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Green Burial: When Dust Really Returns to Dust
When the funeral train following Chris Nichols’ plain, pine coffin arrived at his grave site one spring morning three years ago, this is what it saw. A simple cavity dug into the red earth of a southern pine forest, bunches of needles and rose petals strewn into and around the hole. No concrete burial vault lined the grave. No granite stone loomed at the head. Chris’ final resting place was a natural part of this living landscape, and his burial here – with its wood coffin and unembalmed occupant – allowed what remained of the 28-year-old stonemason to join it.
This photograph, which was taken at the Ramsey Creek Preserve, a “green” cemetery in South Carolina, makes a powerful statement in favor of natural burial. Death is not simply the end of life, the image suggests; It’s caught up in a grander, natural cycle – of decomposition and rebirth, of growth and decay – that sustains and perpetuates all life. Our challenge, as naturalist Ed Abbey put is to “get the hell out of the way” of that natural process like Chris Nichols did and let it work.
An emerging green burial movement is taking up Abbey’s call. Eschewing chemical embalming and bulletproof metal caskets, elaborate and costly funerals, more and more are embracing a range of natural burial options, new and old, that are redefining a better – and greener – way of death.
Some families are finding natural return in the half dozen green cemeteries that have sprung up around the country in the last decade with a score of others in the planning stages. Like Ramsey Creek, they offer vaultless, embalming-free burial in wild, bucolic settings. Caskets are optional – cloth shrouds are just fine – but if used must be made from readily biodegradable materials, like cardboard or pine. Headstones are cut from small fieldstones that are native to the area and laid flush to the ground.
Others families are taking a page from earlier, more sustainable burial traditions, by creating private cemeteries on their own rural lands – and then calling the local carpenter to craft a simple wood coffin when the time comes. There’s even a growing trend in home funerals. Half a dozen organizations run workshops on how to bathe and dress a body and lay it out for wakes and funerals in the home, without using the funeral director or his funeral parlor.
Cremation is also coming into vogue. About 30% of Americans are choosing the hearth over the grave; Some claim by mid-century that percentage will double. Thanks in part to JFK, Jr’s watery sendoff off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, more of us are choosing to return what remains of our deceased to aquatic environments. With the help of an Atlanta-based organization called Eternal Reefs ashes can become part of a life-generating memorial under the sea. Families mix the ashes of their dead with concrete to form a waist-high honeycombed dome called a memorial reef ball. After curing, the reef ball is loaded onto a boat and dropped onto an established artificial reef site in the ocean, where it becomes habitat for fish.
I spent two years traveling the country talking to families who had chosen these green alternatives to the modern funeral. They did it for a number of reasons, they told me: To save money (green burial costing hundreds and low thousands of dollars versus the average $10,000 for the funeral home sendoff). To preserve natural resources (including the metal that’s poured into coffins and vaults every year, enough to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge). To have funeral services that reflect the values of simplicity and self-sufficiency that have guided their lives.
Mostly, though, they did it for the reason Chris Nichols expressed when, lying on the bed on which he would soon die of cancer, he told his older brother, “I want to join all the other living organisms in the ground.” Chris got his final wish at Ramsey Creek. To go there today is to see how well his legacy lives on.
This article was written by Mark Harris from Grave Matters. Mark Harris is an environmental journalist and the author of Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 2007). If you are interested in contributing to the thinking process and become a guest writer on The Thinking Blog, find out more information here and be my guest!
An emerging green burial movement is taking up Abbey’s call. Eschewing chemical embalming and bulletproof metal caskets, elaborate and costly funerals, more and more are embracing a range of natural burial options, new and old, that are redefining a better – and greener – way of death.
Some families are finding natural return in the half dozen green cemeteries that have sprung up around the country in the last decade with a score of others in the planning stages. Like Ramsey Creek, they offer vaultless, embalming-free burial in wild, bucolic settings. Caskets are optional – cloth shrouds are just fine – but if used must be made from readily biodegradable materials, like cardboard or pine. Headstones are cut from small fieldstones that are native to the area and laid flush to the ground.
Others families are taking a page from earlier, more sustainable burial traditions, by creating private cemeteries on their own rural lands – and then calling the local carpenter to craft a simple wood coffin when the time comes. There’s even a growing trend in home funerals. Half a dozen organizations run workshops on how to bathe and dress a body and lay it out for wakes and funerals in the home, without using the funeral director or his funeral parlor.
Cremation is also coming into vogue. About 30% of Americans are choosing the hearth over the grave; Some claim by mid-century that percentage will double. Thanks in part to JFK, Jr’s watery sendoff off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, more of us are choosing to return what remains of our deceased to aquatic environments. With the help of an Atlanta-based organization called Eternal Reefs ashes can become part of a life-generating memorial under the sea. Families mix the ashes of their dead with concrete to form a waist-high honeycombed dome called a memorial reef ball. After curing, the reef ball is loaded onto a boat and dropped onto an established artificial reef site in the ocean, where it becomes habitat for fish.
I spent two years traveling the country talking to families who had chosen these green alternatives to the modern funeral. They did it for a number of reasons, they told me: To save money (green burial costing hundreds and low thousands of dollars versus the average $10,000 for the funeral home sendoff). To preserve natural resources (including the metal that’s poured into coffins and vaults every year, enough to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge). To have funeral services that reflect the values of simplicity and self-sufficiency that have guided their lives.
Mostly, though, they did it for the reason Chris Nichols expressed when, lying on the bed on which he would soon die of cancer, he told his older brother, “I want to join all the other living organisms in the ground.” Chris got his final wish at Ramsey Creek. To go there today is to see how well his legacy lives on.
This article was written by Mark Harris from Grave Matters. Mark Harris is an environmental journalist and the author of Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 2007). If you are interested in contributing to the thinking process and become a guest writer on The Thinking Blog, find out more information here and be my guest!
24 thoughts:
I believe that is the way to do it. I want to be cremated and my ashes placed in a hollow rock under the palm tree; the palm tree is a symbol for my Brazil. The rock will weather.
I have already chosen cremation as the disposal method of my remains. My family, physician and loved ones know that my ashes should be scattered either in the Strait of Florida or at the Great Barrier Reef.
Any remembrance can be accomplished by going to the sea where currents have carried those remaining molecules.
I am very much in favour of a 'green' burial. I would like to think that I have given life to trees and plants that re-oxigenate the environment. Cremation is not an option as the carbon emissions involved are just unacceptable to me and even conventional burial leaves a fairly large carbon 'footprint'. However, in the UK it is difficult to find a 'green' burial site.
Marina 'gets it'. But Tina & Anonymous missed the point completely. Green burial is not about cremation and then doing something with the cremains--do they have any idea the natural gas it takes to heat a retort to 2000 degrees for three hours? Obviously not.
Beautiful alternatives. I love this!
Very nice
Thanks for creating this site. There's more information out there, just search green burial. In addition to the natural gas use in cremation, things like fillings and medical implants create tons of nasty emissions! It sounds like a conspiracy, but the funeral home industry is spending big $ to keep green burial from becoming more mainstream. Thanks again.
Interesting alternatives especially the sea Eternal Reefs.
Marina, There are over 200 green burial sites in the UK, and most can be found in the country's largest directory, The Bereavement Services Portal which we host at www.bereavement-services.org This lists over 800 operators, 4000 sites, and is very popular for following up genealogy research with 2000 hits a day. We also supply a microchip peg to 40 natural burial grounds here to mark green graves to give them a long term identity in case of exhumation, placed underground but scanned through the ground, it prevents inteference with the wrong grave. If you want more information on this let me know at ASSETtrac +44(0)1403 860063. Stephen
Actually, some cultures have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time. Jews generally use plain wooden caskets and dont embalm or do anything like that. The whole "lets make the dead person look unrealistically pretty for an open casket that is freaking METAL so as to not be destroyed" is a very Christian thing, so that the body will be intact for the end times...
I agree with Gavin. When you stop and think about it, the Christian way of burial is very ancient Egyptian. I personally don't want to be the subject of forensic archaeology 2000 years from now...
I love the respectful, earth-friendly, noncommercial burial traditions of Orthodox Jews and Muslims and think they are good role models in this way. I shudder to think that embalming and sealed metal coffins are considered by some to be "Christian." Members of my faith community, which is Quaker, are learning how to respectfully clean, dress, cool and lovingly care for each other's dead until final disposition in the place of a licensed funeral home, and naturally this means no embalming. (Dry ice suffices just fine.) I'd love to see Christian congregations -- as well as faith communities of any other religion -- follow the example of Jews and Muslims in returning after-death practices in caring for our dead to a simpler, more earth-friendly and more family-centered manner.
Jesus ,as we know, was a Jew and was buried in a shroud as were Native Americans ( see Edward Curtis' wonderful photograph of the plains Indian shroud platforms.)Working in cemeteries the last few years including a first Green cemetery in CA. and going on to making Green Burial Products at KINKARACO I have noticed that how one chooses to dispose of their dead has everything to do with 2 viewpoints-
One belief that the person IS the body and the other belief that the body is the VEHICLE of the person,"spirit,"soul","mental contiuum",etc which may re-cycle further taking yet another new body.
The person who believes the person IS the body will spare no expense to preserve that body of their Mother, husband or child by any means necessary.
Until very recently every option has been made available for this view. The only option for the second view has been cremation which we know is not sustainable.
GREEN BURIAL IS NOT ABOUT CONVERSION-IT IS ABOUT AVAILABLE OPTION.
A 75 year old Italian Catholic grandmother will probably never choose the option of Green Burial but her grandchild may.
Now the option of home funeraling your loved one and pre-purchaseing their shroud or casket which you may drive them in yourself in your own vehicle to a Green Memorial Cemetery of preserve to have a midnight fullmoon service with drumming is becoming an option!
Power to the People!
There is nothing new about green burial, it is simply a return to tradition, which apparently knew better....So far so good...
BUT a difficulty remains in that we are now almost 7 billion on this planet, and what worked perfectly for several hundred million may not be applicable for this enormous number. There will simply be a space problem.
Such large numbers can only be dealt with by cremation or by grave plot recycling, as Europeans are already obliged to do. But cremation has a higher carbon footprint than green burial and it is prohibited by many traditions. And plot recycling after 20 or 30 years makes a mockery of the concept of eternal rest.
Hence, although we are on the right track with the elimination of ground pollutants in burial, we have yet to solve the space needs and grave perpetuity questions. Above all, if we wish to return to truly traditional ways, we must find a way to ensure the graves of our families rest undisturbed in perpetuity.
I agree! Eliminating pollutants is commendable and necessary!
But "burial parks" where no signs of the dead are allowed do not integrate death but try to deny it by making it invisible. Enduring markers are symbols of hope and transcedence. We could create beautiful natural areas WITH attractive markers. Use boulders instead of marble!
Also, trees alone as markers will lead to charming but anonymous forests.But a beautiful old engraved boulder AND a tree!
Finally, green burial does NOTHING new to assure grave perpetuity, a truly eternal rest.
Karl Fraser
I want my dead body to be dropped into an active volcano.
I requested a green burial when I die, but my mother says that without a concrete liner, the ground will collapse over time. Oh dear!
I have decided that since my "loving" family can't find it in their "hearts" to let me be food for nature, I had to legally divorce myself from all of them. Now when I die, they don't have the financial woes, and I get feed other creatures of this earth.
hey there... this is really a great blog. I am an avid nature lover and run some animal blogs too! I liked reading your post - the "Green Burial"... they are quite a lot informative and interesting.
It is extremely interesting for me to read this article. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything connected to this matter. I definitely want to read a bit more on that blog soon.
Promession would be the preferred method for me. The body is freeze dried in liquid nitrogen then shattered into dust. One's remains can then be scattered over the surface of the ground and incorporated into the soil and plants in a matter of months.
It cost more than a shroud and hole in the ground, but unless the body is buried quite deep there are smells and bacterial contamination to consider. Besides bones can last for centuries and get in the way of a future generation's burial needs.
It is certainly interesting for me to read the article. Thanks for it. I like such topics and everything connected to them. I definitely want to read a bit more soon.
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Great post as for me. I'd like to read more concerning that theme. Thanx for sharing this info.
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