By Rebecca James, Syracuse Post-Standard
Susan Thomas’ dog bounds across the field, leaping out of the underbrush that covers the southern Tompkins County hilltop, intent on the scent of some small creature. Meanwhile, Thomas and Ed Oyer talk about death. The artist and the retired professor both like the idea of finding stone benches for this land where the names of the dead can be inscribed.
From the crest where the two stand, they can see forests that grew up after settlers abandoned the rocky land 100 years ago because it was inhospitable to farming. This land is likely to become the final resting place for hundreds of people who believe going green is not just an environmentally friendly philosophy for life. It applies in death as well.
Greensprings Natural Cemetery Association, 15 miles southwest of Ithaca, opened for business this year, selling its first plot March 1. People will be buried here without embalming fluid, in biodegradable caskets or shrouds. Thomas is only partly joking when she says, “It’s like the ultimate composting project.”
Graves in this 100-acre cemetery, which borders the 4,000 acres of the Arnot Teaching and Research Forest owned by Cornell University, will be marked by trees or natural stone markers. Even after hundreds of burials, the place will look more like a nature preserve than a traditional cemetery.
Green burial is a relatively new idea, but one that has caught the attention of people around the United States and Canada who favor blending land conservation with a natural approach to funerals.
Ramsey Creek Preserve in South Carolina, which opened in 1996, is acknowledged as the nation’s first green cemetery. Others exist in Florida, Texas, California and Washington state. Greensprings will be the first in New York.
After an AARP article that featured Ramsey Creek and the headline: “Back-to-nature burials in biodegradable caskets conserve land,” the tiny South Carolina cemetery heard from thousands of people, said Kimberly Campbell, vice president of Memorial Ecosystems, which runs Ramsey Creek. People from as far away as Boston and California have been buried there, she said.
A natural for Ithaca
A green cemetery is a natural for the Ithaca area, with its long history of exploring environmentally friendly farming, recycling, transportation and housing. Organic is a byword for downtown merchants selling everything from tea to lamb.
Ithaca is also home to the Finger Lakes Land Trust, which protects open land and forests through conservation easements and dedicated preserves. It boasts more than 200 volunteers as well as 24 nature preserves.
It is the merger of those two interests that made this cemetery happen. Thomas, an artisan from Corning who works in gold and other metals, was talking about
eight years ago to a friend who complained about modern burial practices and raised the question: “Why not have an organic cemetery?”
Thomas and her friends ended up crossing paths with another group of people, many of whom were Finger Lakes Land Trust volunteers who wanted to start a commemorative nature preserve for spreading ashes of people who had been cremated.
Although the cemetery will accept cremains, its brochure suggests that’s not the most earth-friendly option because cremation uses energy and releases dioxin and mercury into the atmosphere while preventing the nutrients in bodies from enriching the land.
Some people are squeamish
The people who have worked for years to make the cemetery project a reality know that not everyone will jump on the bandwagon. “People are squeamish about this sort of thing, and that’s understandable,” said Mary Woodsen, president of the Greensprings board. “There are people who definitely want to be locked up in a vault.”
But there are others who prefer a simpler, less expensive option, as well as people who spiritually feel more comfortable thinking of their bodies returning to nature, Woodsen said.
“It’s a dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes philosophy that I think a lot of different types of people can be comfortable with,” she said. Carl Leopold, a board member of Greensprings, who is a retired plant scientist at Cornell
and was the founding president of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, said he has bought a plot.
“It’s so sensible. It really is,” he said. “Putting bodies in a waterproof, permanent container protected from the environment, it’s ridiculous.”
People who are buried here will need to work with a funeral home because state law requires that bodies be transported by funeral home directors and that the directors oversee burials.
The cemetery board has found a caretaker who lives on the site in a small cottage powered by solar energy. It also has contracted with a Newfield resident who has a backhoe and has dug graves for another local cemetery.
No burials have been held yet, but board members take turns checking the answering machine three times a day to see if the need arises.
So far, 20 plots have been sold, to locals as well as to people in Connecticut, Vermont and New Jersey. It will take 1,200 plot sales to make the cemetery self-sufficient for the foreseeable future, said Thomas, treasurer for the cemetery.
The cemetery will include a Jewish burial ground that is expected to be consecrated by a rabbi in the next month. Volunteers came out recently to put up a kiosk with a map of the cemetery and to begin tucking aluminum markers into the ground to mark the corners of the plots.
Challenging status quo
Still, starting a new cemetery - of any kind - is an unusual undertaking. Only two other new cemeteries were approved by the New York Department of State in the last five years, said Eamon Moynihan, speaking for the department.
Natural or woodland cemeteries are common in the United Kingdom, where they make up more than 10 percent of burials, said Mike Salisbury, part of Natural Burial Co-Operative in Ontario, which is looking at land for a green cemetery near Toronto.
Salisbury, a landscape architect, did his thesis at the University of Guelph on why the concept has taken so long to arrive in North America. “In the UK, funerals are still a community or family event,” Salisbury said. “In North
America, we’ve developed an industry around it. This is not something done by people; it is something done by businesses.”
But the approach that led to the standardized practice of embalming, expensive caskets and manicured cemeteries is beginning to be challenged by the same group that decades ago revolutionized the start of life by demanding more natural and family friendly practices for childbirth.
“The baby boomers are saying: Why does it need to be this way?” Salisbury said. “They tend to look at the status quo and say: ‘This doesn’t work for me. This isn’t spiritually fulfilling. This isn’t something that gives me closure.’ ”
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