By Tom Grace, Cooperstown News Bureau
Bill Ralston of Cooperstown said that after he’s dead, he wants his body to decay gradually and become part of nature at his final resting place.
He doesn’t want an expensive funeral or fancy casket, and he’d like to skip the embalming fluid, please. If others paused a moment to consider their options at life’s end, they might agree that the natural way is best, he said.
That’s why Ralston, a cabinetmaker with a shop on Pioneer Street, has formed a group to create a green cemetery in Otsego County. “I’d never heard of a green cemetery
until they had a story on (National Public Radio) about three months ago,” Ralston said Tuesday. “The first green cemetery in this country was in South Carolina, and the more I heard about it, the more sense it made.”
After hearing the report, Ralston went on the Internet to learn more about green cemeteries, which are common in England. The concept is simple, he said. People are buried and become one with the earth. Their bodies are not filled with substances that can pollute the earth. Headstones, if any are used, must be flush with the ground and made of native stone. “A green cemetery could be in the woods, with trees growing over the bodies,” Ralston said. The idea is to let the natural landscape remain undisturbed, a sanctuary for the dead and the living who come to visit th
The green cemetery also might be a hedge against development, a space kept forever
natural while other fields and woods are obliterated in the name of progress, Ralston
said. “I think green cemeteries could help us in a lot of different ways,” he said. The idea is not radical, Ralston said, but more of a return to earlier practice.
“Until the Civil War, people usually were just buried in the ground,” Ralston said. But in the war, hundreds of thousands of soldiers died far away from home. Their bodies
had to be preserved for the train rides home, and the practice of embalming became widespread and continues today, he said. Otsego County Coroner Jim Magee said Tuesday that embalming fluid today contains a number of chemicals, including formaldehyde, but no state law requires its use.
“People of the Jewish faith often don’t use embalming fluid, but their dead are buried quickly,” Magee said. Any one group that rules out the use of embalming fluid must be prepared to act after someone dies, because bodies decay quickly, he said.
“There are other issues, like what do you do when someone dies in the winter and the ground is frozen?” Magee said. Ralston said the group is still studying the proposition of creating its own cemetery and appreciates any feedback it receives.
Another member of the group, Oneonta lawyer Carol Malz, said she has been studying the legal questions that green cemeteries raise. “In New York state, you can’t have a for-profit cemetery; a public cemetery has to be operated by a nonprofit organization,” she said. Families are allowed to have burial plots for next of kin, she said.
Ralston and Malz said the low cost of green burial, typically cheaper than cremation and other options, has helped spark interest in the concept. According to The Associated Press, the first American green cemetery opened in South Carolina in 1996, and there are now green cemeteries in Florida and Texas.
Ralston said that people interested in joining the group may call him at 547-2675
or 547-2955.