Dane County green cemetery clears hurdle
STEVEN ELBOW | The Capital Times | selbow@madison.com madison.com |
People who want their last act on Earth to be environmentally friendly are closer to having an option in Dane County.
Last month the Natural Path Sanctuary, a cemetery that will consist of about 25 acres of wooded land in the town of Springdale, won approval for a conditional use permit from the Springdale Town Board. All that remains is for the cemetery to be platted and licensed by the state. Peter McKeever, an attorney for Gene Farley, who proposed the green cemetery, says he doesn’t know how long that will take. Platting the land, he said, poses technical difficulties because of tree cover.
But he says the hard part — winning a conditional use permit — is over.
“That’s the big hurdle,” says McKeever.
The burial ground was opposed by neighbors who feared that decomposing bodies would spoil groundwater and lower property values. After getting a thumbs-down from the town plan commission, however, the foundation won approval from the Dane County Board and the Town Board.
Farley, a retired physician and longtime social activist, plans to bury up to 100 bodies a year, about 2,500 altogether, in an environmentally friendly manner. There will be no monuments or markers, and bodies will be left to decompose naturally. The land’s status as a burial site will protect it from development in perpetuity.
Currently, aside from a newly approved Wiccan burial ground in Iowa County, there’s nowhere in the state to go to get buried without a casket or vault. But surveys show demand for green burials is growing.
Farley hopes that sales of the burial sites will provide hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to fund Farley’s Center for Peace, Justice and Sustainability, which helps farmers, most of them immigrants or minorities, run commercially viable organic farm operations.