomenon, but in the end, it’s about simplicity, a return to tradition.” For burials at Greensprings, families have washed their dead, stitched ribbons to shrouds, built coffins, collected the flowers, even helped dig and fill graves.

That intimacy with death may be the most compelling element of green burial—a raw honesty that helps families and loved ones face the reality of their loss. “Going through the motions of the post-death activity by taking care of the person’s body, having a graveside service, helps a great deal,” says third-generation funeral home director Bob Prout, who powers his New Jersey operation with solar panels and takes his cues from the Leave No Trace tradition of outdoor aficionados. “The green burial movement comes back to some of those stark realities. You’re stripping away the trappings and returning to some of the basics, celebrating that particular life.”

—Sharon Tregaskis covered the Solar Decathlon in the December Urbanite.