The Centre for Natural Burial

By Robert King • The Indianapolis Star • November 14, 2008

When people stop by the booth Nathan Butler sets up to promote his funeral home, peo­ple routinely tell him they aren’t interested in the trappings of a modern burial.

“They say ‘Put me in a sheet and put me in a ditch,’” Butler said.

For many potential custom­ers — and in the funeral busi­ness that’s everyone — Butler sees a growing recognition that modern burials are wasteful, needlessly expensive and a cap­stone to one’s life that is any­thing but earth-friendly.

So, Butler’s funeral home is positioning itself on the fore­front of the next wave in death care: the green burial.

Though burials come in many shades, the greenest in­volve cemeteries that look less like golf courses and more like nature preserves, caskets made of cardboard and bodies that aren’t juiced up with embalm­ing fluids — all at a fraction of the cost of a traditional burial.

Not confined to the tree hug­gers of the Pacific Northwest, green cemeteries have opened in places such as the South Car­olina foothills and northeastern Ohio. There are two green ceme­teries on the horizon in Indiana.
Final wasteland

In a society that is becoming more environmentally con­scious about its coffee and its cars, leaders of the green burial movement say it only makes sense that attention would also turn to the final choices of one’s life.

To the most zealous, the mod­ern cemetery is something akin to an ecological wasteland: acres of grass manicured with fertil­izers and pesticides, caskets fashioned from steel, copper, bronze or old-growth hardwoods and thick concrete vaults (the boxes in which the caskets are placed).

The corpse is most often em­balmed in formaldehyde, which will eventually leach into the soil once the tomb is breached.

“If you look at your typical modern cemetery, it functions less as a natural, bucolic resting ground for the dead than as a landfill of largely nonbiodegrad­able — and in some cases toxic — material,” said Mark Harris, whose book “Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial” (Scribner, 2007, $24) is the manifesto of the movement.

The Green Burial Council, a nonprofit that sets standards for natural burials, says enough casket metal is put into Ameri­can soil every year to build a new Golden Gate bridge.

“Do we need to expend that kind of energy on a box we are going to use for one or two days and then bury forever?” asks Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council. “Does that really jibe with our values? An increasing number of Amer­icans are saying, ‘No, it doesn’t.’”

The green burial movement is still small — just 12 certified green cemeteries across the country and about 60 green-cer­tified funeral homes. But the ap­proaching deaths of baby boom­ers — the generation behind Earth Day — are pushing funer­al industry leaders to anticipate a surge in requests for greener farewells.
Education important

Part of the challenge to the growth of green burial lies in ed­ucation, experts said.

Green funeral providers say refrigeration and a few natural tricks of the trade are enough to make unembalmed bodies pre­sentable for open-casket calling and funerals.

Ecology aside, the green burial movement could turn the funeral business upside down in other ways.

Economically, modern buri­als that include embalming, steel caskets and concrete vaults can cost $10,000 or more. Green burials can be done for less than $2,000. The cost of buri­al plots can vary widely, but Butler expects that his natural burial spaces should be at or be­low costs for regular plots.

Karen Conyers, of Blooming­ton, Ind., buried her mother us­ing a simple casket and no em­balming, primarily for environmental reasons. But it also made economic sense.

“I don’t think the family is well-served by spending thou­sands of dollars for something that isn’t that big a part of life,” said Conyers.
Ecumenical appeal

Harris found in researching his book that interest in a green­er burial has appeal across reli­gious lines.

For Muslims and Jews, whose burial practices demand that the body be allowed to de­compose naturally, the funda­mental notion of returning to the earth has never gone out of style. But for more than a centu­ry, most Christian funerals in America have been built less on the notion of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” than on making caskets and vaults as impenetra­ble to the elements as possible.

Green burials — by inviting decay and returning the body’s elements to the earth as natural­ly as possible — promise to change all that. In green ceme­teries, the decay of burial re­mains helps feed the plants and the trees.

“If part of your funds for burial goes to preserving land,” Harris said, “then part of your legacy then becomes very good land for your family to enjoy for­ever.”