The Centre for Natural Burial

By Bruce Dorries

Heard any good jokes about burial lately? How about: “What did Beethoven do for Halloween …?”

“He decomposed.”

Or this comic observation: “Psychological surveys that rank people’s fears list public speaking, snakes and death at the top. That means most of us would rather die from a poisonous snakebite than deliver a eulogy.”

More seriously, heard any good news about death and burial?

A quiet, grassroots movement offers a greener way to go. Natural or green burial is no laughing matter. It saves resources and stays truer to the Earth.

Although National Geographic covered the phenomena earlier this year, the method is spreading across the country primarily by word of mouth rather than through PR or marketing. This end-of-life practice has a growing niche among “consumers,” mostly nature-lovers. Nevertheless, the “death-care industry” is starting to take note. Still, natural burial will have only a small role in the near future, offering no threat to mainstream burial, or funeral directors’ incomes.

Just what are green burial practices and why do they cost less? Green cemeteries typically defy the standard appearance of a graveyard, and preparation of the body requires far fewer resources, and the philosophy of this off branch of the green movement resonates with the cycles of nature.

Ideally, natural cemeteries look like conservation preserves. They can be on special green burial easements, or in hybrid cemetery grounds that allow for vault less burial as well as more conventional practices. There are a dozen of the large, conservation/green cemeteries in the country. Dozens more are planned. Facilities in Richmond and Clarksville are the closest that offer variations on natural burial, according to the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit.

Rather than monoculture lawns with tombstones, green cemetery grounds often have paths bordered by native grasses. Trails lead to sustainable landscape design features that memorialize a loved one, such as specially placed rocks and trees. Records are kept, as in all cemeteries, of where bodies are interned. Conservation easements and other legal protections ensure that natural cemeteries cannot be developed.

Although undertakers offer us help through trying times with planning, support and courteous, compassionate professionalism, they also sell add-ons. Who really needs cement vaults, chemical embalming, expensive caskets? Why drop $7,000 into the ground? Cremation is thought to be green, yet it needlessly adds to our species’ massive carbon emission footprint.

Cumulatively, burial materials used in the U.S. are very costly to the Earth, too. Industry estimates suggest that every year we bury considerable sums along with our kin:
# 30 million board feet of hardwood for caskets
# 100,000 tons of steel
# 1.6 millions tons of concrete
# 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde.

Mown, fertilized cemeteries take up more than 2 million acres of open space in this country. These largely monocultural graveyards do little to support life on the planet and cost millions to maintain. They are dead zones in more ways than one.

Of course, most of the dearly departed humans on the planet are laid to rest far less extravagantly and far more naturally. Like our diets, Americans’ final resting places reflect our wealth and excess. Standard burial practices also reflect our fears, our egos, our cultural conventions and too often a desire to keep up with the Joneses. Ashes to ashes, we preach, but we pay dearly to assuage guilt, remorse, grief.

Yet, like Ludwig B., we all inevitably decompose, naturally. It’s just a matter of how high the cost, how long the passage of time.

As in many parts of the world, green burial here does not include the use of embalming fluid to “preserve” the body. The deceased are wrapped in shrouds or placed in simple wooden or wicker caskets. Ice or refrigeration provide sufficient preservation until burial. The cost of a natural burial runs about $2,000, which makes a lot of good cents for the family. (Bad pun intended.)

Finally, behind the natural burial movement rests a point of view — no matter one’s faith, status or achievements in life, ultimately all pass away. For life to continue, seasons must change, darkness must fall. Recycling enfolds us all.

Write to Bruce Dorries at bdorries@mbc.edu