The Centre for Natural Burial

Toledo Blade

BABY Boomers were the first generation to wholeheartedly embrace the environmental movement, and now they are bent on taking their zeal to save the planet all the way, literally, to the grave.

Increasingly, as they advance in age, boomers are indicating that they favor burial methods that are as “green” as possible.

The green-in-death concept rejects what have become the staples of the American funeral industry: chemical embalming, concrete burial vaults, and granite grave markers. Instead, boomers are opting for a simpler and environmentally friendly trip to the great beyond.

A recent AARP survey found about a fifth of respondents potentially interested in green burial techniques, in which bodies are preserved until burial with dry ice or refrigeration, then buried in wooden caskets in sites identified with simple stone markers.

Actually, such preferences are a return to earlier American customs, when a funeral director would bring the body to the family home for viewing and then take it to a church or other appropriate site for services. Before the Civil War, bodies were displayed without preservatives when people died at home and then buried in simple grave sites.

During that war, though, embalming became popular, mainly to preserve bodies while they were shipped home from distant battlefields. Then came satin-lined caskets and elaborate, pricey monuments.

Nowadays, funeral directors might balk at not embalming a body, although in Ohio it’s not required by law in most cases.

There are only a handful - about 20 - green-burial cemeteries in the country now. But Joe Sehee, the executive director of Green Burial Council of Santa Fe, N.M., believes there could be as many as 200 by 2013.

The likes and dislikes, peculiarities and peccadilloes of Baby Boomers, America’s largest generation, have affected practically every aspect of popular culture since they burst on the scene after World War II.

So it’s hardly surprising that they might adopt contrarian views of how they want to leave the world behind.