The latest in green burial.
By Joe Sehee, Slate
Some cultures befriend death as best they can, with burial customs that embrace decay and regeneration. The American way of death has been to stave off decay with formaldehyde, bullet-proof caskets, and concrete burial vaults. But that may be changing.
Green burial—which bans the use of toxins and nonbiodegradable materials, and helps preserve land—is a growing sector of the death-care industry. Once limited to a few providers and places, it’s now available in eight states, in the form of a burial package approved by the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit founded last year. This week, the first alliance between a green cemetery and a land trust to make green burial a strategy for conservation was formed in South Carolina. And this coming year, the Neptune Society will become the first cremation company to offset its carbon emissions and encourage the scattering of ashes as a way of protecting natural areas.
The era of better dying through chemistry began during the Civil War, with the first commercial use of embalming. The practice requires the draining of blood, puncturing and pumping of internal organs, and injecting of dyes and carcinogenic fixatives into a body, all in the name of preservation. Today what’s strangest about embalming is that it’s still being used at all, since a corpse can be preserved far longer in a cooler.
In a country in which it often takes three containers to pass a hamburger through a car window, it should come as no surprise that it also takes two boxes to bury a body. The first is the coffin, which came into fashion in the late 18th century; previously, most of humanity used shrouds. The second is the concrete vault. Even though no law requires their use, vaults have become a prerequisite for burial at many cemeteries.
Coffins and vaults are sold as a means of protecting the body. In fact, they often produce a far more gruesome form of decomposition than burial without them. A body in the earth breaks down fairly rapidly in most environments. One that is sealed in a casket and put into a vault or wall crypt must contend with anaerobic bacteria. This can cause the liquefying of tissue and bursting of body cavities.
Each year in the United States, coffins and vaults result in more metal being put in the ground than was used to make the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit. (Trust me—I did the math.)
One way to circumvent conventional burial is cremation. More than one out of three Americans now chooses this form of disposition, and in some urban areas, particularly in the West, the number is approaching three in four. While it consumes far fewer resources than the embalming-coffin-vault route, cremation isn’t an ecological cure-all. Incineration burns fossil fuel that contributes to global warming. Older facilities use up to twice as much fuel as newer ones.
Home funerals have also been growing in popularity. Some licensed funeral directors, as well as a new breed of “death dulas,” help families prepare bodies for burial at home, as was common in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Bodies are typically preserved with dry ice rather than embalming. The idea is to give families privacy, control, and the opportunity to spend as much time as they need to say goodbye.
First introduced in England about a dozen years ago, green burial has evolved as a tool for restoration in the United States, thanks to a rural physician who is a cemeterian by avocation. Dr. William “Billy” Campbell began in 1998 to pioneer ideas like filling in graves with twigs, which creates micro-channels that encourage decomposition—and soil nutrients—to rise to the surface, rather than down toward the water table, as traditional methods of grave-filling do. Campbell also developed mounding techniques to counterbalance the ground sinking that normally takes place on cemetery land because of soil compression and the deterioration of wooden caskets. And he introduced the use of grave markers like fieldstones and native wildflowers.
Green burial had a near-death experience of its own in 2005 with the launch of Fernwood Cemetery just north of San Francisco. The first green cemetery in a major metropolitan area, Fernwood claimed that it did not allow embalming and had a conservation easement that would protect its land in perpetuity. But a New Yorker article revealed both promises to be false.
The Green Burial Council was founded last May to keep the movement alive. With board members representing organizations like AARP, the Funeral Consumers Alliance, and the Trust for Public Land, one of the nation’s largest conservation groups, the GBC in July published standards that cemeteries and funeral professionals must meet to qualify as council-approved providers. Consumers can now easily identify and patronize death-care businesses that operate in an ethical and environmentally sound way. The council plans to finalize parallel standards for cremation facilities in early 2007.
Among the cemeteries that the GBC expects to certify this year is a conservation burial ground in the Galisteo Basin of Santa Fe, N.M. It’s being developed by nonprofit Commonweal Conservancy, which plans to offer a burial right to donors who make a contribution to the organization of $1,000 or more. Half the proceeds will fund the acquisition of as many as 6,000 acres of former ranchland that will be turned back into wilderness.
Though green burial has gained the most attention in the United States, it may be Europe that pushes it into the mainstream. Last year, the European Union decided to outlaw formaldehyde in its 25 member nations by 2010, a move that could mean the end of embalming there. Were similar legislation to pass here—a possibility taken seriously in American press accounts of the European ban—the number of green burial sites and practitioners would undoubtedly increase. Imagine: “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” might, once again, really mean something.
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