The Centre for Natural Burial

No embalming, no headstones, no grave liners - just land that eventually looks like a forest meadow

SHANNON MONEO, Special to The Globe and Mail

VICTORIA — For Robert MacRae, the phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is taking on new life now that green burials will be possible not far from his Victoria home.

This fall, Royal Oak Burial Park will be the first urban cemetery in Canada to offer burials in which unembalmed bodies are placed into biodegradable coffins without heavy-duty liners, and then buried at a shallow depth.

“It’s the most natural way of death,” said Mr. MacRae, a retired Anglican Church rector. “The after-care of death has so many artificial elements. It’s part of the denial of death. Embalming, entombment in concrete, to what end?”

Mr. MacRae is president of the 200,000-member Memorial Society of B.C., which for the past decade has lobbied Royal Oak to add a green burial section to its 55-hectare cemetery, about a 15-minute drive from downtown Victoria.

The tenacity, complemented by the growing green movement, paid off. About 200 graves will be available on a 0.2-hectare area of the cemetery. An adjoining piece of land will accommodate future expansion.

“This marks a big societal shift for us,” said Royal Oak executive director Stephen Olson. “For a portion of our community, it will appeal to their sensibilities. It’s one more option. For some families, a mausoleum is important.”

Mr. Olson said Royal Oak’s green burials will stay true to the ideals set out in England, where about 140 green cemeteries are burying the competition as more Britons opt for a simple end.

Chemicals, such as formaldehyde, will not be used to embalm. Body containers must be 100 per cent biodegradable. Options include the unvarnished pine box, a wicker casket or even unbleached cardboard containers. Velvet-lined, silver-trimmed, mahogany or teak caskets are forbidden. But whatever is used, it must be strong enough to hold the body.

“There’s still a dignity issue,” Mr. Olson said.

The casket will be placed straight into the ground at a depth of 1.2 metres versus the traditional two metres. Concrete liners will not be used.

Mr. Olson said the shallow burial depth will allow air and water to reach the container more easily, speeding decomposition.

The burial area, bordering a forested hill and overlooking developed areas of the cemetery, will not have grave markers. Grass, wild flowers and trees will be planted and a few boulders will bear the names of those buried there.

“It will look like a natural meadow,” Mr. Olson said.

Once the area is full, the road will be closed and access will be by foot.

When visitors want to find where someone was buried, maps and a global positioning system will aid them.

The idea is that the remains will reunite with the earth, and rather than focusing on one specific grave, the whole bucolic setting will serve as the memorial.

“At the end of the day, unless you know it’s a burial area, you wouldn’t know it,” Mr. Olson said.

Green doesn’t mean dirt cheap. Royal Oak will charge about $2,500 for a green burial, a figure that pays for the plot and what is known in the business as “perpetual care” where 25 per cent of the total cost goes toward maintaining the cemetery.

Stuart Carrol, manager of McCall Brothers Funeral Directors, said his firm plans to sell unfinished pine caskets and cotton body shrouds. He said its refrigeration system can store unpreserved bodies for several days.

There is no law requiring bodies to be embalmed, a process introduced in the 1860s, during the American Civil War. Embalming surgeons pumped chemicals into dead soldiers so their remains could be returned for services at home. By the early 1920s, funeral homes began to proliferate and replace the unadorned burial.

Some funeral homes have shown resistance, Mr. Olson said, largely because green burials are a departure from tradition.

But as Canada’s nine million baby boomers, a group accustomed to being on the cutting edge, contemplate the hereafter, Mr. Carrol expects to see a huge interest in green burials.

And as Canada’s cremation capital, where about 90 per cent of the population choose cremation, Mr. MacRae hopes Victorians pick green burials. “Crematoriums are one of the great elements of pollution,” he said.