Back-to-nature burials in biodegradable caskets conserve land
By Barbara Basler, AARP Newsletter
In lovely woods just outside the tiny town of Westminster, S.C., discreetly scattered among the tall pines and poplars, are 20 graves, many hand-dug by Billy Campbell.
The graves, mounds of earth dotted with wildflowers and bathed in dappled sunlight, are marked with flat stones engraved with the names of the dead—from a rock-ribbed Southern Baptist to a gentle New Age hippie.
Campbell, the town’s only doctor, is an ardent environmentalist. He buries patients, friends and strangers—without embalming them—in biodegradable caskets, or in no caskets at all, in the nature preserve he created along Ramsey Creek.
The burials are legal and meet all state regulations and health requirements. But in the beginning, many in this conservative town of 2,700 people were skeptical, even angry, about the Ramsey Creek Preserve, where the dead protect the land of the living.
“We weren’t doing anything weird or outlandish,” Campbell says, “but people accused us of throwing bodies in the creek or laying them out for buzzards to eat.” He recalls one irate woman, apparently convinced of the bodies-in-the-creek rumor, who “told me I was a rich doctor who could buy bottled water, but she would have to drink my dead men’s soup.”
In the six years since the burial ground opened, Westminster has come, slowly but surely, to accept it. And now, Campbell’s idea—nurtured in the backwoods of South Carolina—is spreading to rich, trendy Marin County, Calif.
Campbell, 49, and his new partner Tyler Cassity—a 34-year old entrepreneur who owns cemeteries in three states—are scheduled to open the new burial preserve this summer on a hillside in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Campbell says he and Cassity hope to work with conservation groups to open similar natural burial grounds across the country, each crisscrossed—like Ramsey Creek—with hiking trails. “What we are doing is basically land conservation,” Campbell says. “By setting aside a woods for natural burials, we preserve it from development. At the same time, I think we put death in its rightful place, as part of the cycle of life. Our burials honor the idea of dust to dust.”
At Ramsey Creek, burial in a simple casket costs about $2,300. The National Funeral Directors Association says the average conventional funeral costs about $6,500. That includes mortuary services, embalming, a casket and a cement vault or box for the casket, which is often required for a cemetery burial. A cemetery plot adds even more to the cost.
“The mortuary-cemetery business is a $20-billion-a-year industry, and if we could get just 10 percent of that,” Campbell says, “we’d have $2 billion a year going toward land conservation on memorial preserves where people could picnic, hike or take nature classes.” ‘We put death in its rightful place, as part of the cycle of life. Our burials honor the idea of dust to dust.’
A native of Westminster—his family’s roots here go back to the Revolutionary War—Campbell studied to be an ecologist, then switched to medicine. Soft-spoken and wry, Campbell concedes he’s a bit of an eccentric, but then “small Southern towns are good places for eccentrics,” he says. Westminster, after all, was home to the Guns, Cabinets and Nightcrawlers store, “and I think that’s a whole lot stranger than Ramsey Creek,” he laughs.
The folksy, erudite doctor and the hip young businessman who owns Hollywood Forever, a celebrity cemetery where Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille are buried, believe they have the potential to revolutionize the funeral industry and conserve a million acres of land over the next 30 years.
Campbell and Cassity, who has been a consultant to HBO’s television series Six Feet Under, think the idea of burials that protect, rather than consume, green space will appeal to boomers, including those who want their cremated ashes scattered or buried. In Marin County, they plan to designate three of the site’s 32 acres for interments and conserve the rest.
In place of the perpetual care fund of the conventional cemetery, “where money is set aside to mow the grass and battle back any natural growth,” Campbell says, funds in memorial preserves will be used to restore the land.
Campbell’s Ramsey Creek—the first “green” burial site in America—has inspired another in Florida, and a third has recently opened in Texas.
Campbell remembers that when his father died, he wanted to bury him in a simple, dignified biodegradable wood box. But his father was buried in the only wood box the funeral home offered—an eye-popping, ornate oak casket the funeral director assured him was the same model that held actor Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on the TV hit Bonanza.
“You know, I didn’t take any real comfort in that,” Campbell says.
Source - http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/yourlife/a2004-06-30-green_graveyards.html