The Centre for Natural Burial

By Carrie Siedman, New Mexico Business Weekly

A slight breeze ruffles tufts of prairie grass on the hillside overlooking a meadow ringed by juniper and piñon. Here and there, rocky outcroppings provide ready-made seats and nature-made markers, while the purple mountains in the distance offer a rich backdrop. Save for the occasional sounds of nature, the place is silent and serene — somewhere you might want to linger forever.

And soon, you’ll be able to.

The Galisteo Basin Preserve — approximately 13,000 acres of former ranch land located about 15 miles southeast of Santa Fe, near Lamy — is a novel project that includes not only a small, mixed-use community development, but a 15-acre green burial ground, designed for the Earth-friendly deposit of ashes and unembalmed bodies. The “memorial landscape” is a key component in generating funds toward the goal of eventually preserving the remaining acreage as public-access land.

It’s an ambitious idea and one, as yet, untested in the national marketplace — using green burials to create funds for open space preservation. But it’s one that might provide an answer both to aging baby boomers’ desire to make their deaths meaningful, and enviromentalists’ efforts to sustain long-term funding for the restoration and preservation of land protected by conservation easements.

“Green burial was part of the idea from the beginning,” says Ted Harrison, president and managing director of the Commonweal Conservancy, a Santa Fe-based nonprofit that is spearheading the Galisteo Basin project. “We have a lot of stabilization and restoration work that needs to be done, and the green burial resources become, actually, quite important to creating a fund for that long-term work.”

The property is the former Thornton family ranch, next to the El Dorado subdivision, an approximately 20-square-mile plot considered at high-risk for development. Santa Fe County, with assistance from the Trust for Public Lands (where Harrison worked for 18 years) acquired 1,500 acres of the property in 2003. But the Thornton family still wanted to sell the remainder of the acreage and Harrison wanted to make sure it didn’t end up carved into “ranchettes.”

Commonweal reached a six-year, five-phase purchase agreement with the Thorntons, then sold off some land to adjoining owners, who agreed to abide by a conservation easement. On 300 acres of the land, it is developing a green “eco-village.” The adjoining burial grounds were conceived as a way to foster “not a resort community, but a ‘real’ place — with the full life cycle of the human experience honored,” Harrison says. Income from both projects is intended to preserve the remaining ranch acreage in perpetuity as public access open space.

“A way of funding this, I thought, was to give people who cared about conservation but were also facing the inevitable death process, an opportunity to use their death as a way of serving their values,” says Harrison. “Why not create a program where folks could have the option to — rather than invest in a cemetary plot — use their death and burial process to be a resource for protecting the lands and places they love? … It seemed like a winning solution for everyone.”

But not an easy one to achieve. From the outset, there were a myriad of potential objections — from the funeral care industry, which might fear a loss of revenue; from “cheap burial” proponents, more interested in cost than conservation; and from eventual residents of the village, who might object to “the spook factor” (as Harrison calls it) of having a burial site nearby. There was also the necessity of obtaining unprecedented permitting from the county.

The challenge has, thus far, delayed the first interments on the site. But Joe Seehee, executive director of the Santa-Fe based Green Burial Council, which has worked closely with Harrison on setting standards and finding local funeral directors to provide coordinating services, says Santa Fe’s County Commission is fully behind the project and final approval for whole body burial is pending. (Cremation burial is already permitted.)

Seehee anticipates the first burials will take place not long after the turn of the year. Meanwhile, his organization’s Web site (www.greenburialcouncil.org) is receiving more than 100,000 hits per month and has amassed a database of nearly 300 people who’ve inquired about the green burials.

“And we have a ‘hot list’ [of people who want to make reservations] of 50 to 100,” he adds.

Harrison confirms consumer enthusiasm is not lacking.

“It’s amazing,” says Harrison. “We get more inquiries on the green burial sites every week than we do on the home sites.”

With heightened environmental consciousness and the approaching senior years of the baby boomers, green burial, which has been common in England for more than a dozen years, has been steadily gaining traction in the U.S. Boomers express a desire to have their deaths be not only environmentally sound, but meaningful acts of connection to something larger than themselves. Many find the green concept appealing. In fact, an AARP survey identified as a key finding that a “substantial portion of individuals in the 50+ age group expressed an interest in environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional funerals and burials.”

But green burial can mean different things to different people, says Seehee, a former Jesuit lay minister. It is not the same thing, he says, as cheap burial. In fact, it can be as costly as traditional burial and is generally more expensive than cremation.

At the Galisteo Basin, for example, it takes a $4,000 contribution to the conservancy to purchase a whole body burial right, $1,500 for the right to a cremation burial or ash scattering. (Larger “private family burial sites” are available for correspondingly larger donations.) Half of the amount is tax-deductible and goes to preservation of adjacent lands, but costs for any memorial services, refrigeration, transportation, shrouds or biodegradable caskets are not included.

After involvement with a green burial project in California that “turned out to be not so green,” Seehee moved to New Mexico in 2004 with his wife, Juliette, to start the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization aimed at making burial “sustainable for the planet, meaningful for families and economically viable for providers.” For him, it’s about saving the land, and returning death to its role as a natural and inevitable part of the life cycle. His goal is that green burials will protect a million acres nationwide over the next decade.

Seehee knew one of the key elements in making this new model successful was to gain the buy-in of funeral industry providers, many of whom have feared the green movement will threaten their livelihood. During the past year, he has spent most of his time on the road, talking to funeral directors throughout the country about how green burial can be integrated into their regular practices without a loss of revenue.

“It’s an economic conversion and there needed to be some handholding on our part to reassure them they will still get what they need,” he says.

Seehee found two willing participants in Tim Riviera of Santa Fe Funeral Options and Tom Antram, general manager of French’s Mortuary, the two entities that have agreed to handle arrangements for the Galisteo grounds. They are among the converts who see green burial as an opportunity rather than a threat.

“For us, green burial does not mean we are cutting our own throats,” says Antrum. “In fact, we’d be ignorant not to be a part of this. It’s also a sustaining movement that can help our country and our world. Those who are trying to ignore this wave are not seeing the full potential of what we can do.”

Antrum points out that, even without fancy caskets and vaults, there will be many adjunct services required, such as refrigeration, body transport, memorial services and burial arrangments. He sees this as “just an extension of the type of service and level of ministry we want to be able to offer to families.”

Antrum admits, however, that the funeral industry has been historically slow to change. Its members went through similar fears when cremation began gaining popularity 20 years ago, he says; cremation now makes up for about 40 percent of his current business, even more in rural areas.

Riviera, whose family has operated mortuaries in Santa Fe, Taos and Española since 1958, says New Mexico, with its large American Indian population, has a history of “natural burial” and many rural cemetaries that offer few restrictions. However, there is also a large Catholic population that tends to prefer more formal funeral rituals, he says. The ethnic/religious mix in the state makes green burial just another option.

“We’re used to very diverse populations and rituals here,” Riviera says. “And I think it’s quite clear the individual attracted to this [green burial] is of a completely different attitude than those who will want a traditional type of funeral. It’s not an all-or-nothing choice.”

In recent years, Riviera says, due to an increase in multiple marriages, different religions, geographical movement and changing attitudes, what families of the deceased want has become very customized and selective. So the more alternatives a funeral home can provide, the greater its chances of gaining business.

“We see it as an offering, especially for those who have grown up with more consciousness of nature, who see their death as a natural part of the life cycle,” he says. “Someone who may have been very turned off by a traditional funeral, may be very turned on by this.”

Indeed, some of the consumers who have gone on a tour of the prospective site with Juliette Seehee, who serves as site manager, are attracted merely by the serenity of the place itself.

“Someone will point and say, ‘Wow, this is really beautiful. That’s where I want to go,’” she says. “It’s like real estate — people get enamored by a little tree or rock.”

Families will be allowed to place discrete markers at gravesites, she says, but they must also realize that natural markers — like rocks or trees — are subject to the changes wrought by nature.

And that’s as it should be, Seehee says. He’s found that neither ecology or economy are the prime motivaters for those who are attracted to a green burial.

“For most consumers, it’s not about the money or even that it’s the environmentally sound thing to do,” he says. “It really resonates with our spiritual core.”

Harrison agrees.

“Their death becomes a giving process as opposed to just a process and the experience of loss,” he says. “It’s a celebration of life and an act that supports continued life.”
Join the green burial movement

Become a Green Burial Council “approved” provider by including a green burial package in your general price list.

* Have your cemetary become a part of the GBC network by allowing for burials without vaults.
* Become a green cemetery by adhering to GBC standards for natural burial grounds.
* Partner with a conservation organization to run a GBC-certified “conservation burial ground,” owned by the conservation group.
* Get your cremation facility certified by the GBC for meeting fuel efficiency and anti-pollution standards.
* Purchase a burial right.

For more information, contact the Green Burial Council at www.greenburialcouncil.org or (888) 966-3330.

For more information on the Galisteo Basin Preserve project, contact Commonweal Conservancy at www.commonwealconservancy.org or (505) 982-0071, x. 105 or go to www.galisteobasinpreserve.com.