Grave Matters - A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial

Green Burials Take Deep Root in Existing Cemeteries

2010-09-06T11:51:00.002-04:00

Nature's Sanctuary is a one-acre natural cemetery that sits at the northwest edge of Philadelphia, a stone's throw from a long stretch of the Schuylkill River before it snakes into the urban grid.

It's a surprisingly hushed, leafy locale given its proximity to the country's sixth most-populated city. Dense woodlands rim the cemetery's northern corner. A tree-belted rail line -- soon to become a nature trail -- runs along the backside of the property. The grounds themselves are mostly overspread with rough grass, which grows up to earthen burial mounds backstopped by tall, feather-tipped grasses and wildflowers native to the region.

Nature's Sanctuary offers a fetching view of a natural return to the elements -- and in a place you might least expect to find it: a traditional cemetery.

Pennsylvania's first true green burial ground takes root at West Laurel Hill, a suburban cemetery where Philadelphians have been laying their dead to rest for well over a century.

And so far, it represents an approach to green burial that accounts for a large part of the movement's growth.

Nature's Sanctuary is just one of scores of existing cemeteries across the country that have opened their gates and manicured lawns to a more natural approach to burial.

For some cemeteries, that means allowing vaultless burial to take place anywhere on their grounds. The property may not be wooded or even particularly "natural" in appearance, but without entombment in burial vaults -- the usual requirement of most cemeteries -- a wood-coffined body will at least have eventual contact with surrounding soil and, in its decomposition, rejoin the elements.

Other cemeteries are taking a more wholistic approach. Here, a section of ground is reserved for green burial only. No formaldehyde-embalmed bodies are allowed. Metal caskets are banned, burial vaults prohibited. The grounds themselves are typically landscaped to resemble more natural environments, like woodlands or, as in Nature's Sanctuary, meadows.

Native vegetation is planted atop and around graves, grave markers are limited to indigenous fieldstone or rock.

Siting a natural burial ground within an existing cemetery has many advantages. For one, it's easier and cheaper to establish one of these so-called "hybrid" cemeteries than it is to start one from scratch. Operators don't have locate and purchase land or post the expensive bonds, which sometimes tally into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that states often require of new cemeteries.

Cemetery owners already have the land, as well as landscaping crews and sometimes even funds to launch new, eco undertakings. And unlike operators of virgin, all-natural grounds, they don't have to depend entirely on their "green" sales, either. They can often afford to wait for interest, and plot sales, to grow.

Hybrid cemeteries have their disadvantages. They're harder to tie to efforts to preserve nearby lands, as Ramsey Creek Preserve is doing. And while often very handsome, a "wild," unpruned green section can look both odd and oddly circumscribed within the broader environment of the well-tended traditional cemetery, with its surrounding landscape of marble headstones and turf mowed to golf-course grade.

As a consequence, you're less likely to lose yourself in natural revelry here than in those broad, forest-bounded meadows at the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, or to feel the "soothing influences of nature" that the ruined, woodland graves of olde England offered Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

Still, for families seeking a dust-to-dusty return in the known and nearby environs of the local cemetery -- albeit one less leafy than elsewhere -- a hybrid ground like Nature's Sanctuary is a beautiful, worthy, and welcome option.

Next week: How West Laurel Hill started Nature's Sanctuary.

Upcoming speaking engagements:
I'll be giving a number of presentations on green burial in the coming months. Click here for times and street addresses. All presentations are free and open to the public:

September
26: Harrisburg, PA

October:
17: Morristown, NJ
22: San Mateo, CA
23: Berkeley, CA
23: Santa Rosa, CA

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Actress Lynn Redgrave Laid to Rest in Bamboo Casket

2010-05-19T09:06:00.003-04:00

Jane Hillhouse had no idea that the bamboo casket she shipped to a Connecticut family a couple of weeks ago would be used to bury the British actress Lynn Redgrave.

"A woman e-mailed me to ask if I could supply her with a bamboo coffin that would be needed sometime between a week and ten days," says Hillhouse, owner of Final Footprint, a green coffin supplier in the San Francisco area. "Later, she sent me a link to a news story about the funeral of Lynn Redgrave, and there in the photograph -- to my amazement -- was the coffin I'd shipped."

Hillhouse figures the Redgraves found her company when searching the Internet for green casket companies. "The woman knew what she wanted," says Hillhouse. "She said someone had been buried in a wicker casket back in England and wanted something similar" for the Connecticut funeral.

The coffin Hillhouse shipped out East is fashioned from lengths of bamboo that are woven into a traditional rectangular shape (pictured above). The detachable lid is secured to the base with a series of wooden dowels which fit through small rope loops. Three wooden hand grips are attached at intervals on both sides. A finished coffin weighs less than 80 pounds but is sturdy enough to support a body weighing more than four times that. Hillhouse charges $400 for the coffin, plus delivery.

Bamboo is a newer addition to the line of readily compostable materials that are being turned into green coffins, including pine, cardboard and wicker. It may be the greenest of the bunch.

Unlike traditional wood, bamboo completely regenerates after harvesting -- no re-planting is necessary -- and does so more rapidly than any other woody plant. When cut at the root, the stalks grow back to their former height in two month's time.

The bamboo diverted to Hillhouse's coffins is further culled from sustainably-managed and –harvested forests in the Hunan province of China. No chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used, and the species of bamboo is not the kind consumed by pandas.

The coffins are produced by Ecoffins of Kent, England, a Fair Trade company whose products Hillhouse distributes throughout the U.S.

Hillhouse doesn't know the extent of the Redgraves's green leanings. Yet the eco casket and final interment in a rural cemetery just over the New York line in Lithgow were in keeping with the actress's last wishes, she says. And, as that first e-mail to her had indicated, the bamboo coffin is similar in nature to the wicker one in which Lynn Redgrave's brother, Corin, was laid to rest last month. (Scroll down in the linked article to see the casket.)

Hillhouse says this is the first time she has seen a photograph of one of her coffins in an actual service. It's not, however, the first time she has served as Green Coffin Supplier to the Stars.

Last May she got a call from a funeral director in southern California, asking her to send down one of her bamboo coffins. When she called back after the funeral to ask how the service had gone, the director said, "Now I can tell you who the coffin was used for: David Carradine," the actor of "Kung Fu" and Kill Bill fame.

Follow me as I continue to explore the green burial movement:
On Twitter (greenburialist)
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Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters

Going all Natural in Wales

2010-04-02T20:00:00.006-04:00

Nearly a hundred bodies lie buried at Usk Castle Chase, a natural cemetery an hour northeast of Cardiff, Wales.

But visitors who trek these fourteen acres of rolling pasture might never know it. No paved walkways cut through the grounds, no monuments rise from the land. The grave sites themselves are all but invisible, completely devoid of the headstones, flat markers, perimeter edging and other funereal structures that characterize the more traditional cemeteries scattered throughout the United Kingdom.

The only evidence that bodies are buried beneath this verdant swath of rural Wales are modest oak plaques. And even they don't appear on the actual burial ground. The plaques are affixed to the rafters of an open pavilion near the cemetery entrance, and bear nothing more than the names and lifespans of the deceased.

In both philosophy and design, nature -- not its human inhabitants -- prevails at Usk Castle Chase. "We believe in minimizing the impact we have on a place," says James Leedam, director of Native Woodland, a Monmouth company that operates five natural cemeteries in the U.K. "We wish to preserve the landscape as it is."

For generations, pasture has defined the landscape of the "chase," British for an unenclosed forest traditionally reserved for hunting. When Leedam transformed the Usk chase into a natural cemetery, he worked to ensure that its ruminant history endured -- in form and function. He offered a natural return to the elements on the pasture, but he kept the land looking much as it had for centuries and even continued to allow sheep to graze there. When I asked Leedam if that meant sheep may graze upon the graves themselves, he replied, "Most definitely. It always was, is now and should always be pasture."

While lacking any overt sign of its mordant purpose, the land does show the work of human hands. Leedam's crew occasionally mows the grounds, and he follows a mowing/grazing schedule recommended by a local wildlife trust. Wildflowers are cut after they've seeded; weeds are topped. No fertilizer is used -- beyond the natural fertilizer supplied by the host of decomposing occupants below ground.

Leedam's earth-first approach to green cemetery design puts him at odds with that of most other operators. In many natural burial grounds in the U.K., for example, trees are routinely planted atop graves (Leedam restricts the planting of memorial trees to the forested margins of the chase). In the score of natural cemeteries that have cropped up across the United States, families may -- and almost always do -- mark graves with fieldstones that are collected on site or culled from a similar geographical stratum (although even then the soft stones may completely weather into the landscape in time, eventually leaving grave sites there as unmarked as those on Leedam's grounds).

Without artificial objects marring the landscape, Leedam is able to more fully emphasize its natural beauty. The London-based Memorial Awareness Board found as much, calling Usk Castle Chase "exceptionally beautiful and peaceful" when giving it a best Green Burial Site award in 2008.

Leedam's natural approach to the cemetery de-emphasizes the dead who quite literally nourish and sustain it. In doing so, it asks us to consider questions that go to the heart of how we, the living, should memorialize our dead.

Is it enough to return our deceased to an anonymous end, where one's individuality is subsumed and lost to a natural process? Do we lose a record of our human history if we leave it unmarked, even in so small a place as a grave? Or is one's simple perpetuation of the natural cycle of life a truly sufficient and lasting mark of a life well lived?

We'll explore those questions, and others, in upcoming blogs on the growing green burial movement.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

The photos above are owned by and used with permission of Native Woodland, Ltd. The second photo shows a grave site one family has outlined by plucking grass around it. Finished graves sit behind, to each side and in front of it.

Greensprings Back to the Future in 2100

2010-03-08T13:20:00.007-05:00

The 100-acre burial ground that is the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve is mostly meadow now.

A variety of grasses and wildflowers overspread the rolling hillsides just outside Ithaca, New York. If you stand at an overlook beyond the keeper's cottage, you'll see fields fanning out to the dense forestlands that rim this one-time farm, maybe catch meadowlarks or red-winged blackbirds gliding into tall grass.

By century's end, however, a much different -- and much more natural -- view will present itself to anyone standing here. The hardwood forest that stretches to the horizon will have encroached into the Greensprings grounds. Native timbers -- oaks and beech, hickory and black walnut, perhaps even chestnut -- will rise from areas where grasses now grow and mark what will surely be hundreds of additional grave sites. Some meadow will remain, but by 2100 this funereal landscape will more closely resemble the forest that once stood here before Europeans first settled the Southern Tier in the 1700s and began clearing land.

And that's all according to plan.

Greensprings provides a bucolic resting ground for a natural return to the elements. But the long-term goal of this green cemetery is much more far-reaching than mere eco-friendly interment: It's to use its very natural burials to help heal a land long abused by agriculture and, in the process, to return the land to a closer approximation of its truly natural state.

Theirs is an ambitious goal, particularly for an undertaking as humble as a cemetery. To help reach it, Greensprings is steered by a focused Ecological Insight Committee. Made up of naturalists, land trust members and the like, the small group works to craft policy and regulation for the cemetery, using sound ecological principles and practices as a guide.

Its long-term plan for the grounds is still a work in progress. In broad, the group is looking to re-establish the kind of old growth forest that once thrived here (by planting indigenous trees) while simultaneously operating a working cemetery (by "planting" people). Doing both at the same time presents no small challenge. Digging graves beside newly planted trees can harm young roots, for example, and thus make re-growing that forest difficult. More established tree roots may, in turn, make the digging of abutting graves much harder to do.

How to proceed? The answer from the Ecological Insight Committee: go slow. For now, it's recommending that the west end of the burial ground (known as the West Meadow) be preserved as is and that, per existing regulation, trees not be planted onto grave sites there.

To gradually introduce forest into its ground, Greensprings will reserve sections within the West Meadow as "memorial groves." Here, families -- who will have interred their deceased elsewhere within the meadow -- may plant native trees in memory of their deceased. As the number of meadow burials increases over time, the groves themselves will expand, slowly reforesting the meadow.

The Ecological Insight Committee has also marked out "sequential burial" areas closer to the cemetery's forested margins. Families may purchase plots in advance here and, when the time comes, plant trees onto finished graves. The actual grave site, however, will be determined by the Greensprings staff, to ensure that bodies are buried in lots far enough apart so, for example, grave digging won't disturb trees recently planted onto neighboring sites.

Greensprings will always maintain some meadow. Meadow is, after all, habitat for many of the bird species that take flight here, from Henslow's sparrow to bobolink. But it's largely forest that will one day spring from this green and forest to which the dead will return.

Next week: Challenges of the Ecological Insight Committee

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Greensprings Natural Cemetery: Three-plus Years Later

2010-02-26T14:58:00.006-05:00

I returned to the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve recently and found it looking just as bucolic and inviting as I had remembered.

The hillside overlook offered the same breathtaking view of this rural swath of New York's Southern Tier, with its broad meadows and rim of dense woodlands stretching unimpeded to the horizon. In the distance, red-winged blackbirds glided into tall grass just as they had on the blustery day I last visited. A quiet chorus of other birds -- of which I could identify goldfinch, some field sparrows and one, lone cedar waxwing -- only added to the natural serenity I had come to associate with the Empire State's first natural cemetery.

And, as I did on that afternoon three years earlier, I could imagine few places on this earth I'd rather be laid to rest.

I'm not alone.

Since its dedication in May of 2006, some five dozen people have been buried at Greensprings. Another 300 have purchased plots in advance.

In keeping with its natural surroundings -- and per cemetery policy -- all of those interments have followed a basic, dust-to-dust return to the elements. Embalming was avoided. Metal caskets, burial vaults and upright headstone weren't used. Grave makers had been fashioned from stone indigenous to the region and then laid flush to the ground.

When I walked the meadowlands that constitute Greensprings' main burial grounds, the only evidence of individual graves I saw at first were mounds of earth in various stages of settling. Some of the older graves -- and others into which shrouded bodies had been lowered, sans casket -- had already returned to mostly level grade. Grass from the meadow had by then migrated into plots, overspreading their graves. Some sites had also been planted with vegetation native to the region, such as purple coneflowers and blueberry bushes.

As I neared the graves, I could see their modest markers. They were cut from natural fieldstone or quarried stone. Like their attendant mounds of earth, the oldest of them had settled into the ground and become a part of it.

Stakes flagging future graves dotted the meadow, but otherwise there was very little to suggest that Greensprings is a cemetery at all. There was no established walking path. None of the burial plots were marked off with stone edging or linked chain. The meadow itself -- not its resident graves -- predominated and thus largely defined this landscape.

Which is just the point. The focus of natural burial isn't so much the interred body but the natural cycle of life that very body is perpetuating for those who remain. It's life, not mere death, that's celebrated here. And that's why visitors like this one feel uplifted, not depressed, when we walk through Greensprings and other natural cemeteries of its kind.

Greensprings offers families in this part of the country a lovely place for a green repose. But it's doing much more than that, for families and the natural environment. Next week we'll look more closely at how Greensprings is working to redefine the landscape of the traditional American cemetery and see the issues and challenges it faces in doing so.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Burial Coming Out Big in October

2009-09-28T13:52:00.004-04:00

October of 2009 is shaping up to be the month that may very well prove, once and for all, that green burial is not only here to stay but coming, sooner than later, to a Main Street Funeral Home nearest you.

Consider these upcoming conferences.

First: the home funeral advocates at Natural Transitions will host a national gathering of green and home funeral advocates in Boulder, Colorado, this weekend (October 3 – 4). The Boulder-based non-profit convened the first ever green burial conference last year, a lively and inspiring event at which I joined Joe Sehee (of the Green Burial Council) in showcasing the movement to date.

This year's conference promises to be an even stronger and more spirited engagement with a movement that has clearly found its legs. Since then, the natural cemeteries I profiled in my presentation have more than doubled in number and the half page of home funeral providers listed in the hardcover issue of Grave Matters now runs to five full pages in the newer paperback -- and continues to grow.

Billy and Kimberley Campbell will keynote the Saturday session. The Campbells jumpstarted the green burial movement in this country when they opened the woodland cemetery at Ramsey Creek Preserve. A decade-plus later, Ramsey Creek continues to define the highest standard of conservation burial. If you're interested in learning more about green burial and, more particularly, about how to grow a natural cemetery from the ground up (and do it right), you'll get that and more from the best -- and wittiest -- in the business.

Another pioneer in home funerals, Beth Knox, will share her observations on this growing trend (which was featured recently on page one of the New York Times). Beth's the founder of the home funeral advocacy, Crossings, and as much as anyone has helped re-introduce the idea to an American public that once pursued it as a matter of course.

Rounding out the weekend are presentations on legal open-air cremations, serving Native American populations, creating meaningful end of life rituals, and working from within the existing funeral industry to bring green burial to families.

For more information and a complete schedule, click here.

The mainstream funeral industry was late to embrace cremation. The National Funeral Directors Association is not about to let natural burial slip from its grasp so easily. That this group of nearly 20,000 funeral professionals is jumping on the green funeral bandwagon is clear from a quick read of these workshop titles from the group's annual meeting in Boston at month's end (October 25 -28):

It Isn't Easy Being Green. A Green Funeral Home Isn't Just About Burial. Does Formaldehyde Cause Cancer? And then there are two others that look at more eco-friendly products and strategies, including AARDBalm (a formaldehyde-free alternative to embalming fluids) and resomation (a burn- and thus smokeless alternative to cremation).

That second presentation on the green funeral home will showcase one of the most earth-friendly businesses in the entire funeral trade: Prout Funeral Home, in Verona, New Jersey. Last year in this blog I profiled owner/operator Bob Prout, who will lead the discussion. As much as anyone in the trade, Bob's pursing the best in good, green practices and encouraging his colleagues to follow in his footsteps.

For more information on the NFDA conference, click here.

Finally, if you're going to be in southern New Jersey the third weekend of October (17 - 18), stop in at the Steelmantown Cemetery in Marshallville. The cemetery crew will offer tours and an open house of the small, historic site, which is surrounded by hundreds of wooded acres. Certified by the Green Burial Council, Steelmantown shows just how an existing cemetery can offer a natural return to the elements within its existing grounds.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Note on the photo above: This is the historic Caswell Cemetery on Star Island, New Hampshire, where I spoke about green burial at a week-long family conference this summer.

Pennsylvania Valley Gets its First Green Funeral Director

2009-06-08T10:07:00.003-04:00

I have spoken to enough eco-leaning funeral directors since the publication of Grave Matters to see first-hand that the same greening that's washing over most industries in this country, from agriculture (organic foods) to construction (LEEDs-certified homes), is coming to mortuary science.

If I ever doubted that, I needed only to read last fall about the funeral director in the town next to mine who'd begun offering seagrass caskets, refrigeration, and help with home wakes out of a rehabbed Victorian mansion in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

When green burial comes to the greater Lehigh Valley -- a somewhat conservative, largely blue-collar enclave that boasts well-worked farmland and rugged brownfields -- it shows the movement for a more natural return can land just about anywhere.

Just how will it take? To find out, I drove out to Elias Funeral Home in downtown Allentown and talked with its forty-something owner and supervisor Nicos Elias.

A near ten-year veteran of the funeral trade, Nicos ventured into green burial after attending a seminar on the topic put on by the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association in the fall of 2008. "They talked about how [green funerals] is a growing trend and that we may be called on to do these types of services," Nicos told me in the conference room of his funeral home, a bank of casket ends lining one wall. The group distributed a sample General Price List from a funeral home that had offered green goods and services.

For Nicos going green just made sense. For one, it was good for the planet, "a way of being responsible to the Earth in deathcare," he says.

It made smart business sense, too. Funerals clearly are trending green, Nicos believed. And since no one else was doing it, jumping on the eco-burial bandwagon offered the indie funeral director a way of differentiating himself from the very stiff competition.

So, after he bought the old Trexler Mansion and converted it into a funeral home late last year, he advertised himself as green funeral provider -- the first in the area. "I want to be the funeral director that families in the Lehigh Valley think of when they want to do a green funeral," he says.

By then, Nicos had more carefully researched the movement and modeled a green GPL off existing ones elsewhere. In the process, he consulted with Cynthia Beal of the Natural Burial Company, an eco-casket supplier in Eugene, Oregon. From Cynthia he ordered a couple of caskets made from willow and seagrass, and “acorn” urns of paper mache.

Either casket is provided in his five natural burial packages, all of which replace embalming with refrigeration (in a unit on the premises) or dry ice. Burial shrouds, produced by Esmerelda Kent, the San Francisco artist who created the shrouds used in that famous green burial episode of Six Feet Under, are available, as well. Visitations with unembalmed remains are among the options, although Nicos prefers to limit them to families.

What's striking about the packages, which you can view here, is what I've long argued: that funeral directors can find the green in green burial.

For nearly $6,000, for example, Nicos offers a green version of the standard funeral service: the typical funeral director fees, transfer of remains from place of death, evening visitation and funeral at his home, among others, plus refrigeration, eco-casket and vault (as required by local cemeteries). Less expensive packages, down to just under $5,000, are available with fewer goods and services (no public visitation or funeral).

His green funerals fall short of the $7,000-plus Nicos might earn for an average, modern funeral. But not bad, especially when you consider that families that come to green burial are those which very well might otherwise have chosen an even bigger revenue loser for the funeral trade: cremation, whose average cost is $1,800.

Those are just the packages. Nicos recently sat down with Penny Rhodes, a local deathcare midwife, and offered to help her with families seeking assistance with home funerals. When I asked Nicos what else he'd be willing to do to help families interested in funeral options that lay outside the box, he said simply, "I want to [help them] in any way possible."

Since talking with Nicos last spring, he told me he had recently done one green funeral. For that, he refrigerated the remains and arranged a private family viewing in his funeral home the day before burial (in an all-wood casket) at an old cemetery in Connecticut. "Everything went quite well," he said, "and seemed to be exactly what [the family] wanted."

Mark Harris, author Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Writing Out Green Burial/Home Funerals in Colorado?

2009-04-29T14:35:00.002-04:00

From USA Today, more proof of eco burial's growing purchase on the American consciousness: nearly 65% of green-leaning adults say that they are considering or would consider a natural return, were it possible.

The latest funereal stats blipped on my radar just as I was studying Colorado House Bill 1202: Concerning the Regulation of Persons Who Provide for the Final Disposition of Dead Human Bodies in the Normal Course of Business.

Talk about a study in contrasts.

On one hand, an indication of green burial's broadening appeal. On the other, a funeral bill that never directly addresses green burial, natural return, home funerals, or their providers -- although there's plenty said about funeral directors, mortuary science practitioners, cremationist, embalmers, funeral establishments and their services.

In other words: a bill that treats the most major shift to U.S. funeral traditions since Civil War surgeons began embalming Union casualties as if it practically doesn't exist or, at the very least, doesn't much matter. In this bill, the modern funeral is the only (end) game in town.

Little wonder DIYers are protesting. As some see it, HB 1202 not only marginalizes them but threatens their ability to carry out their family- and earth-friendly practices.

The Colorado Funeral Directors Association helped write the bill, whose stated and worthy goal is to offer greater protection to funeral-buying families in a state that affords little. As for concerns about the new bill's limiting a family's right to green burial and home funerals, CFDA contends that those rights are in fact retained in legal statues elsewhere.

If that's true, then the best solution may be this: To re-craft a consumer protection bill that not only shields Centennial Staters from bad funeral practices and their agents but that ALSO spells out their right to care for their own dead, from filing death certificates and buying third-party caskets to waking and laying out their loved ones in their own homes, without the aid of a funeral director.

While we're at it, let's go ahead and name and define the funeral practices -- and practitioners -- that more and more Colorado families are turning to when death comes calling, including green burial and home funerals.

For families, the solution would be a double win. They'd get the consumer protections they deserve and the clearly-stated right to take the care of their dead into their own hands.

As I write this, HB has been sent back to committee for revision, to address some of the concerns above.

UPDATE
I didn’t post this soon enough. On April 22, HB 1202 passed through committee, with amendments. It now moves to further committee consideration and then onto a Senate vote. Natural Transitions, a Boulder-based home funeral advocacy, continues to have reservations about the bill. For more information, click here.

There is one win for supporters of natural return in Colorado. The most significant change to the proposed bill involved the adoption of a separate amendment that will more specifically allow for home funerals and green burial.

SPEAKING OF GREEN BURIAL
For anyone interested in learning more about -- and seeing images from -- the green burial movement, I'll be giving a number of presentations in the coming weeks. Most are free and open to the public.

May 3: Rochester (NY)
May 17: Philadelphia
May 18: Montreal
May 20: Ithaca
May 21: Syracuse

For more information, click here.

The video above features Ken West, a promoter of green burial in the U.K. who opened the country's first natural cemetery in Carlisle, in 1991.

DIY Green Burial Step # 2: Learn Hospital’s Policy on Releasing Remains to Family

2009-03-09T14:29:00.002-04:00

Note to family: If it looks like I'll be taking my last breaths in the clinical environs of the local hospital, please, take me home.

Like most people, I'd rather pass from the scene within the comforts of home, even with its proliferating dust bunnies, missing shoe molding and the previous owners' 1940's wallpaper with the pink flowers I still can't believe adorns my bedroom a dozen years after we bought this pile.

But there's an even bigger benefit to my passing at home: it nearly ensures that my family, on its own, can carry out my last wishes for a green and simple send-off to the Great Hereafter.

That might not be possible if I expire at any of the local hospitals to which I'd likely be brought in extremis. Two of them never returned my repeated phone calls asking about their policies for releasing remains to family members instead of funeral directors. The one hospital rep who did get back told me she's never heard such a (strange) request and wasn't sure her hospital even had a release policy written out.

My lacking response may be typical. Of the thirty-some hospital associations that funeral consumer advocate Lisa Carlson contacted to ask about their body release policies, none of them had a policy on hand. That included an association in New Jersey, a state that requires every hospital to have one.

If my home state of Pennsylvania requires hospitals to set protocol for the release of their dead, I couldn't find it. What I did turn up is a statute in our state code stating that "remains of deceased patients shall be prepared for removal from clinical areas in accordance with hospital policy." That directive seems, to me anyway, to address body disinfection and removal from hospital rooms, not from the hospital itself, although it does seem to grant overall removal powers to the hospital.

The PA hospital association I contacted concurs with that reading. In an e-mail, a representative wrote that hospitals in the state "establish their own policies regarding the release of a deceased." The association does not have or set policy itself.

So, with my local hospitals I'm left with the great unknown about their body release policies. [For now anyway. In the near future, I want to join with our local home funeral advocates and sit down with hospital staffs to talk about the idea of the home funeral.]

I'm also left with the question that keeps nagging whenever I've considered this issue: Can a hospital legally refuse to release remains to families? I know some hospitals do have such a policy or one that states it will only release to families when the deceased has left very clear instructions. If you're a lawyer or expert on hospital policy, I'd love to hear your take on the issue.

If it turns out that my local hospitals do have a release policy, I sure hope it reads something like the one crafted by Fletcher Allen Healthcare in Vermont, which Lisa Carlson cites on page 6 in her newsletter. Briefly, the policy allows for the release of the body to the family and tells families what arrangements they need to make to allow it.

Maybe my local hospitals have such a family-friendly directive somewhere in their files, just waiting for that first client to blow the dust off. Until I know that for sure, though, this will be among my final requests should I be languishing in a local hospital bed: get me home, and ASAP.

Note on video above: a short doc on the history and manufacturing of caskets.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

DIY in States that Require Use of a Funeral Director

2009-02-13T13:58:00.005-05:00

Like the vast majority of green burial enthusiasts, I'm fortunate to live in a state where families may legally care for their own dead.

Pennsylvania, as I wrote in last week's blog, is one of forty-three states that grants its citizens the right to essentially act as their own funeral directors. By law, we Keystoners can lay out and wake our deceased at home, file death certificates, even transport remains to the cemetery or crematory -- among other last acts -- on our own.

Pennsylvania's family-friendly funeral regs make it easy for me to plan my green goodbye in advance (as I'm doing in recent and forthcoming blogs). But, as a number of you rightly note, that's cold comfort if you live in New York, Connecticut, Nebraska, Indiana, Michigan, Utah and Louisiana.

Families in these seven states must by law engage the services of a funeral director to handle certain end of life affairs, from signing death certificates to overseeing the burial. I'll leave it to Josh Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance to skewer to supposed logic behind those requirements and argue for full family rights at end of life, which he does in this blog. Slocum's post also links to groups that are working to overturn the restrictive funeral provisions.

Until legislators in those states see green, consider these tips when planning for the DIY natural return to the elements in the seven states above:

* Learn what your state requires when death comes calling.
The exact requirements vary by state. Indiana authorities will accept death certificates only if they're signed by funeral directors. Hospitals, nursing homes, hospice centers and other state-licensed institutions in New York will release remains only to funeral directors.

If you know your state's specific requirement for end of life matters, you'll go into any funeral arrangement conference fully prepared to contract with a funeral director for only what you need her to do -- and not do.

You can find your state's regulations through the search I outlined in last week's blog. Also helpful is Lisa Carlson’s book, Caring for the Dead, and your local affiliate of the family-advocacy Funeral Consumers Alliance.

* Hire a green-leaning funeral director.
As the natural burial movement gains traction, a growing number of funeral directors are catering to the specific requests of its eco-friendly clientele. The handful of funeral directors I contacted in the restrictive states above not only proved knowledge about green funerals but were willing to help families conduct as much of them as they wanted.

Where do you find those directors? If your end-of-life plans call for burial in a natural cemetery, contact the cemetery and ask for a referral. When I called Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve in Newfield, New York, for leads, burial coordinator Jennifer Johnson enthused about Lisa Auble.

Auble, a state licensed funeral director who owns and operates Lansing Funeral Home, has overseen a number of funerals and burials at Greensprings. "I believe in [green burial]," she told me. "And interest is really, really increasing." Per state law, Auble has assisted families who chose Greensprings by filing death certificates, overseeing burials, and, when necessary, removing remains from hospitals and like institutions.

Beyond that, she said she'll do as much or as little as a family requests. In most cases, her involvement has included transporting remains from their place of death and then, usually, placing them on dry ice (which, to her initial surprise, she found better preserves a body than refrigeration). Auble has also sewn fabric into shrouds for coffin-less burials.

The Green Burial Council is another useful source for leads. The Santa-Fe non-profit posts a state-by-state list of funeral directors who have gained the Council's eco certification. And, again, your local Funeral Consumers Alliance affiliate can steer you to area funeral homes they've found particularly helpful.

* Be clear about what you want your funeral director to do -- and nail down the cost.
Once you know the services a funeral director must by law undertake and, then, know the ones you and your family want to handle yourselves, you can check them off the General Price List the director will produce at an arrangement conference.

You'll also see in black and white the costs for each. The Nathan Butler Funeral Home in Bloomington, Indiana, for example, charges $600 to sign and deliver the death certificate. You'll pay Lansing Funeral Home almost $1,600 if you have Auble and her staff handle the only services you can't DIY by law in New York ($300 for her to be present at the burial, another $1,275 in non-declinable fees that cover arranging services, filing the death certificate, among others).

Note on the photograph above: The red flags indicate potential grave sites at Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Step 1 in Green Funeral Planning: Documenting the Right to DIY

2009-01-30T11:37:00.002-05:00

They may wail and rent their garments. They might toast their good fortune with my best Scotch. No matter how my family marks my passing from the scene, however, this much is clear: they have every legal right to handle what's left of my mortal remains.

Lisa Carson documents those last rights in the Pennsylvania chapter of Caring for the Dead. The PA State Association of Township Supervisors does the same, in more detail, in this summary of state funeral laws (to wit: "Nothing in state law requires a family to use a funeral director.").

I'm adding copies of each of these documents to an end-of-life file I'm preparing for my family. I have a good idea of what I want to happen with my remains upon my final exit, and I want to make sure my family has all the information they need to follow through (after they've finished raiding my liquor cabinet, of course).

They may need it. Officials in charge of post-death affairs in this corner of the Keystone State have an uncertain grasp on the legalities of the DIY funeral and burial, I'm finding. When time comes, my family may have to educate the Powers that Be that, yes, it does have the right to essentially serve as my funeral director. The documentation I'm collecting now will go a long way to prove the point then, if need be.

Interestingly, no Pennsylvania law I've turned up explicitly states that right. The state has enacted all manner of laws for funeral directors; it does not, however, reserve post-death matters solely to the dismal trade. Who, then, has those rights?

According to the Vital Statistics Law of 1953 (P.L. 304) -- another document that's going into my family file -- that somebody would be a "person."

Section 501, which deals with death certificates, reads: "The person in charge of interment or of removal of the dead body . . . shall file the death certificate . . . ." Another section further on emphasizes the point, stating that the "local registrar shall issue the permit [to 'dispose' of remains] only after the person in charge of interment or removal has filed with the local registrar a certificate of death . . . ."

Legislators probably assumed that the unnamed "person" in their law would be a funeral director. A funeral director has so consistently been that person on my home turf that officials here may assume he's the required one by law to handle final affairs.

Yet by leaving that person unidentified, unnamed, Pennsylvania legislators are allowing non-funeral personnel to fill the role: like my wife, children and parents.

To find documentation on DIY rights in your state, start with Carlson's book. Then go online. Google "state legislature" and the name of your state. The results should bring you to your state laws. At the home page of my state legislature, for example, I clicked on "Session Information" and then entered "funeral" in the "Find By Legislation" search box. The search led to amendments that had been made to the Vital Statistic Law, which I then tracked down.

Alternatively, you can search for your state funeral board, whose web pages often link to state funeral laws. Also, consult the pages of your state affiliates of the Funeral Consumers Alliance. Many of them post information about state funeral laws.

Next time: Claiming a body from the hospital.

The video above offers more proof of the value of a home funeral and why it's becoming more popular. The video features Beth Knox, the founder of Crossings whom I profile in the home funeral chapter of Grave Matters.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Emily Dickinson Speaks of Death from the Grave

2009-01-16T17:04:00.003-05:00

In the coming weeks I'll return to the topic I started but flagged on early last year: a step-by-step plan for my own eventual green burial.

Planning in advance for a standard sendoff via the local funeral home can be an involved affair. The green goodbye can be ever harder to arrange, as I discovered when I went to do it myself.

I tell you why and then walk you through the process I'm charting to set my own affairs in order. My goal? To not just record my final wishes but to make it as easy as possible for my family to follow through on them. The steps will be specific to my Pennsylvania hometown, but I'll work to make them broad enough to apply elsewhere.

Back with step one next week: documenting the legal right my family has to care for its own dead.

And speaking of passings, here's Emily Dickinson giving us a gentle and seductive view of death's arrival in her famous poem, "Because I could not stop for Death." Death not so kindly stopped for Emily in 1886 (she died of Bright’s Disease). But the Cyberage has resurrected the Belle of Amherst in this eerie but oddly fascinating "recording" of the poem, in the video above.

Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Burial: The Visual Tour

2009-01-09T11:33:00.002-05:00

Watch more Google Video videos on AOL Video

As the green burial movement gathers steam, organizations have approached me to ask if I speak to groups about natural return. If so, they've wanted to know just what I'd present and how I'd do it.

The answer is, yes, I do speak about green burial and general funeral issues. In the last year, I gave some dozen presentations around the country on "grave matters" to college students, pro-consumer funeral groups, church congregations, hospice workers, and funeral directors, among others. The events have generally been free and open to the public.

For me, these engagements have offered the opportunity to present an updated tour of the green burial movement using images I'd wanted, but was unable, to include in Grave Matters. It's one thing to write about a moving natural burial at Ramsey Creek Preserve; it's quite another to see photographs of families gathered in that lush pine woods, circled around a plain, wood coffin that's suspended above a cavity strewn with flowers and pine needles, the sun filtering through the tall canopy overhead.

That visual tour includes scores of photographs I took in the course of my research and travels, including those of natural burial grounds and backyard cemeteries, of burials at sea and via memorial reef ball, a honeycombed dome containing the deceased's ashes that serves as an aquatic nursery off the U.S. and Canadian coastline.

Archival photographs I've collected show early American funerals and their progression to the more involved sendoffs of today. By way of contrast, I address the environmental aftermath of the standard funeral and how funeral directors are coming to embrace more natural returns.

If you're interested in seeing one of these presentations, I’ll be speaking this spring in Rochester (NY), Princeton (NJ), and Greensboro (NC). You can find a full list of engagements, with specific locations, by clinking on this BookTour link.

If you'd like to bring me to speak to your group, you can reach me by e-mail: mark@gravematters.us. I'll tell you more about the presentation and arrangements. I can also send testimonials from organizers of past engagements.

More on Bibb’s Ban of Green Burial (the subject of my last blog post)

Beth Collins -- the CEO of the would-be Summerland Natural Cemetery in Macon, Georgia -- attended a standing-room only board meeting of the Bibb County Commission earlier this week and asked members to repeal their anti-green cemetery ordinance. The chairman said he'd consult with fellow board members but, according to this story in the Macon newspaper, said he "didn't think they would change their minds." If they don't, Collins suggested she'd bring a lawsuit against the county.

In the meantime, neighboring Twiggs County has quietly been considering its own green cemetery legislation. (The Twiggs County line borders one side of the Summerland cemetery.) From the looks of this item in the April 1, 2008 agenda of the County Commission, any ordinance would seem less than friendly to natural burial:

"After discussion and input from several citizens in attendance, Commissioner Epps made a motion to send a letter to the Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Commission expressing our concerns regarding the placement of this type of cemetery so near to this County, and the environmental impact of such a cemetery. Floyd seconded. Unanimous Vote. Motion Carried.

Commissioner Epps made a motion to send a letter stating these same concerns to Mr. Dave Blankenship, of the District Health Office in Macon. Floyd Seconded. Unanimous Vote. Motion Carried."

A Green Cemetery Ordinance for Twiggs County was passed on November 18. I'll post a copy of the ordinance when I get it.

To see how one county council -- this one in Wellington, New Zealand -- has embraced, not fought, green burial, click on the video at the head of this blog. It profiles the folks who worked to establish the first modern natural cemetery in the southern hemisphere, the Wellington Natural Cemetery.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Open Letter in Favor of Green Burial in Bibb County, Georgia

2008-12-22T12:28:00.005-05:00

The fight for a green goodnight in Macon, Georgia, continues.

You may remember my blog entry from earlier this year, in which I reported on the efforts of Jim Wood and Beth Collins to site a green cemetery on a fifty-seven-acre pine forest on the eastern edge of Macon. Despite some local opposition and after numerous appearances before county planning and zoning commissioners, Jim and Beth finally gained the permit to open and operate Summerland Natural Cemetery.

Last month, however, the Bibb County board of commissioners passed amendments to the county cemetery code that would effective ban green cemeteries -- and thus Summerland itself -- entirely from Bibb County.

Below is the letter I sent to the commission, asking that it reconsider its action.

Heading this blog is a photo of Summerland, courtesy of Beth Collins.

Back with a post in January.

December 22, 2008

To: Board of Commissioners, Bibb County, Georgia
In Re: Ordinance Amending Bibb County Code, Chapter 20, Cemeteries

Dear Commissioners:
I am writing to ask that you reconsider your recent amendments to the Bibb County Code that pertain to cemeteries (Chapter 20).

I am an environmental journalist and the author of Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (2007, Scribner). The book examines the negative environmental impact of modern funeral practices and advocates for more natural, ecological-friendly alternatives. One of those alternatives is burial in a "green" cemetery, which your ordinance would ban from Bibb County.

Josh Slocum of the Funeral Consumers Alliance has already spoken to the more egregious provisions of the ordinance. I won’t repeat them here, but will confirm Slocum’s well-articulated arguments, particularly in regards to the ordinance's requirement that remains be buried in a "leak-proof casket or vault." There is, as he notes, no such container. My own research found that the elements in the environs of the grave will eventually degrade any casket and likewise open cracks in any burial vault. Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission has acknowledged as much, prohibiting funeral directors from making claims to the contrary. Your requirement for leak-proof burial containers thus can’t be met, and, as such, effectively prohibits any new cemetery, green or otherwise, from being sited in Bibb Country.

What I would like to address more directly is your ordinance's seeming bias against green burial. For the last half decade I have studied the natural cemetery, as both a concept and as an actual environment, and found it to be asset to any community.

For one, the green cemetery -- that is, a natural environment in which the minimally-casketed, unembalmed dead are laid to rest in vaultless graves -- is a good use of land. Returned directly to the earth here, one's remains renourish soil, encourage the growth of vegetation and help restore land to ecological health. The result is more nature preserve than mere graveyard. In some natural cemeteries local residents treat them as such, going there for nature walks, reflection and for peaceful communion with the natural world. In the best of schemes, the natural cemetery -- by dint of its cemetery designation -- not only preserves good land from being developed into yet another strip mall or housing subdivision but works to ensures that it stays green forever. A natural cemetery in Macon wouldn't just offer families a beautiful place in which to be laid to rest: it would allow them to preserve a slice of ecological Georgia.

The natural cemetery is certainly preferable to a regular cemetery. A typical 10-acre cemetery contains enough coffin wood to construct more than forty homes, enough toxic embalming fluid to fill a small backyard swimming pool, many thousands of tons of concrete and metal and the residue of untold gallons of poisonous weed killer. As I see it, the standard cemetery functions less as a bucolic resting ground for the dead than a landfill of largely non-biodegradable and hazardous materials. Not so the natural cemetery.

In the end, the natural cemetery asks us to see death in a new light. Death is no longer the mere endpoint of a life; it's part of a larger natural cycle -- of growth and decline, of decomposition and rebirth -- that makes life on this planet possible. Instead of working to short-circuit that cycle at literally all costs -- as our modern funeral practices do, with chemical embalming, bullet-proof metal caskets, and concrete burial vaults, all of which will only delay, not halt the inevitable -- green burial says, let's let Mother Nature follow her natural course. To the benefit of the earth, of families, and, not coincidentally, our pocketbooks.

Green burial argues that our best last act may be the simple one of using what remains of our physical existence to fertilize depleted soil, push up a tree, preserve a bit of wild from being developed, and, in the process, perpetuate the cycle of life that turns to support those we leave behind. That, I contend, is lasting, noble legacy to a life well lived.

I ask that you make that possible for the families of Bibb County.

Thank you,

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters

Grave Matters: The New, Updated (and Cheaper) Paperback

2008-12-12T09:28:00.005-05:00

Grave Matters may not exactly be a holiday read -- well, maybe it is to the readers of this blog -- but on Tuesday, almost two weeks from Christmas Day, Scribner released an updated, paperback version of the book.

The hardcover, which was published in January of 2007, chronicles the experiences of families who found in green burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic American Way of Death. For some families that meant burying their loved ones in natural cemeteries or at sea. For others it involved conducting home funerals, hiring local carpenters to furnish simple pine boxes, maybe casting ashes into memorial reefs.

The paperback gave me an opportunity to update that material and to report on the phenomenal growth of the green burial movement.

New material in the paperback, in part, includes:
* Profiles of nearly two dozen natural cemeteries that have sprung up around the country
* Lists of almost 40 home funeral providers from coast to coast
* Information on eco coffin manufacturers and distributors
* A new afterword on the growth of the green burial movement

Price is better, too: $15. Even cheaper on-line.

Finally, a heartfelt thanks to the many, many wonderful folks I've met who have helped me with this project. You’ve graciously shared your experiences and knowledge, invited me into your homes and communities and made the writing of a book feel almost like a family endeavor. For that, and much more, I'm grateful.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Metal Implants Find Second Life via Recycling

2008-12-05T20:14:00.003-05:00

When the door to the cremation unit retracted and I looked into the still-radiating hearth, what I noticed first was not the low-spreading mound of bones.

It was the metal hip joint that caught my eye.

Glowing bright red (as you can see in the photo above), the titanium ball-and-socket joint had survived its ninety-minute cremation, with hearth temperatures reaching 1,800 degrees, fully intact. As the cremator swept the implant and accompanying bones into a collection pan, I couldn't help but think the metal joint looked perfect enough to stand in for another damaged one just as is -- or at least be melted down (at higher temps) and recycled.

At the time (this was a few years ago) neither was the case. Federal law prevents body-to-body reuse of implants, the cremator told me. As for recycling, it just wasn't done in this country. Implants were just buried in local cemeteries or sent to landfills.

That's still the case, but it's happening much less often. In the last couple of years, a handful of companies have started collecting post-cremation metal implants – hip and knee joints, plates, rods and screws -- and sending them out for recycling.

One of those recyclers is Implant Recycling. The Detroit metal processor collects prosthetic implants from crematories across the United States and, with the help of a spectrometer, separates them by alloy: stainless steel, titanium, and cobalt chromium. The alloys are then melted into ingots, which are sold to recyclers who, in turn, transform them into new prostheses or into parts that are used in the aerospace industry.

While novel in this country, the recycling of metal implants is hardly new. It's fairly common practice in parts of Europe, where cremation rates run as high as 80%. For good reason: the recycling benefits the environment, preserves space in landfills and cemeteries, and gives second life to still-valuable material.

It's also perfectly legal, says Brad Wasserman, managing partner at Implant Recycling. Regulations in some U.S. states and Canadian provinces are murky when it comes to recycling (a few take issue with funeral directors and cremators profiting from the resale of implants headed to the recycling plant). But lawyers for Implant Recycling conducted a thorough review of the regulations and found nothing that prevented the prosthetic recycling itself.

As for the funeral industry profiting from the sale of implants, those that work with Wassserman's firm don't. Although some charities certainly benefit. For each sale, Implant Recycling offers to make a donation to the charity of the supplying funeral home/cremator's choice.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

You've Got a [Green Burial] Friend in Pennsylvania

2008-11-21T16:47:00.004-05:00

When I first ventured into the green burial underground more than half a decade ago, I had to travel far afield from my home in eastern Pennsylvania to gather the material that would become Grave Matters.

When it came to natural return, not much was cooking here at the time (besides the very real bake taking place in the hearths at Philadelphia Crematories, a model crematory I ended up profiling in chapter three).

Since then, a green sea change has colored funeral and burial customs in this part of the Keystone State, with most of it coming in the last couple of months. Here's what's happening in:

Pocono Mountains
Last week I drove up to the Poconos and walked the grounds of Pocono Plateau (pictured above). It's one of three ashes-only EcoEternity Forests I blogged about a couple of months ago. On a chilly afternoon, I caught up with president Jack Lowe, who talked about how families had approached him with such enthusiasm because they'd been holding onto their loved ones' ashes and didn't know what to do with them -- until now.

Since its consecration back in June, Pocono Plateau has seen three interments (one of which involved a daughter who'd removed her father's ashes from their mausoleum niche for greener burial in Jack's forest). Nearly ninety families in all have purchased burial plots in the three EcoEternity sites, including the newest location due east of Richmond, Virginia.

Pennsylvanians will soon have even more choices for a natural return with the help of EcoEternity. In the coming year, the company plans to open a pair of new sites in the southeastern part of the state.

Philadelphia
Two weeks ago, the owners of West Laurel Hill Cemetery opened up a corner of its expansive grounds for natural burial. Founded shortly after the Civil War on the northwest outskirts of Philadelphia, West Laurel Hill is part of Laurel Hill, the second of the "rural" cemeteries that flourished in this country in the nineteenth century during a greening of the American deathscape.

The cemetery's "Natural Sanctuary" is a 3.5 acre parcel where only green burials may take place. Embalmbed bodies are banned, burial vaults prohibited. Natural stones may mark the grave. A funeral home on site understands green burial concepts, makes basic caskets and can help families conduct home funerals.

I'll write more about the Natural Sanctuary in an upcoming blog.

Eastern PA Home Funeral Providers
Families in eastern Pennsylvania -- as is true for the rest of the state, and, for that matter, for most of the country -- have always been able to care for their own deceased. Now, they can turn to two area organizations for help with those family undertakings.

In the Philadelphia region, there's A Natural Undertaking, which is staffed by Jennifer Bingham and Donna Larson. Families in the greater Allentown region can turn to Penny Rhodes (610-756-6253) and Greta Brown (610-865-9050). Penny and Greta might work with a local funeral home that's just gone green. More on Elias Funeral Home shortly.

Barbara Kernan: 1962 – 2008.
Finally, my sympathies to the family and friends of Barbara Kernan, an early advocate of home funerals in the Southern Carlifornia area, who died from breast cancer at the end of October.

Barbara was the founder of Thresholds, an organization that offered home funeral services and support in San Diego. I'd interviewed Barbara for the home funeral chapter of Grave Matters. We very quickly figured out that she grew up literally around the corner from my home in Pennsylvania and knew some of the friends I'd made since moving here. We'd hoped to meet up when she came back to visit her parents.

What I remember most from our exchanges was Barbara's good humor and her spirited engagement with the funeral industry, to the extent that she even earned a funeral director's license (to make it that much easier to encroach on their turf). I hear that Barbara's own home funeral was a moving tribute to her life and work. A celebration of her life went into the wee hours, and when her body was taken to the crematory on Halloween Day, her friends wore witches hats.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters)

Funeral Directors Conference Gets the Greening

2008-10-31T08:49:00.003-04:00

It could be that funeral directors averse to green burial decided to sleep in on the morning that Joe Sehee, Darren Crouch and I hosted a panel on green burial at the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association in Orlando earlier this month. (Not that I begrudge them the extra shuteye: we did start at 7:00 am.)

But the seventy or so who did show up – and the larger group that attended our roundtable discussion later that afternoon -- seemed to accept the fact of a green burial movement. At least no one contradicted the Jewish funeral director who, very eloquently, stated that green burial was clearly an idea whose time had come and that his colleagues would do well to get involved.

The questions and comments that followed suggested that many of those funeral directors had moved beyond acceptance and were looking to actually venture into planet-friendly burial. Some of those comments and my replies:

One funeral director told the group that he could refrigerate remains and provide the biodegradable coffin easily enough. What he couldn't offer his natural burial clients was a cemetery that would allow for a vaultless grave.

Supply is an issue -- for now. Green cemeteries are springing up around the county (there are some 20 by my last count). I know another score are in various stages of planning. That does not include the growing number of regular cemeteries that are allowing for vault-free burial or are reserving sections of their grounds for natural burial preserves. We'll see hundreds of these open to burial in the coming years. As demand for natural cemeteries increases, sites will grow.

Is it possible to have a home funeral for remains that had been autopsied or whose organs had been removed?

At the biannual conference of the Funeral Consumers Alliance last June, I'd asked that same question of Jerrigrace Lyons. Jerrigrace, one of the country's leading authorities on home funerals, said that she had held home funerals in such cases, with no issues. Addressing the possibility of fluids leaking from autopsied remains, Darren Crouch said his company was in the process of developing a biodegradable plastic body bag that could be used to capture liquids for the period of a home funeral.

How much are green cemeteries charging?

Prices vary widely from cemetery to cemetery, but most tend to be in the $2,000 to $3,000 range for the plot, plus another $500 for the opening and closing. High? Maybe compared to regular cemeteries. Although I would argue that burial in a green cemetery is a worthy investment in more than just one's interment: the burial not only nourishes soil and pushes up vegetation (rejoining one's remains to the cycle of life that turns to support those we leave behind) but in the best of schemes helps preserve good land from being developed. A powerful legacy, I'd say. Also, in cemeteries that have partnered with land conservation organizations, some of the cost may be tax-deductible.

After the morning session, I walked the huge convention showroom which, as much as anything, proved that the funeral industry is indeed a multi-billion dollar business.

Still, I was pleased to note a number of green enterprises.

One of them is Ecoffins, a British company that's producing coffins made from a biomass of compostable material, like bamboo and the wicker that's woven into the casket pictured above.

I'll report on them and on other green funeral providers in the coming weeks.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

First Green Burial Conference: A Lively Affair in Boulder

2008-10-10T21:35:00.004-04:00

Last week's first-ever green burial conference, in Boulder, Colorado, brought together the broad, eclectic mix of adherents that continue to bear out my long-standing belief that natural burial has the legs to go mainstream.

There were students and septuagenarians. Hospice workers. Vegetarians and MBAers. Cemetery operators and celebrants. A couple of funeral directors and many more home funeral advocates. A few gutsy souls who had the moxie to take the deathcare of their deceased into their own hands, not because they knew it was legal but because they felt it the right thing to do. Even a couple of attendees who'd never heard of natural burial but thought it sounded interesting enough to invest a day learning about.

I gave a version of my ever-changing presentation on the current lay of the green burial landscape, with a history of death in early America and how it evolved into the more elaborate funerals of today. Joe Sehee, of the Green Burial Council, provided an update on the natural cemeteries across the country he has helped start.

The Q&A sessions and open forums that followed provided an interesting window into how some are viewing the green burial movement and what issues the movement does and may face.

Some highlights:

• Green in green burial? A pair of businessmen wondered how to make green burial pay out. Up to now, the natural cemetery has largely provided a strategy that offers not just a dust-to-dust burial but a way to preserve land from being developed. Profit margins, to the extent there are any, are thin. To increase them, the MBAers talked of burying more bodies per acre than is currently the case, partnering with conservation organizations, growing natural cemeteries on or near the urban cores where large populations dwell. The challenge, as they acknowledged, is to do that and stay true to real-green conservation principles.

• Natural cemeteries may draw too many visitors. One of the goals of the natural cemetery is to reconnect people with the land, by inviting them to see it less as a graveyard than as nature preserve to delight in. So it's possible, one cemeterian noted, that locals might overtax their natural cemeteries, arriving in huge numbers and despoiling the land in the process.

• Ensuring that green cemeteries remain green. A great question from one of the green burial neophytes: what's to prevent the future owner of a green cemetery from deciding to, say, allow for the burial of embalmed bodies or metal caskets? For Joe Sehee the answer is in making sure that green cemeteries partner with reputable conservation organizations, which act as ecological stewards of the land. That's just the kind of arrangement he sets up with the conservation burial grounds he helps establish.

Not surprisingly, the Boulder gathering was friendly to natural burial. I'll report next week on the response I get from a tougher and, perhaps, more suspect audience I’m addressing on Monday: the funeral directors who are attending the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association in Orlando.

The photo above comes complements of Clint Crary, of Pioneer Natural Burial. From left to right: Karen van Vuuren (founder/director, Natural Transitions), Joe Sehee, Mark Harris, Laina Corazon Coit (founder, Prairie Wilderness Cemeteries) and Maeve Conran (news producer at KGNU radio).

Note: That's a wicker coffin, distributed by Passages, in the far right of the photo.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

First Green Burial Conference, More on Enduring Grave Markers

2008-10-02T11:19:00.005-04:00

There's still time to register for the first-ever green burial conference, in Boulder, Colorado. The date is this Saturday, October 4.

Organized and hosted by Natural Transitions, a home funeral provider in Boulder, the conference brings together green burial advocates and practitioners. I'll be joining Joe Sehee (director of the Green Burial Council) and Karen van Vuuren (of Natural Transitions) to survey the growing green burial movement and learn how to literally bring it to ground in our own communities.

For anyone who's looking to establish a natural cemetery, Joe's presentation in the afternoon is a must. Joe has helped a number of individuals, groups and government entities root conservation/green graveyards on land across the country. He'll share his experiences and insights that you can apply to your own patch of earth.

I'll report back here on what I learn.

For more information, see the conference web site

More on enduring grave markers.
Those of you who have been following our fascinating discussion about appropriate grave markers should note Thomas Friese's recent reply to Billy Campbell. You'll find the original thread by clicking here. I've posted Thomas' comments below.

From Thomas Friese:
Billy, I particularly like your observations on the "re-storying" aspect of restoration ecology -- without a consistent multigenerational human engagement, one cannot expect to naturalize/restore/recreate a landscape in any intended direction, be it back to its former wild condition, its former cultured condition or to a new state altogether. Since you prioritize the ecological benefits of natural burial, the particular forms of "natural" landscape one tries to achieve from the process are important to you. I, on the other hand, am more interested in the cultural and spiritual benefits of this return to nature per se -- we emphasize different benefits from the same process.

So that we understand each other, I require a short digression…. Though I share your goal of returning the planet to more natural ways (intentionally vague words), I am more focused on the human cultural and spiritual aspects of burial, since I believe the earth will take care of herself and the real danger posed is to the human realm.

In my world-view, the earth is a far more intelligent and resilient being than the human species which momentarily lives on and of it. Her life span is of a different level of magnitude than our species’. With respect to her, we are temporary guests, as individuals and even as a species. And even though our recent generations seem to be (indeed, are) rapists and pillagers of their own mother, I still believe that the earth is essentially in control of its own geological and ecological evolution, and that she is presently undergoing an especially rapid and dramatic phase of change -- a complete change of clothing, a new incarnation, if you like. Of course this has happened many times before, without human "help", before humans even existed. I see the human species as a relatively unconscious agent of the present changes our earth is going through -- and only one of many agents: our actions and their effects (CO2-induced global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation etc etc) complement or counteract other forces like vulcanism, magnetic pole movement, astronomical precession, "natural" elements of global warming, and so on. The earth wants and needs to change, it is an important moment for her, and we are called, forced, to participate.

Our role in these changes includes a real, though limited and usually over-rated, element of free will -- we can do more or less, better or worse things to help her achieve a new state of equilibrium. But we should not presume to know what she wants -- long ago, Nietszche said that above all we should never doubt the will of the earth, it is her will that counts and will be effective, not ours. Who knows, she may want, may need desertification, flooding, a warmer temperature, no more ice caps. Why not? Let's not be small-minded, just because it is inconvenient for us, one of her many ephemeral guests. Time and destiny gave her the Sahara where a rain forest grew for millions of years, it gave her ice ages and mass extinctions -- these are facts we view reluctantly or deny.

But, as a hypothetical example of our potential role, I would guess she probably does not want vast areas spoiled for eons by nuclear or chemical pollution. Or perhaps she does want some of her former fauna and flora preserved, at least certain parts of it. Here, in the few choices we can effectively make, as consciously as possible, is where our ability to help or hurt the earth begins and ends. The rest is up to her and higher forces of the universe. Whatever, we cannot hope to preserve her as she is, that would be titanic presumption, impossible, and in any case against her will. So what can we do?

Firstly, we should believe in her -- she is infinitely longer-lived, smarter and more powerful than us and in the end she has always been and will continue to be able to look after herself.

Secondly, we should try to understand what she wants and aid her according to our modest means -- this is tricky terrain, I know, and vulnerable to all sorts of self-serving justifications.

Thirdly, we should be realists rather than idealists, and learn to accept what we cannot save, adapt where there is no other choice. Or we will waste our energies defending the indefensible.

Lastly -- this is my priority -- we must act vigorously to ensure our own cultural and spiritual survival. For the first time, Man risks total destruction -- physical, cultural, and spiritual. His physical survival is hopefully part of the economic/ecological plan of the earth -- but who knows, the dinosaurs are now only fossils. But whether or not that survival is given in the long term, our medium term cultural survival and our spiritual survival above all is our own responsibility. Here we must act for ourselves. This is why my focus is first and foremost on perpetuity and preservation of individual and collective human heritage.

On cultural survival…. To paraphrase a favourite author of mine, ahistorical Man knows no peace; even his graves, like all his structures, are intended to last thirty years. But thirty year graves are no basis for cultural continuity and growth. For graves form the very soil of humanity -- we are humans because we create humus. And not organic humus, which every plant and animal does, but cultural humus, which only humans do to any significant degree. Clearing away graves after thirty years to replace them with others, removing entire cemeteries to build gas stations, parking lots or housing developments, or worst of all, not leaving any physical memorial at all by relying entirely on ash scattering, is exactly akin to the slash and burn agriculture of the Amazon -- the cultural humus that is beginning to be laid down is wiped out in one fell swoop and a basis for rich and sustained cultural diversity is precluded. Cultural desertification results. Graves (or memorial markers – cremation or burial is irrelevent IMHO, what matters is the memorial) preserve the past and thereby form the basis of culture. The longer they preserve that past, the better. The disappearance of our old cults of the dead announced the end of culture and history -- if they were to start again, culture could also take new root.

On spiritual survival… In our mundane titanic age, death and graves could become the most effective access to transcendence remaining to modern man: his religions are corrupted and no longer credible, his art has become abstract, fragmented and directionless, and to make things worse, he naively believes himself the new king of the universe, with even Great Nature at his feet. The only power that remains invincible, awesome, mysterious is death -- hence his exaggerated terror of it. But it is precisely in death's invincibility, in its true and enduring mystery, that a new spirituality could take root -- if, big IF, he is encouraged by cemeteries that are beautiful, that reflect transcendence, that inspire hope, that point in the direction of eternity. This requires a new vision of cemeteries and our death rituals.

Now finally I can close the circle and return to the topic of natural burials and cemeteries: I believe that part of a positive and workable new vision would be a conscious integration of Nature into the world of cemeteries and death rituals. Nature's eternal cycles, seasonal rebirth, unblemishable inner purity, immutable laws, and intrinsic beauty can all be powerful symbols of higher order, of hope and of transcendence for man. And, especially if the intention is genuine, the ecological aspect makes the movement very marketable, which, like it or not, is critical to its success.

I hope this has explained my angle on natural cemeteries, and I welcome personal correspondence from anyone who even partially shares this vision and would like to work to make it happen.

friese@attglobal.net

Thomas Friese

Funeral Directors Serving Both Green and Non-Green Families

2008-09-26T14:37:00.004-04:00

In a previous blog about eco-friendly funeral directors, "T" posts a question I suspect a number of funeral directors have been asking themselves as they look to cater to the growing green burial market: "Is it possible to offer both traditional embalming techniques for our traditional customers alongside green techniques for our 'green' customers?"

As far as I'm concerned, the answer to that is yes.

Since the publication of Grave Matters, I've welcomed funeral directors into the natural burial movement and encouraged them to add green goods and services to their General Price Lists. The arrangement, I've argued, benefits not just families and the environment, but funeral directors themselves.

Refrigerating remains, for one, reduces morticians' exposure to the toxic formaldehyde they'd otherwise be exposed to in the embalming room. Offering a wide array of handsome and affordable caskets made from cardboard, pine, willow and other readily biodegradable materials attracts the increasing number of families who say they are interested in a natural return to the elements (as is true of 43% of all Americans, according to once survey). Green is good for their bottom lines.

That said, I recognize that we're at the beginning of the green burial revolution. Converts are increasing in number but, at this point, perhaps not in large enough sizes to wholly support a funeral home that's green only. As a pure business matter, offering both green and modern funeral/burial services makes good financial sense. And that's just what many funeral homes have done.

What happens then? Well, I'm reminded of the comment that New Jersey funeral director Bob Prout made when talking about families' reactions to seeing the seagrass/willow/bamboo coffins sitting out in his casket display room. The families buy the metal caskets their loved ones requested but tell Bob they want the eco caskets for themselves, when their time comes.

After walking out of Ramsey Creek Preserve for the first time in the summer of 2003, I was convinced most people would ask to be laid to rest in that lush, living pine forest if they could only see it. I think the same can be said for most green burial strategies. If families come into T's funeral home to make arrangements for the typical, modern funeral but then see a willow casket or cloth shroud or learn that T will help them hold a funeral in their own home -- and at a lower cost -- I know what choice most of them will make.

Note on the photo above, which was taken by Penny Rhodes during the Pennsylvania Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Festival, in Kempton last week. This is the table where Penny, Greta Brown and Jenny Bingham set out information on home funerals and talked to countless people who stopped by. Penny, Greta and Jenny are home funeral practitioners who service families in southeastern Pennsylvania. Web: www.naturalundertaking.org

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Burial at Existing “Traditional” Cemeteries

2008-09-12T19:14:00.004-04:00

It's tempting to measure the growing interest in the green burial movement solely by the rise of new natural cemeteries around the country.

That number is impressive, for sure. When I first visited it back in 2003, Ramsey Creek was the only woodland cemetery in this country. Today, some dozen have joined its ranks, with at least another score in various stages of development.

One of them in Milton, Georgia, a rural hamlet north of Atlanta, gained an operating permit from the town planning commission just this week.

For my money, though, a truer indication of green burial's growth might come not from these new burial grounds but from the old ones. I can't trot out hard numbers, but I count at least a dozen traditional cemeteries that have recently begun allowing for green -- that is, vautless -- burial within their existing grounds. (These are in addition to the countless garden-variety cemeteries across the land that have never required a burial vault.)

Among them are California's Sebastopol Memorial Lawn, and Eternal Rest Memories Park in Dunedin, Florida. There are others in Temple, Texas, and Hillsboro, Oregon. Still more in South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Washington State.

Green burial is literally gaining ground there, and for good reason. As many readers have told me, establishing a green cemetery from scratch can mean very tough sledding. For starters, would-be green cemeterians must locate and purchase land, research state/county/municipal cemetery regulations, and move on to gain permits from government entities. Expensive bonds are sometimes required. A cemetery board must form and run a burial business.

Existing cemeteries have it much easier: they can simply decide to offer green burial and bypass all the hassles of starting from ground zero. After all, no law requires them to demand that families use burial vaults (though cemeteries often do, because vaults keep the ground from caving into graves when their wood coffins collapse). Traditional cemeteries can at a moment's notice decide to allow vaultless burial anywhere on their property or, with more work, create a separate, leafy section reserved for the kind of green burial more in keeping (in appearance anyway) with true natural burial grounds.

Recognizing those benefits, a number of eco burial enthusiasts are asking their hometown cemeteries to adopt policies that permit a natural return to the elements. Some cemeteries are responding. As more families request green burial services -- and as a more Ramsey Creeks crop up on the funereal landscape -- I suspect many, many more will follow suit.

Note: I took the photograph above of Pine Ridge Cemetery in Hancock, New Hampshire, a historic cemetery in the southwestern part of the state.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Funeral Costs: $7,323 and counting

2008-08-29T14:46:00.003-04:00

A couple of thoughts on today's announcement by the National Funeral Directors Association that the average cost of a standard funeral in America has risen to $7,323.

First. You'll pay more than that.
NFDA's figures are from 2006, when gas prices were in the enviable mid-$2.00/gallon range. With pump prices two years later just now backing down from nearly twice that amount – and this before Gustav makes landfall -- you can be sure you'll be shelling out more than $233 to have the funeral director retrieve the deceased from the hospital and drive it to his funeral home, or $251 for use of the gas-guzzling hearse. Same goes for almost every other item on that General Price List.

Second. Seven grand doesn't bring the dead to ground.
NFDA's figures include the cost of a vault, metal casket, and basic goods and services for a funeral only – not burial. Expect to pay thousands more for the cemetery plot, opening and closing of the grave, foundation for the headstone/marker, the headstone and market itself, and perpetual care fees, among others.

Third. Modern sendoffs are de facto pricey propositions.
Yes, funeral directors sell caskets at a steep mark-up from the wholesale price, sometimes by more than 300 percent. As does every other service operator, they pad their margins. That said, outfitting even the basic American funeral -- with its embalming chemicals, metal caskets, concrete burial vaults -- demands the inputs of vast amounts of resources that are bought with hard and plentiful dollars. Next time you're in Lowe's or Home Depot, do a quick price check on construction materials (and so much of modern memorialization is just that, a construction project). Have you seen how much concrete mix costs these days?

Fourth. Value depends on who's paying.
Is a modern funeral worth $7,000? That's up to the individual family to decide for itself. My purpose in writing Grave Matters was to present a fuller reckoning of the American Way of Death -- to present the costs not just to the pocketbook, but to the environment, the corpse, and even the health of the funeral director himself. If after reading my book a family still chooses to plunk down $7,000 for the modern send-off, they'll get no argument from me.

Fifth. Green funerals and burials can be expensive, too -- and be worth it.
By skipping the embalming, metal casket, burial vault and the other goods and services that fill out the funeral director's GPL, green burial is almost always a less expensive way to go. But not always, and not necessarily.

A highly biodegradable wicker coffin can set you back $3,000. A burial plot in a woodland ground can cost double what you'd pay at the local city cemetery. And be worth every penny. Your burial fees may not only push up a tree and renew the cycle of life that supports all of us, but they may also fund the preservation and ecological restoration of a piece of threatened wild. That expensive casket may not only encourage an earth-friendly, dust-to-dust return to the elements, but it may also employ workers in a good, green business. Less is more, runs the green mantra, but sometimes more really can be better.

Note: The music video above plays Iron and Wine's "Naked as We Came," a folksy anthem to cremation.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

The Newest Natural Cemeteries

2008-08-22T10:54:00.003-04:00

A greening continues to spread across the funereal landscape of North America.

In the last couple of months, some half dozen natural burial grounds have cropped up in this country, taking root on former farmland and cattle ranches, within unspoiled tracts of big wilds, and even inside the historic cemeteries near urban cores.

The latest additions:

Foxfield Preserve (Wilmot, Ohio)
Former farmland on 43-acres in northest Ohio that's being restored to original prairie and forest. Owned and operated by a non-profit nature center and land trust.

Galisteo Basin Preserve (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
A natural burial ground within a 13,000 permanently protected conservation area on a one-time cattle ranch.

White Eagle Memorial Preserve (Goldendale, Washington)
A 20-acre cemetery within 1300 acres of permanently protected oak and ponderosa forest, meadow and steppe on the edge of Rock Creek Canyon near the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

Steelmantown Cemetery (Tuckahoe, New Jersey)
E-mail: bixby17@msn.com
An active cemetery dating back to the 1700s where green burial has been practiced by default. Its one-acre grounds are overspread with oak, cedar and pine and border the Belle Plain State Forest.

Makemie Woods (Lanexa, Virginia)
The third Ecoeternity Forest in the U.S., which is sited within a hardwood forest between Richmond and Williamsburg. Burial of cremated remains only. Opens October 5.

The natural cemeteries join the existing green burial grounds I've reported on in Grave Matters and in this blog: Ramsey Creek (South Carolina), Honey Creek Woodlands (Georgia), Glendale (Florida), Cedar Brook (Maine), Rainbow's End (Maine), Greensprings (New York), and Ethician (TX). A score of others are in the planning stages.

This list does not include the growing number of existing cemeteries that are offering green burial within their grounds. More on those developments coming shortly.

Note: I'll be joining Joe Sehee (of the Green Burial Council), Karen van Vuuren (of Natural Transitions) and others at the first-ever green burial conference in Boulder, October 4. This promises to be an inspiring, informative and fun-filled event. Karen, who is organizing the event, is looking for participants and sponsors. For more information, click here.

Note Two: The photo above was taken at White Eagle Memorial Preserve.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Funeral Director Bob Prout Goes Green in New Jersey

2008-08-15T14:05:00.003-04:00

One of the more welcome developments in the green burial movement has been the willingness of some funeral directors to consider -- and in some cases, actually venture into -- green burial.

Perhaps the greenest of the bunch is Bob Prout. A third generation Prout funeral director, Bob runs Prout Funeral Home in Verona, New Jersey, an ex-urb of Manhattan. Bob made news two years ago after he'd installed solar panels on his funeral home (per the CNN clip above). The former Boy Scout (and current assistant Scout master) and livelong conservationist has more recently begun offering families green burial goods and services, from seagrass coffins to embalming-free viewings. His wife has even gotten into the act, sewing cloth shrouds by hand.

Bob's at the forefront of a new wave of funeral directors who "get" green burial and are working to help their families lay their dead to rest in more natural, personal ways.

I interviewed Bob not long ago to ask him about his solar panels, the green burials he has arranged, and what fellow funeral directors make of his ventures into the natural burial movement.

How did you come by your environmental ethic?
Conservation has always been second nature to me. I was brought up in Scouting, and safeguarding the natural resources we have is a mainstay of the Scouting movement. All through grade school and high school I worked in a garden center and thought I'd pursue a career in either landscape architecture or garden center management. In college I majored in horticulture. But after the first semester I realized that I enjoyed it but couldn't see myself doing it day in and day out.

What inspired you to install solar panels on your funeral home?
I've been interested in solar energy for more than thirty years. But the cost [of installing solar panels] was prohibitive and the technology wasn't there yet. What [made it feasible] were the incentives being offered by the New Jersey Clean Energy Program. When we installed the panels in the summer of 2005, I enclosed the solar inverter behind a glass viewing window in a former smoking room, and built in an educational display on sustainable and renewable energy. I invited local schools and Scouting groups, Rotary and Lion Clubs and science classes to come through the funeral home to see the display.

How did you learn about green burial?
The solar panels got a lot of notoriety. There were articles in the New York Times, the New Jersey Network News. Then we starting getting calls from people, saying, I see you have solar panels. Do you also do environmentally-sensitive funerals? I knew a little bit about the natural burial movement. I did some more research on it, learned about Greensprings Natural Cemetery (outside Ithaca, New York) and went to one of their open houses. It was a spectacular place, and what they were doing there was absolutely incredible.

I came back and started putting together natural burial packages. We now have packages for Greensprings Natural Cemetery and for Steelmantown [a new natural cemetery in Tuckahoe, New Jersey]. We also offer "greener" funeral options for existing cemeteries and work within the constraints of their requirements.

What's included in the package?
We either won't embalm or will embalm with gluteraldehyde or Aardbalm [two formaldehyde-free embalming solutions I'll write about in an upcoming blog]. We have sustainable caskets made from seagrass, wicker, bamboo and native pine. We also work with shrouded bodies and do home funerals. We'll work with families to meet whatever needs they have.

Some funeral directors have said green burial is a fad and, like most fads, will fade. Do you agree?
I don't think green burial is a fad. The funeral directors [who think it is] are probably the same ones who twenty-five years ago [mistakenly] thought that cremation urns were a fad.

I don't think green burial will become as popular as cremation or overcome traditional funerals. But I do think there's a growing movement that will certainly feel very comfortable with the concept of natural burial and the green funeral.

Have you handled any green burials?
I have made pre-arrangements for future natural burials at Greensprings and Steelmantown. I've handled more "green funerals" in existing traditional cemeteries, about one to one-and-a-half per month since the beginning of this year. That's because there are more people out there who want to be buried in family plots they own [at existing, traditional cemeteries] but want to do it as green as possible.

What do those green funerals entail?
In January I had a family that wanted to give their mother a green burial. We wrapped the woman in a shroud, placed her in a very simple pine box. The following day there was a gathering in the funeral home. There was no embalming, no viewing in this case, a closed casket. We went off to the church for a traditional funeral Mass and then buried her in the cemetery next to her husband. The cemetery did not require a concrete burial vault, so although she was buried in a traditional cemetery she had a natural burial.

I think you'll see more of those green funerals happen because older family members want to be buried in the plots they already have. As the Baby Boomers grow in number and choose for themselves, then you'll see more growth in the true natural burial concept [i.e., a natural burial in a true natural cemetery, ala Greensprings].

How do families react when they enter your casket display room and see your array of natural caskets?
A number of them have said, I'm [choosing a metal casket] because this is what Mom would want. Then they look at their spouse and say, "But when my time comes, I'd be more comfortable with something like this [natural casket]."

Why do you think some people are turning away from "traditional" funerals and to green funerals and burials?
The traditional funeral has become like some weddings. If you look at your watch and it's four o'clock you know they must be cutting the cake. If it's four-fifteen, they must be doing the garter bit.

Green burial offers families a personalized funeral. It offers them what they need at the time they need it. And a funeral director can't personalize a funeral by [simply] changing a cap panel or unscrewing a corner post. That's not personalization.

How have your fellow funeral directors reacted to your foray into green burial?
Some of the funeral directors who know me understand where I'm coming from. Some others think I'm a little off the bean. And that's all right. I'm not going to try to change their mentality, because some of these fellows are also trying to decide whether cremation is here to stay or not.

Any final comments?
The general public should understand that while some funeral directors are reluctant to change not all of them are Tom Fieldings [the modern funeral director I present in chapter one of Grave Matters]. We're not all totally stuck in the mud. As the funeral industry is educated to the concept of green burial, some funeral homes will start responding to the natural burial movement. It will take time. It's a different concept than what a lot of us funeral directors have been brought up with. To change what has been the norm through the course of a lifetime is going to take time.

You can reach Bob Prout at Prout Funeral Home, 370 Bloomfield Avenue, Verona, NJ 07044. Phone: 973-239-2060.

The Prout Funeral Home has been certified "green" by the Green Burial Council.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Enduring Grave Markers and Natural Cemeteries, Continued

2008-08-08T12:13:00.006-04:00

Returning to the debate about biodegradable grave markers sparked by Thomas Friese.

Thomas, in this reply to an earlier Grave Matters post, had argued that marking graves with such non-permanent memorials like trees, as some natural cemeteries have done, risked de-emphasizing the individuality, the importance of the deceased. A more enduring marker would, Thomas asserted, ensure that some memory of the dead would live on and that green burial wouldn't devolve into some kind of efficient, utilitarian means of body disposal.

A number of people checked in to comment on Thomas' post. One of the most thoughtful comes from Billy Campbell, founder of the Ramsey Creek Preserve, the first natural cemetery in the United States. I'm reposting his comments below.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

P.S. The photos of the markers here were taken during my visit to Ramsey Creek last fall.

From Billy Campbell:

Concerning the issues of conservation burial, memorials and memory.

I would like to reassure Thomas Friese that he is on the same page with many of us working on restoration ecology/natural burial. In 1996, when getting ready to launch Memorial Ecosystems, we hired a marketing company to do focus groups; these seemed to show that we would lose a significant number of our potential clients if we did not allow permanent markers. I thought that if we lost 20-40% of our potential clients, we were sacrificing a significant market share for aesthetic purity, and that allowing markers would not actually affect the ecological functionality of the projects. At the same time, I had found evidence that (at least in the Southern Appalachians and a number of other ecosystems) that forest/grassland floor stones might play important ecological roles and that human collection of these stones for building materials had actually degraded habitats for animals (including ants, which are keystone species in the southern Appalachians). Nicholas Albery of the UK's Natural Death Centre and I had an exchange about the idea-he stuck with the position that stones were bad, period.

We allow stones, but they must be in keeping with the geological context of the site, and we take great pains to ensure that the stones are "ecologically functional".

We were also looking at the idea of having what I called "life history archives" available on an information appliance that visitors could walk around with. I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal about an outfit in California (Hollywood Forever) that was already doing innovative work with what they called "Life Stories". A year or two later, I received a call from Joe Sehee (founder and director of the Green Burial Council), who was working with Tyler Cassity and Forever Enterprises at the time. It seemed like a natural-uniting Forever's technological expertise for life stories with our expertise with restoration, land selection, etc…..Unfortunately, things did not work out, to say the least. Still, Thomas is on the right track with his comments about integrating restoration with creative ways to remember.

Beyond the basic business objectives of not losing market share and basic ecological objectives of saving more land, it turns out that the relationship between effective restoration and memorialization might be deeper and more fundamental than generally recognized.

The quick version:

Bill Jordan, one of the founding fathers of modern restoration ecology, once said that land is not truly restored until we restore the ghosts. Not only the missing non-human ghosts (wolves, nearly extinct plants, etc.), but the ghosts of those humans that helped create or maintain many ecological niches, including areas like open prairie/meadows in the eastern US. Restoration ecology is "re-storying" the land as much as a technical pursuit. Without active human engagement over timescales that are several orders of magnitude beyond modern faddish attention spans, restoration attempts will fail. Restoration ecology is ultimately about people actively engaged with the landscape. The inspiration for our approach to conservation burial is the belief that one of the most powerful long-term tools for land conservation will be human ritual, and the assurance of the long term memory of people and their interaction with that landscape. This will require significant endowments, and the reliable, long-term archiving of biographical and ecological information much more detailed than that achievable with relatively anonymous, detached names and dates engraved in granite or bronze.

The longer version:

Restoration ecology has been criticized by both righteous environmentalists and "command and control" landscape architects as "mere gardening" or a dangerous distraction from real wildland preservation. Peter Del Tredici, writing in the Harvard Design Magazine (Spring/Summer 2004, "Neocreationism and the Illusion of Ecological Restoration") said: "Implicit in the proposals that call for the control and/or eradication of invasive species is the assumption that the native vegetation will return to dominance once the invasive is removed, thereby restoring the 'balance of nature.'" That's the theory. The reality is something else. Land managers and others who have to deal with the invasive problem on a daily basis know that often as not the old invasive comes back following eradication (reproducing from root sprouts or seeds), or else a new invader moves in to replace the old one. The only thing that seems to turn this dynamic around is cutting down the invasives, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species in the gaps where the invasives once were. After this, the sites require weeding of invasives for an indefinite number of years, at least until the natives are big enough to hold their ground without human assistance.

What's striking about this so-called restoration process is that it looks an awful lot like gardening, with its ongoing need for planting and weeding. Call it what you will, but anyone who has ever worked in the garden knows that planting and weeding are endless. So the question becomes: Is "landscape restoration" really just gardening dressed up with jargon to simulate ecology, or is it based on scientific theories with testable hypotheses? To put it another way: Can we put the invasive species genie back in the bottle, or are we looking at a future in which nature itself becomes a "cultivated entity?"

Tredici is wrong in stating that practitioners of restoration ecology believe that we are "restoring the balance of nature" -- defined as nature without humans, as he is wrong if he thinks he has discovered an embarrassing contradiction involving ecological restoration resembling gardening. A year before Tredici's essay in HDM, Bill Jordan, who coined the term "ecological restoration", and started the first scientific journal devoted to the subject, published a landmark book, The Sunflower Forest. Many of the ideas in the book had already been canvassed in Restoration and Management Notes (Later renamed Restoration Ecology). In it Jordan states: "Traditional forms of gardening, for example, are valuable in part because they provide a context for a creative engagement with the landscape at the level of the ecological community.

Ecological restoration, in contrast is valuable as a special form of gardening that is-or at least aims to be-explicitly noncreative with respect to objectives, neither improving on nature nor improvising on it but attempting, blankly, to copy it…..the value of the deliberately noncreative act as a stilling of the will, an expression of obedience and humility and the entrainment of consciousness to the gesture and movement of the other-an important element in religious practice-becomes clear. But this value is compromised or missed entirely so long as we insist only on the creative aspects of restoration and deny the commitment to noncreativity at its core."

Tredici cannot be blamed for hesitating to embrace a science that seems to put brilliant creatives like himself (a plant/horticultural/design specialist) in a role more akin to Irish monks copying ancient Greek texts than the Greeks that actually wrote them (although I strongly support including LSAs in large scale projects to help design the human stuff, including entrances, visitor centers, etc., to make it more interesting-this is worthy of another discussion). Others think that by working on restoration, we weaken the will to protect the last real wild areas ("we can always make more wetlands" as abused by the Bush administration).

The goal of restoration is not to develop a static, prettified simulacra or simulation of nature, but to (re)create a real, dynamic landscape that changes with time. At Fernwood Forever, the project in Marin, Tyler and company were selling "tree-spots", with the implication that the tree would be replaced with another tree if it died. The result will be more arboretum than nature preserve. Not that arboretums are bad, they just do not pass the muster as ecological restoration.

The point here is that successful restoration ecology will require the long term (many hundreds of years) involvement of human communities, something almost everyone agrees with. Jordan and others point out that North American landscapes have been affected by people for many millennia, and that human activities such as burning and clearing helped maintain niches just as beavers do, and the now extinct mega-fauna did. Yes, it is an awful lot like gardening…but more in the sense of ancient meadowlands in the UK, where the orchids and other relatively rare plants (and dependent invertebrates) depend on regular human mowing and hay-making.

The question is how do we establish durable, trans-generational links between human communities and "restoration landscapes"? It is true that we can never truly restore pre-Columbian ecological communities: many of the elements are gone, or are impractical to re-introduce except very locally (passenger pigeons, eastern wood buffalo, etc.). But restoring an "old growth" hardwood forest will by definition take a couple of hundred years; probably much longer in some situations.

A major challenge for restoration ecologists is the need to create endowments for properties scattered on a continental scale, while ensuring the long term political/community support for these projects.

In The Sunflower Forest, Jordan makes the case that human rituals and customs that link human and natural communities are essential for success. That is the case we are making, and it is very dependent on preserving memory. It is not about burying people anonymously without ritual or some tangible and accessible link to the physical memory of that person.

Intellectual foundations aside, the issue of what is an appropriate permanent marker is one that needs further discussion. For example, some cultures such as some Hispanic groups have traditionally decorated the graves with photos and other mementos. These decorations, while not in keeping with a wild aesthetic, probably do little to harm the local ecological community-while increasing the client-pool and cultural diversity of the project. Long term (over 100 years), it is unlikely that families will continue to keep us such displays. Might it be desirable in some situations to have a section of a conservation burial ground that allows more exuberant decoration-within limits?

BTW, the sweeping off of the rock on TV was a "set up" shot of a cremation scattering space-they put leaves on it for me to sweep off [From Mark: this is in response to a comment by Pete McQuillin about Billy sweeping off a grave stone at Ramsey Creek so the name could be read, in a Weather Channel segment on the Preserve]. Most of our markers are well above the surface to allow for critters under the rock. We also have a back up system with fixed reference markers entered into a GIS model and in a spread-sheet, with co-ordinates that enable us to quickly find even unmarked graves (some people do not want stones) with nothing more than a tape measure and compass. This requires far fewer markers, which can also be benches, the back corner of the chapel, etc.

Going Gentle into that Good Night

2008-07-25T13:14:00.005-04:00

Sometime after he was diagnosed with end-stage cancer of the pancreas, Michael Miller considered the kind of death he wanted.

His would not take place in the hospital, he vowed. A retired physician in his late 70s, Michael had seen too many patients with fatal illnesses spend their final days in the sterile, clinical environs of his onetime workplace, tubes jammed down their windpipes.

His death would also be under his own control. As far as he could, Michael intended to direct the course of his final exit, to ensure that it was gentle, humane and ultimately peaceful.

How Michael arranged for and carried out that considered death is the subject of Karen van Vuuren's poignant and powerful documentary, Dying Wish (2008, WordWise Productions).

Michael came upon that dying wish after turning up research indicating that it was possible to die with less pain -- and in some cases, with an even heightened sense of well being – by fasting, literally, to death. To show us that such a good death is both possible and largely painless (as well as legal), he invited Karen to record the fast that leads, thirteen days later, to his death.

A lifetime is wrapped up in that final fortnight of Karen's documentary. We see Michael recalling childhood events in the company of his siblings. Reading and flagging sections in a book on death and dying. Enjoying a last meal with his family. And as Michael becomes too weak to rise from his bed, we see him slip -- and that's the word, slip -- slowly into the coma that presages the end. Surrounded by his family, in his own home, in his own bed. As he'd wished and planned for.

Like the physician he was in life, Michael notes his vital signs to the end. He tells us of his increasingly dry mouth, of the ache in his back. He is our guide to the afterlife and, with much grace and courage, shows us that we can take our last steps without fear and in much peace.

For more information about Michael Miller, his fast and how to order DVD copies of Dying Wish, click here. DVDs are $19.99 each for individuals, between $49.99 and $89.99 for organizations.

Note: I'm on vacation next Friday. Back with a post on August 15.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Could Utility Trump Memorialization in a Green Burial?

2008-07-11T11:39:00.003-04:00

One of the more thoughtful comments to the Grave Matters blog came a couple of weeks ago from Thomas Friese.

Responding to my post about how some funeral directors have dismissed green burial as a mere fad, Thomas praises the green burial movement -- with this cautionary note: Natural return -- with its emphasis on restoration ecology, land preservation, and resource-sparing interment -- is certainly good for the environment. Yet, if the graves in natural cemeteries are marked only with trees, the green burial movement runs the risk of de-emphasizing the personhood, the individuality, the memory of the deceased. If that happens, Thomas writes, natural burial becomes a mere utilitarian and "nihilistic" mode of body disposal.

I have posted Thomas' comments in full below. I invite your responses. I'll return with mine in the coming weeks.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Note: The photo above was taken in on the ashes-only FriedWald in Germany (the subject of last week's blog).

From Thomas Friese:

I can't say enough about how positive I find the growing movement towards natural burials. Poisoning our mother earth with formaldehyde and filling her up with concrete and steel is entirely unjustified. As is poisoning her with mercury from our dental fillings and wasting so much fossil fuel by cremating our bodies. YET I need to mention a potentially nihilistic trend which I perceive in some aspects of the natural burial movement.

The thought was prompted by a recent reading of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose awful utopic vision seems to be coming true in many aspects. Among the negative developments for humanity in the brave new world, Huxley predicts the ultimately nihilistic attitude towards death. In the brave new world, only cremation exists. When people die, they are immediately transferred to a central crematorium, where they unceremoniously disappear in a puff of hot air. No funeral service, no mourning or sadness, no memorialization at all - people have been thoroughly conditioned from early childhood to altogether disregard death, see it as quite inconsequential, not worth a second thought. Indeed, the only significant emotion their conditioning leaves in them regarding death is that by being cremated, they will contribute to society via the fertilizer recovered from their body's cremation. That is, they will help grow plants. I quote:

"Why do the smoke stacks (of the cremetorium) have those balconies around them?" enquired Lenina.

"Phosphorous recovery", exclaimed Henry. "On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. Phosphorous used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated someone. Now they recover over ninety-eight percent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of 400 hundred tons of phosphorous every year from England alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing wholeheartedly in the achievement, as if it had been his own. "Fine to think that we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow."

We understand that in the Brave New World, the significance of death has been reduced to the amount of useful fertilizer returned to the environment, to a merely ecologically useful function.

To return to the natural burial movement now. We can only agree that land conservation, pollution reduction, energy conservation and tree planting are noble and necessary aims. And that conversely, preserving the material body is evidently NOT the point - only the ancient Egyptians and 20th century North Americans thought this at all relevent.

THE POINT IS that burials and funerals should never become ONLY about their utility to the earth's ecology and to the social collective. Eliminating our negative effects on the earth and collaterally conserving green space are only first steps in redressing the historical aberration that our modern death care has become. Then we need to return to the truly traditional aims of death care, those primary aims which have motivated people through the millenia: paying tribute to the existence and dignity of the individual; creating momento moris for the survivors; and testifying to hopes of transcendence and immortality in whatever form that takes for a particular people. Whether people are cremated or naturally buried, if no LASTING individual markers and no eternally protected and sacred burial sites are left, these three primary functions will not be served and the natural burial movement will have failed in its potential.

Which means that conserving green space by burying people there and then forgetting who those people are is insufficient. That only planting a tree as a grave marker, though it may serve the earth and thus society, is insufficient. Trees are among Man's oldest and most faithful friends and protectors, and the more we have the better - but trees die like humans, sometimes sometimes sooner, sometimes later. Thus they cannot be substitutes for lasting and individualized grave memorials.

Why do we think this is an either/or situation? We can have more trees, more protected green space AND lasting memorials and cemeteries. If "traditional" grave stones and cemeteries provoke aversion and morbidity in people today, let's change the way we memorialize - all sorts of appealing, meaningful AND natural alternatives might be created with artistic imagination and creative use of technology. After all, ancient burial sites that archeologists now uncover contain no plastic or concrete, only natural materials that have lasted thousands of years. Are we not capable - or worthy - of something equally lasting, beautiful, dignified and individual?

Or will we choose the way of the brave new world?

Thomas Friese

Ashes-only Cemetery Greens up German Funeral Practices

2008-07-04T18:04:00.006-04:00

Axel Baudach consecrated the second of his ashes-only woodland cemeteries in North America two weeks ago (the subject of last week's post). But the genesis of his EcoEternity concept takes root some two decades earlier, when Axel attended the funeral of his grandfather at a small cemetery in Germany.

The funeral and burial were in keeping with Protestant tradition in the northern part of his home country, says Axel, a former financier with Deutsche Bank who was born and raised in Berlin. The director of the funeral home, which Axel describes as "sad and dark and old," delivered the unembalmed, wood-casketed body to the cemetery chapel. There, a Lutheran pastor from the area gave a somewhat generic, 10-minute eulogy, based on a brief conversation beforehand with Axel's family.

After a few hymns and prayers, pallbearers hired by the funeral director carried the casket out to the church graveyard, a landscape of headstones where, says Axel, "we were reminded of death and dying wherever we went.” The coffined remains of Axel's grandfather were then lowered into the vaultless grave, a handful of sand tossed into the hole.

For a grieving Axel, the whole affair was impersonal, sterile and not at all celebratory of the man he knew in life. When it was over, he had one thought: "When I die, I don’t want this to happen to me."

Axel found a picture of a better way to go when, trolling the Internet shortly after the funeral, he stumbled upon a company in Switzerland that opened forestland in the Alpine country to the burial of ashes. Axel visited the founder, Ueli Sauter, and, soon afterward, transplanted the concept onto German soil. The first EcoEternity Forest – FriedWald, in German -- opened in November of 2001.

Axel sites his green cemeteries on parcels owned by federal, state and municipal governments in Germany. From them, he leases acreage that's both popular with German hikers and best suited for a cemetery ground (i.e., offering prime vistas and easy accessibility). A naturalist inventories and then marks with colored bands trees that families may select for grave sites. No plastic flowers or headstones are allowed. Trees may be tagged with small markers.

Keeping in mind his grandfather's mortician-directed funeral, Axel encourages families coming to his forests to take control of the funeral service themselves. And they have. Funerals in the German FriedWalds typically feature families reading, playing music, and carrying the urn into the woods themselves. "Very often families will open a bottle of wine or champagne and toast the deceased at their tree," he says. "The sound of glasses clinking in the forest is so moving. It's very emotional."

Axel's green, personal approach to burial has caught on in a big way with his fellow Germans. Today, EcoEternity manages some 30 memorial forests all over the country; another 150 similar projects, not overseen by Axel, are in operation as well. A recent newspaper poll found that a third of all Germans are considering the EcoEternity option for their final return. "That survey shows that funeral traditions in Germany are changing,” says Axel. "There's a need for our forest concept."

Axel is hoping for a similar welcome in the U.S. He opened the first EcoEternity Forest last fall in Loudon Country, Virginia. The Pocono Plateau, which opened two weeks ago, is the first of three planned for eastern Pennsylvania by the end of the year. Also in the works are projects in the Virginia tidewater region and in North Carolina.

Note: The photos above were taken in the German Friedwalds.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Cemetery for Cremated Remains Goes to Ground in Pennsylvania

2008-06-20T14:26:00.006-04:00

No natural cemetery on par with Ramsey Creek has taken root in Pennsylvania – at least not yet. Two days ago, though, a German company consecrated a three-acre woodland graveyard in the heart of the Pocono Mountains where cremated remains may be buried beneath select maple, beech, birch and other mature timbers that populate the EcoEternity Forest at Pocono Plateau.

"We're providing families with a green place where they can return the ashes of their loved ones,” says Axel Baudach, the founder of the German-based EcoEternity (“FriedWald” in German), which oversees some two dozen green cemeteries in his home country. When they do, families not only "help preserve a forest but establish a relationship to it that is not just about death but life."

As in Germany, the foresters who manage the Pocono Plateau have blazed walking trails through the new cemetery and identified trees suitable for urn burial, typically those that are mature, healthy and easily accessible. On the morning I trekked the grounds with Axel, scores of trees had been marked with blue bands (which you can see in the photo above), so families may easily spot approved urn sites when they tour the grounds, either at time of need or in advance.

When families are ready to inter their "ashes," foresters trench out a hole roughly a foot deep along the drip line of the tree, creating an opening broad enough to accommodate the biodegradable urn the company supplies families. The urn, which is pressed from cornstarch, will quickly degrade. Families may bury their own urn (as long as it will biodegrade) or simply pour ashes into the gravesite. Trees can be marked with simple plaques the size of an index card; no headstones or groundmarkers are allowed.

When I asked Axel how many sets of ashes a single tree can accommodate, he strode the drip line that circumscribes one of the banded trees, each of his fifteen strides, he told me, marking a potential urn site. Burials are offered in three packages. Up to fifteen urns may be buried around a "Family Reunion Tree" ($4,500 for all burials). Groups of friends (up to fifteen) -- neighbors, parishioners, or, as Axel said, members of the local soccer or bowling team -- can find final rest under a "Friendship Tree" ($4,500). An individual can choose to add her urn to a dozen-plus others that surround a "Community Tree" ($500). The cost of interment is an additional $250 (with a ceremony families can plan and conduct themselves) or $175 (without ceremony).

Unlike some other green cemetery schemes, EcoEternity does not own its forest -- and, thus, its cemetery and graves. The company leases those three acres from the Methodist Church, which owns some 750 acres here and on them runs various camps and retreats. Axel's group leases the cemetery property for 100 years; he can't say for sure what will happen to the cemetery when the lease is up, although, certainly, the Church is a good and solvent owner, which is committed to the long-term stewardship of the land. Also, along those lines, the Church agrees to hew to certain eco-friendly practices in its contract with EcoEternity, including not logging the land. A forester, who manages the cemetery property, is hired and paid by EcoEternity.

As Axel sees it, his cemetery scheme is "a win-win for everybody." Families gain a natural environment for that final rest and a welcome wood to visit in life. The church gains some revenue from very gentle use of its land (and one that's in keeping with a Christian dust-to-dust philosophy of life and death). EcoEternity grows a green burial movement that speaks to the needs of families who choose cremation and earns a bit of green in the process.

Axel admits that translating his German-born approach to burial to an American audience presents special challenges. He finds, for one, that his company has to "explain what a forest is" to a trans-Atlantic public that's more estranged from the natural world than are its German counterparts, who tend to regularly venture into their forests for hikes and walks. "We need to motivate Americans to come into their forests and see them for the peaceful places they are." Axel has also been struck by the number of Americans who hold onto their loved ones ashes at home, with no plan to return them to earth or sea. He's hoping his woodland cemeteries will inspire them to plant those ashes in a more natural home.

In the next post, we'll look at modern German funeral and burial practices and why Axel chose to move beyond them. We'll also investigate how the EcoEternity Forest compares to the natural cemeteries springing up in this country.

I'm on the road next week, giving a presentation on green burial at the biannual conference of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in Seattle. Back with a post on July 4th.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Finding the Green Cemetery Coming to You

2008-06-13T13:55:00.002-04:00

Ramsey Creek Preserve was the lone natural cemetery in this country when I began reporting on the green burial movement almost a decade ago. Now there are ten, and like prices at the gas pump, that number is headed inexorably upward.

Just look at the list below.

Here, by state, are the efforts I know about to grow green cemeteries throughout North America. They’re in various stages of development. Some are poised to open; others are still in the exploratory phase. All involve folks who are passionate about creating space for a sensible, natural return to the elements in their own corner of the planet.

Want to know more? Want to join their efforts? Beam me up an e-mail -- mark@gravematters.us -- and I’ll put you in touch with the forces that are driving your project of interest.

Next week: I'll report on a company that's opening woodland cemeteries that allow for the burial of cremated remains only.

The photo above is the ultimate in memento mori. How could you forget your mortality with this image wallpapered onto your living room ceiling?

California
• Humboldt

Colorado
• Denver area

Connecticut
• Northwest part of state

Georgia
• Central Georgia
• Milton

Hawaii
• Maui

Illinois
• Southern Illinois

Indiana
• Bloomington
• Northeast Indiana (greater Chicago area)
• Indianapolis

Iowa
• Cedar Rapids

Kansas
• Lawrence

Kentucky
• Lexington
• Winchester

Michigan
• Ann Arbor
• Detroit area
• Lansing area

Minnesota
• Minneapolis

Missouri
• Rocheport

New Hampshire
• Monadnock region

New Mexico
• Santa Fe

New York
• Tarrytown
• Hudson Valley area

Ohio
• Cleveland
• Cincinatti

Oregon
• Portland
• Eugene

Pennsylvania
• Lehigh Valley
• Philadelphia

Texas
• Central Texas
• Houston
• Dallas
• Austin
• Big Bend

Virginia
• Roanoke
• Culpeper

Wisconsin
• Milwaukee
• Barneveld

Wyoming

In Canada:
• Vancouver Island
• Paisley
• Nova Scotia

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Mary Tyler Moore Gets Eulogy Right

2008-06-06T12:30:00.002-04:00

As I listened to the funeral director offer bromides about the brother of an elderly friend at the wake I attended this week, I found myself thinking -- inexplicably -- about the "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of the late, lamented Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Chuckles is the clown who appears on the news show Mary writes for in her eponymous sitcom. In this famous episode from 1975, Lou Grant tells the newsroom that Chuckles, outfitted as Peter Peanut in the city parade, is killed by a rogue elephant that "tried to shell him." The clip above is from Chuckles' service at the funeral home (whose slumber room of thirty-plus years ago, a dead ringer for the one I sat in yesterday, suggests that funerary décor never goes out of style).

Moore's famous segment is both hysterical and poignant. It came to mind, I think, because its fictional pastor manages to do what my director hadn't: capture in brief the humanity, the essence of the deceased. In this case, Chuckles' pastor moves one mourner to both laughter and tears, those perfect expressions of celebration and loss.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Note to Funeral Industry: Green Burial No Mere Fad

2008-05-30T11:27:00.002-04:00

A reporter I spoke to recently told me a funeral director had said that green burial was just a "fad" and, like most fads, would fade away soon enough. Changes to American funeral traditions come slow and hard, he'd argued, citing the history of cremation, which is only now catching fire with the American public a hundred-plus years after its introduction. As evidence of green burial's limited appeal, the director said that no family he'd worked with had ever requested one.

I've heard a number of funeral directors dismiss green burial with similar arguments. But, as I told this reporter, I'm quite sure they're whistling past the graveyard. Based on my research and travels into the green burial underground that's beginning to surface in this country, I believe natural burial will not only change our funeral practices but do so even faster than many advocates had thought possible.

The demographics tilt too strongly in its favor, for one. Embracing and driving the green burial movement are the Baby Boomers. Those 78 million Americans born in the two decades following the end of World War II ushered in the first Earth Day and natural childbirth; they wrote their own wedding vows and nurtured the organic food revolution. As the leading edge of the Boomer generation now approaches retirement and begins to consider the Great Hereafter, there's every reason to believe it will bring -- and is bringing -- that same do-it-yourself, pro-environment mindset to bear on end of life issues. And unlike their parents and grandparents, Baby Boomers will be more than happy to look outside the box when death comes calling.

Green burial also makes too much sense not to appeal. While niched in the popular press as an eco phenomenon that speaks mostly to off-griders and Sierra Clubers, a natural return embraces broader, old-fashioned American values that continue to hold sway with a large swath of this country. Like thrift and simplicity, a love of family, a desire to do it yourself, a respect for tradition. Yes, green burial moves environmentalists because it's good for the planet, but failing to see its wider appeal -- as some funeral director have -- is to shortchange the movement. I'd not had that insight myself until I interviewed an 87-year-old retired meatpacker and Iowa farmer named Ed McKenna, who told me that he'd wrapped his unembalmed wife in a family quilt and buried her in a plain pine box, because it seemed "the most logical thing in the world to do." As more of us see that what constitutes "green" burial is merely "sensible" burial, a natural return will go mainstream.

As for cremation, its acceptance was slowed by many factors that don't much apply to green burial. The Holy See's glacial and begrudging approval of cremation delayed its adoption by American Catholics for the better part of a century; cremation is largely anathema to members of the Jewish faith (particularly conservatives), given their preference for burial and fresh memories of the Holocaust. Green burial, by contrast, suffers little from such prejudice.

So, while it is true that the funeral director my reporter interviewed may not have been asked to perform a green burial, I can only say: it won't be long.

The photo above shows the skyline of Seattle, Washington, site of this year's annual conference of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (June 26 - 28). This national nation profit, and its many affiliates across the country, is dedicated to helping families arrange sensible, low-cost and meaningful funerals and burials. This conference, at which I'll be speaking, offers a tremendous opportunity to learn about a range of funeral issues and strategies. Deadline for registration has been extended to tomorrow, May 31.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Seeking Eternal, Green Repose in Redwood Country

2008-05-23T15:29:00.004-04:00

If you've got a piece of land in northern California that you'd like to donate to a good cause, Georgianna Wood wants to talk to you.

Georgianna is an environmental activist, administrator, and green burial enthusiast in Arcata who's spearheading an effort to site the first natural cemetery somewhere in this coastal redwood country. And what she needs most, at this point, is land.

Goodwill she's got, in spades. Local enthusiasm for dust-to-dust return is high here, which is not surprising, given Arcata's natural green leanings. This is the town, after all, that treats its waste water via marshland and elects Green Party candidates to city council. Environmental organizations flourish and are bullish on protecting area wilds, some of them redwood forests, from development and logging.

Even the regional officials Georgianna has spoken to about the green cemetery have been supportive of the concept. The Funeral Consumers Alliance of Humboldt, an active pro-consumer organization, has offered its support, as well. And the environs of northern California, with their rugged, bucolic lands hugging the coastline, couldn't be more inviting for that final rest.

Still, as Georgianna is finding, getting a green cemetery off -- and in -- the ground is no easy feat. There's no single template for getting it built, no one-size-fits all model to work from. The forces behind every existing natural cemetery have had to research their own state and local cemetery laws, navigate their individual bureaucratic channels, and, as Jim Wood and Beth Collins discovered in their struggle to launch Summerland Natural Cemetery in central Georgia (as we saw in last week’s blog post), deal with the neighbors. Among other challenges.

Georgianna's efforts are, thus, local in nature. But they're also instructive to those looking to start a natural cemetery in their own backyards. Here's what she has done and is doing in northern California:

• Forming a team. After investigating cemetery laws and requirements on her own, Georgiana enlisted the help of a former publisher (and kayaking enthusiast) to shoulder the load.

• Seeking alliances. She has contacted local land trusts and conservation/environmental organizations, and reached out to the FCA of Humboldt. These organizations could offer funding, (wo)man power, and services. Their members are also those mostly likely to put a green cemetery to good use, for themselves or family members.

• Meeting with the State Cemetery and Funeral Board. To see if any green cemetery she starts would need to be licensed and, if so, how arrangements to do that need to be made.

• Scouting out land. Georgianna would prefer to partner with a land-owner rather than purchase land herself (for cost reasons, mostly). One of the options she's looking into involves approaching state park officials to talk about the feasibility of establishing a green cemetery on state land. That approach is compelling, offering a win-win, for the state (which would gain a unique funding mechanism: the fees from burials) and locals (who could find final rest in local lands).

That said, Georianna would be happy to hear from anyone in northern California who has land and is looking to preserve it. She's got just the plan for it.

Contact Georgianna at: curiousgeorgianna@gmail.com

In an upcoming blog, we'll look at how other would-be cemetery builders are hiring outside green burial experts to help them get it done.

The photo above of a redwood forest just north of Arcata I took during my visit with FCA Humboldt last month.

Mark Harris, author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Georgia's Second Green Cemetery Offers Lessons in Getting it Built

2008-05-16T10:46:00.007-04:00

Families in central Georgia can soon choose to rest in eternal, green repose in their own region, thanks to planning and zoning commissioners who last month permitted the siting of the Summerland Natural Cemetery in Macon.

That's good news for families and the environment, of course -- but it almost didn't happen. The proposal for Summerland passed by a single vote, and that after months of multiple meetings, a deferred decision and the protest of some local dissenters who vowed to continue the fight against green goodnights taking place in this rural corner of Bibb County.

So, what happened to make such a good idea seem like such a bad one? As the founders of Summerland tell it, ignorance of what green burial is (and is not) -- and the advocates' lacking attempts to explain it -- played big roles and offer valuable insights to would-be natural cemetery builders.

First, some history. In the fall of 2007, Beth Collins and Jim Wood bought a 58-acre pine forest at the far eastern edge of Macon. Their goals were worthy: save local land from development, provide a place where people can reconnect with the natural world, and create a green cemetery on the property.

The agricultural zone in which Summerland rests allows for cemeteries but only with a special permit from the planning and zoning commission. And so Jim and Beth began the long application process, which included creating a business plan, surveying and mapping the land and, in the process, and piling up the fees. They even contacted some neighboring property owners, none of whom disapproved of the plan.

The day before the commission was to consider the Summerland petition, an article about the proposed "green cemetery" appeared in the Macon newspaper. Half a dozen neighbors who lived along the property where it crosses into the next county (whom Jim and Beth hadn't reached), arrived at the meeting angry and up in arms against the plan. Some argued that the cemetery would lower their property values; others found the green burial concept "repulsive" and contrary to their religious beliefs. Many of the opponents worried that rainfall filtering through gravesites would carry contaminants from corpses into underground wells that supplied their drinking water. The commissioners deferred their vote pending further investigation of the groundwater issue.

Faced with opposition they hadn't expected, Beth met with discontented neighbors to better explain the concept of green burial, while Jim dug into cemetery research. Trolling the Internet, he turned up published studies on cemeteries, like those by Australian geologist Boyd Dent, which, in this case, showed little cause for concern about groundwater contamination. Environmental/health officials and local drillers Jim interviewed concurred, particularly given the cemetery's hilltop location (which encourages the runoff of water) and long distance from both the water table and private wells. Still, to make sure contamination weren't a problem, he and Beth decided to limit burials to 75 per acre on ten acres of their highest ground (down from 300 burials on 25 acres) and to increase buffer areas between gravesites and both roads and neighboring wells.

And then went back to the commission. The vote at an April 14th meeting, in which one commissioner was absent, was deadlocked. A full commission met two weeks later and, with little evidence that groundwater contamination was an issue, granted Summerland its permit.

I talked to Jim at a home funeral conference earlier this year and have since corresponded with him and Beth. They're obviously pleased with the commission vote, but also believe their somewhat tortuous route to approval offers useful lessons for others looking to start green cemeteries in their own towns:

1) Educate first. Beth found that the much of the opposition to Summerland came from people who didn't understand the green burial concept. A presentation on green burial -- with pictures of existing sites and of actual burials, with some history showing that what we call green burial is really little more than a return to long tradition in this country -- might have brought many of them around.

2) Master the science. When neighbors voiced concerns about groundwater contamination from graves at that first meeting, the Summerland group had little evidence on hand to show that their site posed no such threat. Jim's subsequent research (much of it gained from local experts) helped turn the commission vote in his favor.

3) Meet the neighbors. Their understanding and, if possible, cooperation would have gone a long way to not just gaining favor with officials but with the very families who may one day want to pursue a green burial.

With the commission vote behind them, Beth and Jim are moving ahead to transform their forest into a natural cemetery. At the moment, they’re looking to apply for a cemetery license from the state board, develop a landscape plan (including a survey of the ground's native plantings), clear trails and establish policies and guidelines. They hope to open the land to burial next year. We'll follow their progress in this space.

Note: If you’re interested subscribing to the Grave Matters blog, with its (mostly!) Friday post, you can do so via the link at the foot of this page.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Catching Up

2008-04-26T02:10:00.000-04:00

I'm en route to northern California, where I'll be speaking at the annual meeting of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Humboldt. I'll report back on efforts underway in area to start a green cemetery.

In the meantime, a couple of updates:

A green burial ground opens in Maine.
I just heard from Ernie Marriner, a board member of Rainbow's End, a natural cemetery (pictured above) that takes root on a fourteen acre meadow- and pineland just south of Bangor, Maine (see my November 30th blog post of last year for more information). The board that operates Rainbow's End had last year gained approval from the state to run a cemetery but had held off on opening the ground to burial until the IRS had granted it non-profit, tax-exempt status. Ernie wrote to say that they'd gained the approval a couple of weeks ago and opened for business this past Monday, April 21.

This is the second natural cemetery in Maine. As I reported in this December 14th blog entry, Peter McHugh launched Cedar Brook, a three-acre woodland cemetery within a larger pine forest some 30 miles due west of Portland, back in the early fall of 2007.

A documentary on one man's peaceful, controlled death.
I shared a ride back from the recent, 10-year celebration of the home funeral organization Crossings with Karen van Vuuren. Karen is the founder of Natural Transitions, a non-profit group that offers home funeral education and assistance to families in the Boulder, Colorado, area. In the course of our conversation, Karen told me about Michael Miller, a retired surgeon in the area who was dying of cancer. Michael, who didn't want to die in the hospital, had decided to halt his intake of fluids and foods in an effort to induce and control his own gentle death, in his own home, and had asked Karen to document his remarkable journey to educate those he'd leave behind.

Michael died peacefully, as he'd wished, on the thirteenth day of his fast. Karen tells the story of his final parting in her new documentary film, Dying Wish. I'll report on the documentary shortly, but those of you who live in Boulder can get a sneak preview at the film's premier, on May 8 in the Normad Theatre, at 7:30. (For more information, call 303-245-4866, or e-mail dyingwishmedia@mac.com). The film, and other end of life resources, will soon be available at: www.dyingwishmedia.com.

Funeral directors and formaldehyde.
More evidence that formaldehyde, a major ingredient in most embalming fluids, is hazardous to funeral directors. A new Harvard study shows that people who are exposed to formaldehyde are at greater risk of developing amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. ALS, for which there is no cure, is a degenerative condition that damages nerve cells and leads to paralysis.

The Harvard researchers found that exposure to formaldehyde, which the EPA declared a probable human carcinogen in 1987, increases one's risk of ALS by 34%. Longtime funeral directors, who regularly handle the chemical, would seem to be at particular risk. The study reported that workers who were exposed to formaldehyde for more than ten years were four times more likely to develop ALS.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

An Interview with Joe Sehee

2008-04-18T13:46:00.000-04:00

With the exception of Billy and Kimberley Campbell, no one has done more to advance the cause of green burial in this country than Joe Sehee.

Joe's the executive director of the Green Burial Council, a non-profit organization based in Santa Fe that's both promoting natural burial and keeping it honest. To that end, the Council has established standards that cemeteries must meet in order to be considered true green and will soon release similar standards for crematories and burial products, including caskets.

In last week's post, we looked at the Council's new certification program for funeral homes.

What I like most about the Council's work, and this program in particular, is that it welcomes the participation of the funeral industry in the green burial movement. Joe believes -- as I do -- that the mainstream funeral industry can play a role in the greening of the American Way of Death. Many of the directors I've met are sympathetic to the idea of the natural burial, after all; many more simply accept the fact that they'd be wise to offer the eco goods and services that families in their communities will increasingly request. Instead of demonizing the industry, the Council seeks to educate it in the ways of green burial and, in the process, help it grow.

The interview in the clip above comes compliments of Funeral Gurus, a Canadian web portal where funeral professionals can share ideas about and experiences in the dismal trade. It was taken at the recent annual convention of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA), where Joe was chairing a panel on "going green." Here, Joe talks about the Green Burial Council's work and how the funeral industry can join the movement to green up end of life practices.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Finding an Eco-Friendly Funeral Director

2008-04-11T22:29:00.000-04:00

Grave Matters is critical of many of our modern funeral customs, from the use of bulletproof metal caskets and concrete burial vaults to the practice of embalming (whose step-by-step procedure I lay bare, it all its glory, in chapter one).

The book's kinder to funeral directors. In large part, that's because I met too many caring, decent and dedicated directors in the course of my research to warrant a wholesale bashing of the dismal trade. Like the ones in Texas who waive their cremation fee because of the hassle a client family goes through to obtain a death certificate in the midst of holding a home funeral. Or the funeral director in my own hometown who, not knowing I was writing a book, told me that buying a fancy wood casket for a cremation was just a waste and that a simple card- or particleboard container more than sufficed.

To my surprise, frankly, I also turned up quite a number of funeral directors who approved of the green burial concept and could understand its appeal to the communities they served. The challenge, they told me, was to make the leaner, simpler sendoff work for bottom lines already pressured by the growing cremation rate, increased competition from big funeral firms, and the like. But, still, they were willing to consider it.

Since the book's publication last year, green burial has morphed into a mainstream phenomenon that even wary members of the funeral industry now recognize they can't ignore. Funeral directors who show up at my presentations tell me they're adding green burial goods and services to their General Price Lists in order to accommodate the growing, green demographic in deathcare (to wit: this 2007 survey by AARP). I take their information and direct families to them when I'm asked for referrals for earth-friendly funeral directors in the area.

Now, the Green Burial Council has made them even easier to find. A couple of weeks ago, the Council posted this list of funeral homes in nearly a dozen states across the United States that have earned the Council's eco-certification.

To gain a place on the list, the funeral homes must agree to provide families with "services/products that do not involve the use of toxins or materials that are not biodegradable." For families, that means they can walk into any Council-certified funeral home and know the directors there understand not only what green burial represents but how to accommodate it. More specifically, it indicates that the funeral home will use refrigeration or dry ice to preserve the deceased in lieu of embalming, and also offer caskets that break down readily in the environs of the grave.

To date, some fifty funeral homes have earned the Council's green seal of approval and a spot on the Approved Providers list. Joe Sehee, the executive director, tells me another hundred will soon join them.

The Council's certification is a clear win-win for all involved. For consumers, it directs them to the nearest eco- and family-friendly funeral home, with click of a mouse. For funeral directors, certification -- which runs $250 -- gains them families that are likely to employ their services.

Directors benefit in other ways, as well. Once they're certified, funeral directors get free technical assistance from the Council (on best techniques for using dry ice, for example) and access to on-line courses and webinars on green burial methods. And, of course, funeral homes can then advertise themselves as eco-friendly to their communities, getting a leg-up on the competition.

Next Friday's post: An interview with Joe Sehee.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Home Funeral Movement Gaining Momentum

2008-04-04T15:00:00.000-04:00

If I'd harbored any doubts about the viability of the home funeral movement in this country, last weekend's celebration of the Crossings organization's 10th anniversary would have laid them all to rest.

Crossings, as readers of Grave Matters know, is the Maryland-based non-profit that offers workshops that teach the basic skills of holding a home funeral -- how to wash and dress a body and lay it out for viewing in the deceased's own home, without the assistance of a funeral director. The group was founded by Beth Knox, who was inspired by the heartbreaking and, yet, affirming home funeral she conducted for her seven-year-old daughter, Alison.

Last weekend's event brought together the vast Crossings community, to share information, renew contacts and celebrate a decade's worth of good work. And what a community it has become. Some seventy people from around the country packed into the Seekers Church in Washington, D.C., for a day of presentations, networking and socializing. A number of them were home funeral "midwives" who'd taken Beth's workshops and now offer families in their own communities information and instruction on home funeral strategies -- and, in some cases, guide them through the actual washing and laying out of their deceased. More of them had come to simply gain advice on how start their own funeral group back home. A few, like the one widower who, though his grief, told of his wife's recent passing and home funeral, were there to attest to the very real, personal benefits that accrue when we take care of our own at death.

For me, the event showed that the home funeral, which I'd once thought an intriguing but mere historical phenomenon, was in fact a viable practice that was gaining adherents and traction in our own time.

And for good reason. One of the speakers last week was Nancy Poer, author of Living Into Dying (White Feather Publishing). Nancy told the story of a mother whose eight-month-old daughter had died in the hospital, in her mother’s arms. When the time came to hand the infant to the medical staff, the mother, Nancy said, "just did not want to leave her baby" in that cold place, in the company of strangers. A tug of war ensued between the hospital and mother. Nancy got involved. Thanks to her, the father could later tell her, "We walked out of that hospital with our daughter in our arms" and had a funeral for her at home. That, Nancy told us at the Crossings event, "is why we do the work we do."

One of the results of the conference will be a directory of organizations and individuals that offer home funeral services in their communities. I'm not sure when that list will be available. In the meantime, if you're looking for information on or help with a home funeral, you can consult this list, which was just compiled by the Crossings Care Circle of Austin, Texas.

Mark Harris,
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Update on Home Funerals, to Come

2008-03-28T09:59:00.000-04:00

I'm on the road to Washington, D.C., where I'll be speaking at the 10th anniversary celebration of Crossings: Caring for Your Own at Death. Readers of Grave Matters will remember its founder, Beth Knox, the mother who holds a home funeral for her seven-year-old daughter following an automobile accident. It's Beth's heartbreaking and affirming story that inspired me to include a chapter on home funerals in the book. I'll report on the celebration and on developments in the home funeral movement when I return.

In the meantime, those of you who have followed our discussion here on the merits of new eco caskets that are showing up in modern-day coffin shops might enjoy this short clip on the topic, from American Public Media's radio show, Marketplace.

The photo above was taken at one of Beth Knox's workshops, in which she teaches the basics of holding a home funeral.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Better to Expire at Home

2008-03-14T14:13:00.000-04:00

For my family's sake, I hope I don't expire in any of our local hospitals. If I do, there's no saying if my wife and daughters will be able to handle my final affairs themselves.

That's the gist of what I learned when I called around to hospitals in my area. My question to the spokespersons at each of them was straightforward: would my family be able to take control of my remains -- that is, remove and transport them home or to the crematory or cemetery directly -- were I to die on hospital premises?

The answer? I certainly wish I knew.

One representative said she'd never heard of any family making such a request; another said she'd look into the question and get back (but never did). None of them, in fact, knew what hospital policy was in this case or if one even existed. All, I'm sure, wrote me off as a crackpot (a designation that, as an environmental journalist, I'm all too familiar with).

I'd called the hospitals to help fill out a "final affairs" packet I've been assembling for my family (more on this in future blogs). Planning one's own eventual funeral is always a good idea, for obvious reasons. Doing that for any kind of natural return, particularly one that bypasses the funeral director, is even more important, because families must rely on their own, limited knowledge to pull it off. I figured any information I could provide while still vertical -- i.e., a copy of the hospital policy, the name of representatives I spoke with -- would educate my family about its rights when death came calling, embolden them, perhaps, and, in the process, make the simple funeral/burial of my choice more likely to happen. Starting with getting me out of the hospital.

I knew that policy addressing the release of remains, when it exists at all, differs from hospital to hospital. Some permit families to retrieve remains only if the deceased had expressed such a wish in writing. Others only release corpses to licensed funeral directors.

Certainly, funeral directors remove bodies from hospitals in an efficient manner and know how to navigate the bureaucratic channels of post-deathcare -- a big plus for hospitals and families. But are funeral directors the only entities who may undertake that responsibility -- by law? Following my less than fruitful interactions with area hospitals, I've begun to consider this broader question: do hospitals have the legal right to deny families the opportunity to retrieve their own dead from hospital grounds?

I'll investigate this question in the coming weeks and report back.

The photograph that heads this blog was taken at Honey Creek Woodlands, a conservation burial ground for all faiths on the grounds of the 2,100-acre Monastery of the Holy Spirit, outside Atlanta. Slated to open next month, it's being developed and operated by Billy and Kimberley Campbell of Memorial Ecosystems. More on this newest and intriguing -- a Monastery! -- addition to the growing list of green cemeteries shortly.

Note: I'm out of town to celebrate Easter with family next week. My next blog entry will be on March 28.

Cremation: The Tour

2008-03-07T09:01:00.000-05:00

What impressed me most when I visited the crematory I profile in Grave Matters -- Philadelphia Crematories Incorporated (PCI) -- was the openness of owner Bill Sucharski and staff. Far from seeking to shield this reporter from the details of disposition by fire, Bill literally opened his doors to me, leading me on a tour of his spotless facility, answering my every question (multiple times and over repeated visits) and allowing me a look behind the scenes. It's the same tour he offers anyone who knocks on his door, because, as Bill told me, "We’re not doing anything we’re ashamed of."

You should demand a similar tour of any crematory you're considering engaging, says Bill. Until you do, here’s a limited preview, compliments of the History Channel, of what you can expect to see.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Keeping it Local Even in Death

2008-02-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

If you want to see a model of how we can survive -- and even thrive -- in an increasingly warming world, book a table at the White Dog Café.

Sprawling across three brownstones that front a narrow side street just west of center city Philadelphia, the White Dog serves up a hearty New American cuisine that has won over food critics and attracted a large and loyal clientel. But good eats alone aren't what bring patrons back for more. It's the White Dog's commitment to the region it calls home.

Every dish is quite literally a taste of southeast Pennsylvania.

The Big Juicy Burgers on the lunch menu come from grass-fed cows that graze on a small, family farm some 40 miles away. An Amish-area farm supplies the eggs (from free-range chicken) that fill out the Three Egg Omelette. The cheese in the beet salad starter comes compliments of goats gamboling in meadows just beyond the city limits; beers -- Stoudts, Sly Fox, Victory -- are native brewed.

The White Dog's regional outreach nourishes a local economy that's a win-win for all involved. The short distance from farm to plate is good for the environment, limiting the commute of gas-guzzling and carbon-spewing delivery transports. Area farmers gain reliable markets for their goods. The greater Philadelphia region benefits from financial transactions that recycle funds within their communities. The Café itself is able to offer fresh and usually organic fare that’s good for patrons, suppliers and its own bottom line.

The arrangement works for southeast Pennsylvania, and it can do so elsewhere. (To learn how other communities are doing just that and to see how you can join the effort, click on this link to the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). Local is the new organic, and, the way I see it, we'll have to start living much closer to home to have any chance of prospering in a rapidly changing environment.

So, what's the connection to green burial?

As the green burial movement gains traction, we'll see the rise of a market in "natural" funerary products, from coffins that biodegrade harmlessly and quickly in the environs of the grave to cloth shrouds with lowering straps stitched into the fabric. Most will prove better for the planet than the hermetically-sealed steel caskets that for now are still standard feature of modern burial. Others will turn out to be more green-washed than true green.

How to tell the difference?

First, figure out what's necessary. Edward Abbey's simple, desert burial (the subject of last week's post) reminds us that less is almost always better for the Earth. Mother Nature does green burial best when nothing stands in her way. Like compost, the body's decay happens. Our job, as Abbey said, is to just "get the hell out of the way" of the natural process.

When you decide to use coffins or shrouds or urns or other funeral/burial goods, try -- as the White Dog does -- to purchase those produced closest to home. In Grave Matters, I profile an octogenarian living in Iowa who buys a plain, pine box from a nearby carpenter. The arrangement worked to the benefit of buyer, seller, the economy of eastern Iowa and the planet.

The arrangement could have worked to even better advantage, certainly. The coffin's white pine, for example, was timbered in northern Minnesota, a good day's transport from its point of sale; the forest where the pine was felled, I believe, is not sustainably harvested. So, while sold locally, the coffin is in some deeper way not a completely home-grown or green product. (An issue, by the way, that some casket makers are addressing, a topic of a future post).

Perfection is a worthy goal. That doesn't mean we should necessarily shun natural funeral products that fall short of such high green standards (particularly, again, since the small "e"co good is likely world's better than the standard, mass-produced alternative). It does mean, however, that we should set high standards and encourage producers -- and ourselves -- to reach for them.

Keeping it local in death is a good place to start.

The photo above pictures the entrance of the White Dog Café. You’ll find more information on the White Dog’s commitment to local economies in this story I wrote many years ago for Hope magazine.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Edward Abbey: Green Burial’s First Modern Practitioner

2008-02-22T17:01:00.000-05:00

The opening of Ramsey Creek Preserve in the fall of 1998 may mark the genesis of the modern green burial movement in this country. But I prefer to start it a decade earlier, when friends of environmentalist and author Ed Abbey trucked his remains into the Arizona desert and then buried them, wrapped in nothing but a sleeping bag, under a pile of rocks.

The date was March 12, 1989.

As befitting a hard-bitten naturalist, Abbey's burial was a simple dust-to-dust (and illegal) affair -- no embalming, no coffin, not even a signed death certificate. An epitaph carved into nearby stone reflected, in brief, the contrarious character of the deceased: Edward Paul Abbey. 1927 - 1989. No Comment.

The term "green burial" wasn’t part of the lingua franca of alternative funerals at the time (at least not in this country). But that's just what Abbey's was -- and that's just the way he wanted it. Throughout his adult life, Abbey often mused about his future natural return. At one point, he told his friends that his remains should "help fertilize the growth of a cactus, or cliffrose, or sagebrush, or tree." Following the burial, just "pile a lot of rocks on top of me to keep the coyotes off," he directed them, "and for an epitaph write: No Comment."

Abbey saw no reason to circumvent Mother Nature in her final act. On the contrary, he believed there was every reason in the world to allow her to take over. As he told his friend and fellow journalist Ed Loeffler, who would eventually write the fine biography of Abbey whose jacket heads this blog:

"[After] the moment of death . . . we should get the hell out of the way, with our bodies decently planted in the earth to nourish other forms of life -- weeds, flowers, shrubs, trees, which support other forms of life, which support the ongoing human pageant -- the lives of our children."

I've been thinking about Abbey's remark -- and his singular green burial -- as we've debated the merits of the new eco-coffins that are appearing in this country.

The caskets are just the first of a slew of "natural" funerary products we can expect to see as the green burial movement grows and, eventually, changes the American Way of Death. Their arrival is mostly cause for celebration, because it offers planet-friendly alternatives to the industrial, non-biodegradable goods that have filled the showrooms of Any Funeral Home USA for better part of the last century. The best of them, like the Ecopod, have the potential not just to green up burial practices but to create and support the kind of local economy that's our strongest path to a more sustainable way of life (and, perhaps, our very survival in a warming world).

Why only "mostly" cause for celebration? Well, because of Abbey. His comments to Loeffler and his natural return to the desert solitaire years later remind us that the greenest of all burials is the most minimal. Literally in the end, green burial is not about products – be they coffins made from recycled paper or wood or bamboo or cardboard -- but their very absence. It's not the stuff we bring to a burial that makes it green, but what we leave out. Natural return, as our first modern advocate showed in his life and death, is a natural process that Mother Nature can do all by herself. Our job, as good stewards of the Earth, is to just get the hell out of her way.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Natural Return, Shown in Living Color

2008-02-15T19:58:00.000-05:00

The typical funeral home sendoff -- with the body chemically embalmed, laid out for view in the metal casket, and then bunkered in a concrete burial vault at the local cemetery -- has been standard practice in this country for the better part of a century now. "Modern" burial has been with us for so long ago, in fact, that it's hard for us Cyberagers to even envision, let alone recall, the more sensible, simple and natural returns that our not-too-distant ancestors followed as a matter of course when death came calling.

The clip below offers a visual resurrection of sorts of that old-time burial, in living color. The segment, from a KQED television show called Quest, follows -- and shows -- a couple of families that revive those early American funeral rites in our own time under the guise of "green" burial.

Given our recent discussion of eco coffins -- which we'll return to next week in this space -- it's interesting to note how the families here have transformed plain, inexpensive cardboard containers into handsome vehicles into the afterlife.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

How Green the Ecopod?

2008-02-08T21:39:00.000-05:00

A number of readers weighed in on my assessment back in January of the British-made Ecopod, the stylish but pricey coffin that's making its debut in this country. One of the most thoughtful, articulate, and passionate reactions came from Cynthia Beal, a green burial advocate who sells Ecopods and other funerary products in her Portland, Oregon, shop named the Natural Burial Company.

You can read Cynthia's full response to my blog post here. In brief, she defends the $3,000-plus sticker price of the Ecopod because, among other reasons, those dollars support every person involved in the production and delivery of a beautiful, handcrafted and earth-friendly piece of artwork, from artist to shopkeeper. "A low price in dollars is NEVER the best way to measure true cost," Cynthia writes. "[I]n fact, if you see something that's cheap, that's almost a sign that it has a whole host of externalized costs it's NOT accounting for," including environmental degradation, low wages for workers and the like. Those who can afford the Ecopod support good work with their purchase. Those with shallower pockets aren't out in the cold; they have their pick of other, more affordable and eco-friendly alternatives, from cardboard boxes to pine caskets.

Well, amen to that. Price may matter to the family pocketbook, but Cynthia is right: it shouldn't be the sole arbiter in gauging greenness. When it comes to the planet, sometimes more really can be better. Consider cemetery space. A plot at the local graveyard may go for half of the two thousand dollars that Ramsey Creek charges (mostly because regular cemeteries typically sell plots as loss leaders and make up the difference in vault sales and such). But the higher cost of eternal real estate at Ramsey Creek is simply worth it. Not only does the memorial preserve allow for the natural return of one's remains, but the actual cost of burial there also funds the preservation and restoration of ecologically significant land that's otherwise threatened by the bulldozer. The greater investment may exceed the reach of some families, but the investment is nonetheless one worth making. The same is true of the Ecopod, which, as I wrote in the January blog, is "certainly worth the greenbacks."

Cost isn't my beef with the Ecopod (and some of the other earth-friendly burial goods that are washing up on these shores from abroad, including British-made caskets of willow and bamboo coffins woven in China). It's provenance.

As far as I know, the Ecopod is manufactured solely in Great Britain. The short distance between the Ecopod's ARKA production plant in Brighton and the 200-plus natural cemeteries scattered throughout in the U.K. makes the Ecopod a high green vehicle to the afterlife for eco-conscious Brits. Not so for their American counterparts.

To reach them, ARKA must transport Ecopods thousands of carbon-spewing miles across the great pond of the Atlantic and, from there, possibly across the entire North American continent to its various points of sale. That trans-oceanic and -continental journey freights the otherwise eco-friendly Ecopod with a significant environmental drag that can't be dismissed in the name of aesthetics, particularly when the artwork itself is billed as earth-friendly. A family that spends its greenbacks for the lovely Ecopod certainly supports the manufacture of a good product and of good community. But until the Ecopod is produced closer to its final destination in this country, the plain Jane cardboard box, cloth shroud or simple pine casket would, in most cases, trump it in overall greenness.

That said, it's important to put reservations about the Ecopod into perspective. First, the British coffin's a better deal for the planet, its carbon footprint notwithstanding, than the U.S.- (and increasingly Mexican-) made metal casket that's standard issue in this country. Plus, the Ecopod's carbon footprint may be a temporary phenomenon. I understand that ARKA is considering setting up a manufacturing plant in North American, to service U.S and Canadian customers closer to where they live.

Cynthia Beal, a smart and dedicated environmentalist with a long history in the natural products industry, understands these arguments as well as anyone and is working to address them. One of the many compelling projects she's looking forward to launching involves planting willow trees in this country and then training artisans in local communities to weave the willow into fetching and readily biodegradable coffins. When that happens, Cynthia won't just be producing true green coffins; she'll have established the basis of the kind of truly sustainable economy that, I believe, is the only way we'll thrive in a warming age.

One note about cost and aesthetics. They don't always correlate. The $800 cherry coffin that heads this post is every bit as handsome as an Ecopod or willow or bamboo casket. Same for the cardboard coffin above -- grand total: $35 -- that two Texan women decorated for the grandmother whom they'd helped wake in her own home. Or, frankly, any of the cardboard coffins that children slop over with fat paint brushes. A frugal family that wants to send its loved one off in high, green style can do so on a penny pincher's budget.

So, when my time comes go ahead and "bury me beneath the willow," as the old bluegrass standard puts it and as Alison Krauss, below, sings it. But, please, lay me down in a simple cardboard coffin -- or pine box or cloth shroud. Save your money.

Natural Burialists: No Dying Breed

2008-02-01T15:13:00.000-05:00

What a difference a year makes. Since I last surveyed the green burial movement in a March blog, one new natural cemetery -- the Cedar Brook Burial Ground -- has taken root in southern Maine and another half dozen similar efforts are well underway, including those in Santa Fe (New Mexico), Macon and greater Atlanta (Georgia) and in the Bangor area (Maine). They join the exiting green cemeteries that have cropped up in South Carolina, New York, Texas, Florida and California.

More are on the way. My own tally below counts a score-plus of other groups and individuals who are working to get green graveyards off the ground in their areas. In some cases, they've secured and/or identified land; in others, they're gauging local interest, seeking board members and drafting bylaws. So far, I've heard or learned of efforts in the following states:

California
Humboldt County
Los Padres National Forest

Colorado
Denver area

Georgia
Central part of the state
Savannah

Hawaii
Maui

Illinois
Downstate

Indiana
Indianapolis area
Northwest part of the state (an hour outside Chicago)
Bloomington

Kentucky
Lexington

Maine
Orrington

Michigan
Detroit area

New Mexico
Santa Fe

New York
Hudson Valley

Ohio
Cleveland

Oregon
Portland
Eugene

Pennsylvania
Philadelphia area

Texas
Central part of the state

Virginia
Roanoke

Wyoming

In Canada
Ontario
British Columbia
Nova Scotia

I'm connecting readers who want to learn more about the green grave goings-on in their area. If you'd like to join those who are active in your area -- or if you just want to learn what they’re up to -- let me know. I'll forward the information I have, and, if you wish, send the group your contact information.

P.S. The photo above was taken at the Cedar Brook Burial Ground, in Limington, Maine.

Mark Harris, Author
Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Six Feet Under: Taking Green Burial to the Mainstream

2008-01-25T15:20:00.000-05:00

Like many expirations, the end of the HBO series Six Feet Under came all too soon and, to its huge base of mordant fans -- including this one -- with profound sadness.*

But not before taking one big, parting swing at the American Way of Death. In a near-to-last episode of the final season, director Alan Ball and his cast introduced the then-new concept of green burial to the great mainstream and, in the process, showed it to be a more personal, moving and natural alternative to the standard, funeral home affair.

I've long believed that Ball's fetching view of green burial, which aired on August 21, 2005, did more to sell the idea to the greater public than any newspaper story, newscast or magazine piece at the time. In large part, that's because of Ball's compelling script and of the character of Nate Fisher himself, the show's dazed, confused, but ultimately decent free-thinker who's laid to rest six feet under -- in the most natural of ways -- in the clip above, from episode 61.

* Fair warning: If you haven't watched Six Feet Under and plan to (as you should) read no further and skip the clip. Both give away the ending.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

The Ecopod: That's One Stylin' Coffin

2008-01-18T19:58:00.000-05:00

When I first conceived the idea for a book on natural burial, I intended to write a chapter on the cool and compostable coffins that visionary artisans across the globe were handcrafting from a leafy biomass of materials, like bamboo and sea grass, willow and plain old pine.

All of these alt.coffins proved worthy, planet-friendly substitutes to the cookie cutter, bullet-proof metal boxes of the standard American sendoff. But the most striking by far was -- and remains -- the Ecopod.

Pressed from old newspapers and molded into the shape of a seed pod, the Ecopod elevates coffin-making to high, green art. Not surprisingly, it's the brainchild -- the creation -- of an artist and one with wide-ranging interests in ecology, natural childbirth and ancient Egyptian death rituals to boot.

You don't have to tease out the nuance to see how those passions come together in the coffin that British Hazel Selina first crafted over a decade ago and more recently began manufacturing at her ARKA shop in Brighton.

Looking at the photograph of the Ecopod above, it's hard to image a more lovely transport to the Great Hereafter. All the better that it's fashioned from minimal and reused material and that in the environs of the grave quickly biodegrades, speeding its lone passenger's return to the elements. What a way to go. If the fourcorner steel casket was our grandparents' Cadillac to the Life Eternal, the Ecopod is surely the hybrid drive of a great last ride in the Cyberage -- but with Mini-Cooper styling.

So, why didn't I write about it in Grave Matters instead of the carpenter-built pine box? Among other reasons, I decided early to focus on the natural burial movement in this country and, at the time, Ecopods were only made and almost exclusively purchased in the U.K. and, eventually, parts of Europe. I thought briefly about trying to locate a U.S. family that had purchased Selina's funereal handiwork and had it shipped thousands of carbon-spewing miles across the Atlantic. But, really, could the burial it was used in -- even if it did take place in a woodland ground -- actually be considered "green"?

Price was another factor. I don't remember what ARKA was charging for Ecopods at the time of my research, but I recall that the sticker price was pretty steep, starting somewhere in the low thousands of dollars and zooming up, depending on the choice of lining and finish.

Don’t get me wrong: Selina's coffin is certainly worth the greenbacks. The Ecopod offers both an earth-friendly and stylish way to go, particularly when compared to the clunky, resource-heavy alternatives that fill out the casket display room of almost Any Funeral Home USA. Still, the high price seemed at the time of my research to be at odds with the more conserving and often frugal ethic of the families I was interviewing for the book and, to a certain extent, with the ethic of a large segment of the green burial movement. When choosing caskets, these families were finding more meaning in less -- less upholstery, less flash, less outlay of cash.

Not every natural burial enthusiast feels that way, of course. And for those who want to go out green and in high style -- and don't mind paying the fare -- the Ecopod offers the ride of, well, a lifetime.

That's never been truer that now. Ecopods are now for sale in this country, at shops in Portland, Oregon, and Boston. I also understand that ARKA is looking into establishing a manufacturing plant in North America, which would hugely reduce this sleek coffin's otherwise heavy carbon footprint for customers in the U.S. and Canada.

The Portland store I mention is proving to be a popular one-stop shop for natural death in the United States. We'll look at Cynthia Beal and her Natural Burial Company in an upcoming post.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Burial Goes Cartoon

2008-01-11T09:10:00.000-05:00

In the 1960s, brainy Brit and muckraker Jessica Mitford dubbed the U.S. a "society where the funeral industry got completely out of control." GOOD Magazine delivers the modern update, in this stomping, cartoon tour of the American Way of Death. Includes a side trip into the green -- and sometimes bizarre (ashes into pencil lead?) -- alternatives that are springing up to challenge it.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Green Burial: Proof It's on the Move

2008-01-04T12:29:00.000-05:00

Hardly a day passes without a story on green burial making headlines. Yesterday, CNN aired a segment; Monday, a lengthy article with photographs from a recent natural burial at Ramsey Creek ran in the newspaper that serves Pueblo, Colorado.

Growing coverage of the natural burial movement suggests what I've found in my own research and travels: that green burial has mainstream appeal and will, I believe, change funeral practices in our time. In part that's because natural burial isn't just about the environment, but, as I've argued in this blog and in the book, speaks to long-held American values -- of thrift, simplicity, a respect for tradition -- that continue to have widespread currency.

That has been my gut sense from the beginning. Now, a new AARP survey gives it some validity.

Conducted last May and published in November, AARP's "Funeral and Burial Planners Survey," found that nearly a quarter of all respondents said they were "interested" or "very interested" in an eco-friendly alternative to the standard, funeral home sendoff.

The percentage is remarkable given the movement's short, ten-year history in this country and the fact that it represents the most significant change to U.S. burial practices since the Civil War.

The vast majority -- 86% -- of the AARP respondents said they'd never heard of green burial. So, most who noted that the idea intrigued them had to rely on the definition their questioners offered: "green burial tries to leave the burial site as natural as possible -- such as using a biodegradable coffin or blanket. No embalming fluids or concrete vaults are used."

The definition is accurate as far as it goes, but it hardly does justice to natural return. There's no mention of the natural state of the burial ground itself (i.e., that it typically takes root in a woodland, meadow or nature preserve). The uninformed respondent probably doesn't see the hand-painted, personalized cardboard coffin or handsome pine casket in the survey's bland mention of the green burial's "biodegradable coffin." Some of them, perhaps many, probably don't believe that it's legal -- or even preferable -- to present a body for viewing without embalming it first.

A more encompassing definition of green burial would, I believe, have produced a much higher percentage of respondents in favor of natural burial. In fact, I'm sure that would happen now if AARP were to conduct that very same survey today, which would take in all the media stories on green burial – in USA Today, Chicago Tribune, CNN – that have appeared since AARP dialed out last May.

Note on the photo above. This was taken at Glendale Nature Preserve, a natural cemetery that sits on a 70-acre expanse of creeks, ponds and woods on the Florida Panhandle.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

A Jewish Casket Invites the Elements

2007-12-21T16:10:00.000-05:00

Did the carpenter who built this coffin bore holes into its base?

That's the question I had as members of the Portland, Maine, Jewish burial society wheeled the coffin above into the receiving paddock of a local funeral home, pulled off the protective wrapping, and invited me to take a look.

Orthodox Jews take a “dust to dust” view of burial, as advocated in that well-known verse in Genesis, and their coffins (when used at all) are thus crafted to allow for the ready decay of both the box and its occupant.

I'd seen plenty of pictures of Jewish coffins. This was my first look at a real one, which proved representative of the type. It had been fashioned from plain, pine boards and fastened without the use of any metal -- that is, non-biodegradable -- parts. The box itself was of a simple, plain make. No stain or varnish had been applied to the lumber; looping rope sufficed for handles.

The lid was split into two panels, which were attached to the body with wood dowels. When members of the society pulled out the dowels and lifted off the panels, they revealed the coffin's rough, unlined interior. There was no mattress or cushion to receive the body that would eventually reside here, no bedframe. This was clearly nothing more than a plain, pine box, a no-frills vehicle to quick decomposition.

I'd read in the course of my research that some Jewish coffin makers go one further for natural return: they drill holes into the bottom of their boxes to invite the elements, super-speeding the decay they'd already designed into their handiwork.

And the builder of this coffin, I saw as I looked inside it, had clearly done just that. If you look closely at the photograph above, you'll see the three holes he/she had bored into the center of the coffin base.

As the natural burial movement gains traction, it's beginning to offer families caskets fashioned from all kinds of eco-friendly materials, from cardboard to recycled paper mache. Most, if not all, are better for the planet than the sealed, metal caskets that are standard feature of the modern American funeral. Few, I would argue, are as truly green as this Jewish make above.

Back with a post on January 4th. Happy holidays.

Mark Harris
Author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

Cedar Brook: New England's First Natural Cemetery

2007-12-14T09:26:00.000-05:00

New Englanders seeking a natural return for their loved ones won't have to wait until Maine's Rainbow's End goes, ah, "live," this coming spring.

A new woodland cemetery in the southern part of Maine offers dust-to-dust, chemical-free burial in a verdant green right now.

Launched three months ago, the Cedar Brook Burial Ground takes root on a two-acre wood of mostly pine and hemlock in Limington, a rural hamlet some thirty miles due west of Portland. Within its borders sits the rock wall-enclosed Joshua Small Cemetery, a tiny, historic graveyard whose dozen burials date back to the early 1800s. Both new and old cemeteries are part of larger, 150-acre expanse of pine forest that is owned, and, at times, selectively cut, by Peter McHugh.

That's a lot of green. And Peter, a genial, 70-something jack-of-all-trades, wants to make sure it stays that way. "I was looking for a way to preserve the land from development," Peter told me on my recent swing through Maine in November, "and on the Internet I came upon this article about green burial and cemeteries."

The very idea of natural burial squared with what Peter calls his KIS philosophy of life: Keep It Simple. In fact, he'd already planned for his own basic burial on a small family plot he'd staked out next to the Joshua Small cemetery, as is allowed by state law. [Maine residents may legally establish family graveyards on no more than a quarter-acre of their private land as long as it's at least 413 feet from a public water source, no permit required.]

Peter saw that transforming a larger parcel of his holdings into a green cemetery would pay bigger dividends. It would not only accommodate other, non-family members who sought a greener way to go but, as the article suggested, also keep bulldozers from his land. A green cemetery would bring some changes to the landscape -- the appearance of engraved fieldstone among the pines -- but these changes were preferable to the alternatives. "If you have to have neighbors, the dead make awfully good ones," says Peter.

Peter investigated the legal requirements for non-family, private cemeteries this past summer and found few hurdles. No ordinances in the town of Limington address the issue. And, as Ellen Hills had found with Rainbow's End, the state of Maine's few requirements were easy to meet (see the Nov. 30 blog entry below). This past summer, Peter invested a couple of thousand dollars in a survey of the land and for some signage. In September, he sent his completed application for cemetery registration to the state Department of Health and Human Services. Within two weeks, his application for a private cemetery was approved.

Since opening Cedar Brook three months ago, Peter has had many inquires but no burials as of yet (although he wrote me just this week to say the first is imminent). As with other natural cemeteries, burials at Cedar Brook will occur in vaultless graves; coffins made from metal or treated wood are banned, embalmed remains are prohibited. Peter will supply a family with a smallish stone, collected on site, for use as a grave maker, at no charge.

Cost of burial is $800 per single site, $1,200 for two sites. The burial of a military veteran, of which Peter is one, runs $600.

In some natural cemeteries families are welcome to "open" – that is, dig out -- the grave themselves. When I asked Peter if he'd allow that at Cedar Brook, he chuckled. "You can’t put a toothpick into the ground there without hitting a rock," he says. "We'll dig them out with a backhoe." For that, Peter hires an independent contractor, who charges families an additional $500 ($700 in winter, when the ground is harder to work).

Mark Harris
author, Grave Matters (www.gravematters.us)

A Natural Cemetery Preserves a Small Green in Maine

2007-12-07T14:46:00.000-05:00

The fourteen acres of meadow and pine forest that hug the Penobscot River just south of Bangor, Maine, look as bucolic and unspoiled as they did when a school teacher named Charles Annable bought the land in 1921 and turned it into a natural retreat he called Rainbow's End.

Decades later, his daughter is making sure it stays that way -- by turning it into a natural cemetery.

"I was looking for a way to preserve my father's land after I died," a retired teacher in her mid 80's named Ellen Hills told me as we walked Rainbow's End on a bright autumn afternoon recently. The town she offered it to had no use for the additional property, a local nature conservancy told her they'd sell it. "And then I came across this article in AARP Magazine on Ramsey Creek Preserve and thought, 'That's just what I should do with Rainbow's End."

The first green cemetery in the United States, Ramsey Creek offers a simple, natural return to the elements on thirty-some acres of mostly pine forest in the South Carolina foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The AARP article touted the strategy's clear value to families -- its low cost, the opportunity for highly personal funerals, the ecological pluses of dust-to-dust interment, and the beauty of the final resting place itself.

But for Ellen, it was the potential benefit to landowners that appealed most. Ramsey Creek didn't just offer a green burial in a green locale; it provided a model for how to preserve good land like hers from the bulldozers. By transforming her property into a natural cemetery like Ramsey Creek, Ellen saw that she could forever put Rainbow's End off-limits to the developers who might someday turn it into a housing development or strip mall or water park. The strategy even provided a mechanism to fund the on-going preservation her land: the burial fees themselves.

As she explored the green cemetery concept, Ellen found no insurmountable legal roadblocks. The state of Maine, for one, allows for private cemeteries, as long as a site plan is submitted and the graveyard is located at a certain distance from nearby homes and drinking water supplies, among a few other requirements. Orrington, the town in which Ellen's property sits, also permits private cemeteries in rural zones such as Ellen's.

To get her cemetery off the ground, Ellen enlisted the help of the Funeral Consumers Alliance (FCA) of Maine, a pro-consumer group based in Auburn whose advocacy of simple, low-cost funerals squares with the ethics of green burial. After much discussion, the FCA became a major supporter of the project, assuming owner/operator status of Rainbow's End and agreeing to loan the cemetery up to $10,000.

Since that time, ownership of the land has passed to a non-profit corporation made up largely of Ellen and other landowners adjacent Rainbow's End. The corporation has drawn up a site plan, which deeds four acres of the property to the Hill family members (until their deaths) and establishes the remaining land as a cemetery. The group has also decided to funnel 25% to 30% of the cemetery income into an account for the perpetual upkeep of the property. The Orrington planning board reviewed the plans and granted its approval in August.

On the day of my visit to Rainbow's End in early November, its board of directors was discussing the cemetery fees (as I reported in last week’s blog) and considering arrangements for the opening and closing of graves, the use of a local carpenter to provide pine coffins, and the like.

The board secretary was in the process of submitting an application to the state for tax-exempt status. The board hopes that the application will gain approval sometime in early 2008 and that Rainbow's End will open for burials in the spring.

When it does, Maine families won’t have to travel out of state to find a final, green resting place.

Turns out Rainbow's End won't be their only choice. Two weeks before my visit with Ellen Hills, I learned that another landowner in the southern part of the state had recently opened the first natural cemetery not just in Maine but in all of New England.

We'll look at Cedar Brook next week.

Note on photos. The photo that heads this blog shows Ellen Hills at Rainbow's End. The one following pictures the site Ellen has roped off for her family's graves, including her own.

A Natural Cemetery Grows in Maine

2007-11-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

Add Maine to the small but growing list of states that can boast of green burial grounds within their borders.

Located just south of Bangor, Rainbow's End offers a natural return to the elements on fourteen acres of meadowland and pine forest that hug the lower run of the Penobscot River, not far from where it flows into the Bay and, from there, the Atlantic.

The meadow, which accounts for half the total cemetery acreage, greets you when you pull up to the site. On the day of my visit a couple of weeks ago, ankle-high grass covered the ground, though in the spring and summer months it's overrun with wildflowers native to this corner of Maine and a profusion of white and yellow daffodils.

Burial of whole bodies may take place here, as well as the burial and/or scattering of ashes. As with other natural cemeteries, the non-profit organization that runs Rainbow's End permits only unembalmed remains to be buried, in either cloth shrouds or coffins made from readily biodegradable materials. Metal caskets and burial vaults are banned. Flat stones may be used to mark the grave.

The board of directors, many of whom live on properties adjoining the cemetery, hope to open Rainbow's End in early 2008, after they've gained tax-exempt status from the state. At this point, they expect to charge $750 for burial/scattering rights, plus somewhere in the $300 to $400 range to open and close the grave.

A number of board members I walked the leaf-strewn meadow with told me they thought most families would want to be laid to rest here. But as we entered the forest that fills out the back half of the cemetery, I wasn’t so sure. Overspread with mostly towering white pines, intermingled with spruce and fir, some birch along the shoreline, the enveloping green of this simple woodland seemed a more visually compelling, somehow more welcoming site for a natural return.

Walking the path that cut through these woods, we arrived at the far end where the land falls away to the Penobscot. Standing on the promontory overlooking the river, I could imagine Maine families standing on this very spot and wanting, when their time came, to use what remained of the physical part of their life, to rejoin this ground and become part of the natural cycles that turn here.

The place at which I was standing, in fact, is where Ellen Hills told me she will be buried someday. Ellen's family has owned this land for more than eighty years, and it was her idea to transform it into a natural cemetery.

Next week: We’ll learn just why -- how -- Ellen did it.

Ramsey Creek Redux

2007-11-16T11:32:00.001-05:00

The Ramsey Creek Preserve, as enthusiasts of natural burial know, is the first -- and until recently only -- green cemetery in the United States.

On a trip down to Georgia last week, I stopped off in tiny Westminster, South Carolina, to tour Ramsey Creek's leafy grounds for the first time since visiting some four summers ago and coming away with the germ of an idea that would become Grave Matters.

I found it looking even more beautiful and -- for that final rest -- more inviting than I'd remembered.

The somewhat utilitarian signpost at the entrance had been replaced with a rugged boulder bounded on two sides by rock pillars, the cemetery's name and founding date etched into the boulder's smooth face. And the weather-beaten chapel, which owners Billy and Kimberley Campbell had saved from demolition and installed at the head of the main cemetery trail, boasted fresh clapboard siding and a small porch.

What impressed me most, though, was the burial ground itself. Now the site of dozens of additional burials, the pine forest that is the Ramsey Creek cemetery had retained its natural character, remaining more nature preserve than graveyard. As before, I had trouble identifying most of the graves that skirt the trail running through the preserve. The minimal graves still blend so seamlessly into the landscape that they’re largely inconspicuous, and remain free of the usual dross of the modern cemetery -- the plastic flowers, pottery vases, crepe displays -- I'd frankly expected to find here.

Not surprisingly, I guess, my short walk brought me to Billy Campbell, who was digging a grave on a break from seeing patients at his family practice. He'd just started turfing off the top layer of dirt and depositing it onto a tarp beside the grave, the first step in an ecologically-sensitive excavation strategy Billy describes in the book.

Green burial has come a long way since Billy dug that first grave at Ramsey Creek in the fall of 1998 and, with it, launched a movement. What at the time struck many as a quirky idea whose appeal would be limited to granola crunchers, green burial is now reaching into the mainstream. A summer issue of People magazine devoted four pages to the Campbells' approach to burial, sandwiched between stories of Matthew McConaughey's bachelorhood and Paris Hilton's meltdown in rehab. A Canadian film crew was in the woods scouting out shots during my walk; a photographer from the Chicago Tribune would follow days later.

The media is here because it recognizes that green burial isn't just about the environment. As the Campbells have long argued, it also represents an embrace of old-fashioned American values of simplicity, thrift, and self-sufficiency that continue to have widespread currency. And far from being quirky or bizarre, natural burial is little more than a return to a once common practice in this country, a default burial that has served humanity for thousands of years.

As the green burial movement grows and matures, it can look to Ramsey Creek as a model of the best of what green burial has to offer: A thriving, natural green where the dead can return to and rejoin the elements as directly and simply as possible and, in the process, perpetuate the cycles of life that sustain all life. More than that, this pine forest in the wilds of South Carolina provides a compelling strategy for preserving land from development and returning it to ecological health.

Next week: A natural cemetery takes root Maine.

Green Burial: An Idea as Old as the Hills

2007-10-19T11:50:00.000-04:00

What we call green burial -- that is, the burial of an unembalmed body that's placed in a basic, biodegradable casket which is then lowered into a vault-free grave, usually in a natural setting -- is seen in our CyberAge as a novel approach to handling the dead.

But, as several people I interview in Grave Matters point out, it's nothing new, bizarre or even remarkable. In the early years of this country, such natural return simply defined the standard American Way of Death. It was the norm, not the exception.

In more rural regions, the practice -- and the embrace of an organic philosophy of life that undergirds it -- endured well into the 20th century.

One of the more powerful, personal narratives about those earlier rural customs comes from the late Rufus Morgan, an Episcopal minister and renowned naturalist from the backwood mountains of North Carolina. In the early 1970s, when Rufus was in his 80s, he sat down with the student writers of the Foxfire books to tell them about the funerals and burials he witnessed as a young man. There's no indication of the exact years he refers to in this passage, though I'd imagine they extend into the 1930s or '40s:

"I really wish that the same burial customs prevailed now as then. . . . . [T]he neighbors would come in during a sickness, and then in death, and they would lay out the corpse and dress him – get him ready for burial. And a neighbor carpenter would make the coffin, and neighbors would dig the grave, and the coffin would be taken to the churchyard or cemetery in a farm wagon drawn by horses or mules. Then the remains would be buried by the minister; sort of a very simple -- and to my way of thinking, more reverent than the present -- practice."

"There wasn't any idea of a metal casket or a means of preserving the remains because, as the scripture says, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' And I'd much rather think of my body as just going back to the earth where it came from and fertilizing some tree or the grass or flowers, than just having a metal box with me inside preserved like a mummy."

As much as anything I’ve read or written myself, that last sentence of over thirty years ago could serve as a perfect manifesto for the green burial movement of today.

Rufus passed away in 1983, not quite reaching his 100th birthday. Thanks to the ongoing work of the Foxfire project, his views on old-time burials live on in Foxfire 2 (Anchor, 1973) .

As a kid, I was enthralled by the Foxfire project, an effort by a Georgia English teacher and his students to interview old-timers living in the nearby Appalachian Mountains and document their history and passing traditions. (Click here to learn more about its continuing work.)

In fact, I’d read this entry when the book first appeared in the early 1970s. I’d forgotten about it until Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead (Upper Access, 1997), mentioned it in a recent listserv posting. Thanks to her for the lead.

To learn more about Rufus Morgan, click here.

The photo of Rufus Morgan that heads this blog was taken by John F. Schlatter in 1969. Thanks to John for his permission to reproduce it here.

Green Burial in Pictures

2007-10-12T12:22:00.000-04:00

I spilled close to 100,000 words describing various green burials in Grave Matters. Few of them, though, come close to showing off the idea as well as the photos I collected in the course of my research.

Point in fact is the image above. It pictures the woodland grave that awaits the remains of Chris Nichols, the 28-year-old stonemason from South Carolina who, as I recount in the book, passes away after a brief struggle with colon cancer. Chris had asked his family to bury him at Ramsey Creek Preserve, the first natural cemetery in the United States, which lay some half hour from his home.

This single, powerful photograph shows viewers just why Chris asked for such natural return to the elements. No words needed.

A couple of weeks ago, Ilker Yoldas invited me to write a guest post on green burial for her intriguing site, The Thinking Blog.

You’ll find that final post here. As you can see, the images that drive the text really are worth 1,000 – or 100,000 – words.

Green Burial Happened by Default in Historic Cemeteries

2007-09-05T10:52:00.001-04:00

Some half dozen natural cemeteries lie scattered across the new green deathscape. But that doesn’t mean you have to travel to these few leafy locales to find good green burial grounds.

Practically any historic cemetery, whose final interments took place in the last decades of the 19th century, will do.

Pine Ridge Cemetery in Hancock, New Hampshire, is a prime example. Nestled behind a low rock wall that skirts the two-lane road that bisects this colonial town, Pine Ridge is the final resting place of local residents from the late 17th to late 18th centuries. Carried off at mostly young ages, some of them children who fell prey to the dysentery epidemic that swept through the area in the early years of the 1800s, the deceased were given natural burials by default.

Embalming, which early Americans considered a desecration of one's scared remains, wasn't practiced until after the Civil War. And burial vaults, which were first used in the mid- to late-1800s to deter grave robbers who supplied early medical school with cadavers for anatomical study, didn't become a standard feature -- and later requirement of cemetery owners -- of cemetery burial until the end of the same century. Metal coffins, which now account for some three-quarters of all coffins sold in this country, were rare.

As a consequence, historic cemeteries like Pine Ridge present real, compelling pictures of green burial. (True, the headstones are less biodegradable than the fieldstones typically erected in the best of our modern, natural cemeteries. Those at Pine Ridge are hewn from granite, and, as these photos from my summer visit to the cemetery indicate, still stand strong.)

As is not the case in more modern cemeteries, the deceased here sleep in green repose. Washed, dressed, laid into simple pine coffins and lowered into vaultless graves, their remains quickly degraded and soon thereafter rejoined the elements. And, in doing so, perpetuated the cycles of nature that supported -- and continue to support -- the living.

The Death of Abraham Lincoln -- and of the Traditional American Funeral

2007-06-01T11:47:00.000-04:00

On a raw, wet afternoon back in early April, I marched with a crowd of other umbrella-shielded mourners behind a horse-drawn hearse that carried the casket of Abraham Lincoln down the main drag of Allentown, Pennsylvania, to the solemn beat of a lone drummer.

The casket was a mere (though exact) replica of the cloth-covered walnut case Abe was long buried in, the hearse clearly a prop. But with a troop of re-enactors outfitted in Civil War uniforms and the street fronted with antebellum manses, our modern funeral train caught the spirit of the very real processions that marched through some dozen Northern cities like this one almost exactly 142 years ago to the day, the date of Lincoln's assassination.

Our re-enactment noted the end of one great man's life (and of his era). Unbeknownst to most of my fellow mourners that afternoon, it also marked the anniversary of another kind of death altogether: that of the traditional American funeral.

Up to the time of Lincoln's funeral, deathcare was a primarily family affair. Women of the house typically washed and dressed the body of their deceased, laid it out in the front parlor, often in a wood coffin built by the local carpenter. Mourners came and went. Burial took place on the back forty or community cemetery, and the body was lowered into a simple, vaultless grave a family member may have dug himself.

Chemical embalming, as I explain more fully in Grave Matters, was considered an abuse of the body and thus limited to cadavers used for anatomical study. Resistance to the practice softened during the Civil War, however, because embalming helped preserve the remains of slain Union soldiers for the long rail ride North to their home parlors and family cemeteries.

The connection to Abraham Lincoln? Like many of those Northerners who died under his command, the body of Lincoln was embalmed following his assassination -- the first president to be so -- and loaded onto a funeral train for its long journey to the Springfield cemetery. The train followed a northerly route, taking nearly two weeks and stopping at select cities along the way.

At each one, Lincoln's casket was transported to a central location (via marches like the one in Allentown) and opened to public view. More than a million Americans in total would file past the body of the 16th president. Preserved to enough of a life-like appearance that mourners would reach out and touch it, Lincoln's body put a good face on embalming and, in the process, gave life to a new funerary practice.

Embalming became a mainstay of the American funeral, and, since only an embalmer/undertaker/and eventual funeral director could do it, a true funeral "industry" was born.

Note on the photograph of Lincoln's coffin. The Batesville Casket Company produced the original coffin for Lincoln's funeral the day following his assassination. The image above shows an exact replica, also created by Batesville. In addition to the cloth cover and walnut case, the coffin is lined with satin and silk and adorned with silver handles. In the upper left corner of the image here, at the brim of the soldier's hat, you can see a print of the only existing photograph of the real Lincoln lying in his coffin.

Good Green Burial Media

2007-05-11T16:11:00.000-04:00

I’m back to the blog after a spate of deadline reporting and travel, the latter of which will inspire a number of upcoming entries in this space (next week: a re-enactment of Abraham Lincoln's funeral and how Abe's passing 142 years ago connects to the natural burial movement of the Cyberage). In the meantime, I thought I'd share some of the better, recent press about natural burial.

The first is an interview with Terry Gross, on her NPR show, Fresh Air. In brief periods when construction workers next to the studio had laid down their jackhammers, Terry gamely led a wide-ranging discussion on the costs of modern memorialization and the merits -- and challenges -- of green burial. To listen, click here and follow the link.

I'd not heard of the California Literary Review until the editor e-mailed me with his request for an interview. Turns out CLR is a lively, compelling on-line arts journal, and in keeping with the publication, Paul Comstock's questions were direct and intriguing, making for one of the better, brief overviews of what the green burial movement is all about. Click here to read it.

Back next time with Abe and more about the re-enactment of his funeral, as seen in this picture above.

Connecting with Natural Burialists Near You

2007-03-15T14:55:00.000-04:00

I'm still gathering information from local hospitals about a family's right to reclaim their deceased and bring them home (or to the crematory). Apparently, so few -- if any -- families make this request that none of the administrators I spoke to had any idea how their doctors were supposed to respond to it. As far as they know, no hospital policy on the issue exists. The administrators promise to look into the matter further and get back.

In the meantime, I'll turn to addressing the question I'm asked most often: is anyone else in my area interested in starting a natural cemetery? The question comes up frequently enough that I've created a database of names/contacts and have started putting people from the same general region in touch with each other.

I'm happy to add your name to the list. When someone from your region writes in, I'll forward on your name and whatever contact information you care to share.

Here's the list to date, by state/region:

California (Humboldt County, Los Padres National Forest)

Colorado (Denver area)

Connecticut

Georgia (Central part of the state, Savannah)

Indiana (Bloomington)

Kentucky (Lexington)

Maine (Orrington, Solon)

Ohio (Cleveland)

Pennsylvania (Bucks County, Lehigh Valley, Philadelphia)

Virginia (Roanoke)

Add to this list the score of groups that already exist in the following states: Texas (Austin), greater Midwest (group based in Wisconsin), New York (Tarrytown), as well as Canada (Ontario and British Columbia), among others.

I'm in the process of putting together a short primer on how to go about getting a natural cemetery off -- or on -- the ground. I'll post that at a later date.

Note on the photograph: This is the entrance to the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve, outside Ithaca, New York.

Planning for Your Own Natural Return

2007-02-23T15:17:00.000-05:00

When I set out to write Grave Matters, I imagined a future reader handing the finished book to her family and saying, "When I die, do chapter [fill in the blank]."

I consequently laid out the book in what I hope is a fairly straightforward arrangement. Each chapter presents a picture of a greener, more natural alternative to the standard funeral home send-off, as experienced by a real family in a real place. An appendix offers a brief how-to, with enough information to help readers pursue the given alt.burial strategy when the time comes.

Still, I'm under no illusion that arranging your own future green burial is as simple as handing over the book to a loved one, with a bookmark stuck in the relevant chapter. Funerary laws vary from state to state, region to region. The backyard burial that's possible in the county I examine in the book may be illegal in yours. When an expected death occurs at home, your municipality may demand more than the hospice nurse's declaration to that effect when issuing a permit that allows you to transport the body to the crematory or cemetery.

Your family, who will be in charge of overseeing your final arrangements, will need concrete, site-specific information that's beyond the reach of the book. They'll need to know, for example, the best, local crematory to use and just where to turn to buy a cardboard coffin. Whom, exactly, should they contact to arrange the scattering of your ashes at sea? If you die in the hospital, what paperwork do they need in order to transport your body back to the house for the home funeral?

And, by the way, where's the will that states your preference for your green burial of choice? Some hospitals, after all, will only release your body to family members if you've indicated that in a living will or other pertinent document. Otherwise, the funeral director gets involved.

Your family can probably come up with the answers to those and the host of others that arise with death comes calling. But you can save them no small effort and even greater anxiety -- and guarantee that the green burial you want comes about as you envision it -- if you plan for it yourself.

What does that mean exactly?

In the coming weeks we'll look into question. I'll use this space to craft a plan a family could use to conduct a natural burial in this corner of the planet. The information I glean, which I'll post, will be specific to this locale, of course. But the questions I ask -- if not the specific answers -- are the very ones you'll have to consider for yourself and your family. At the very least, I hope the exercise I conduct here inspires you to undertake a similar one in the place you call home.

Next week: Checking in with the local hospital.

And speaking of hospitals: In the course of searching for funeral images of Abraham Lincoln, who was embalmed and subsequently viewed by some million mourners, I came across this Civil War-era photo of the Douglas Hospital in Washington, D.C. Source: Library of Congress.

Yanking Teeth Before the Final Burn?

2007-02-16T17:25:00.000-05:00

After learning that the major air pollutant billowing from crematory smokestacks consists of mercury that taints the dental amalgams/fillings of the deceased, a number of readers have written to ask the logical question: Why not yank riddled teeth from the dead before loading them into the hearth?

Pulling those teeth would, of course, prove an immediate boon to the environment, preventing their cache of mercury from eventually contaminating soil and surface waters. It could also be done cheaply and easily, by, say, a dentist or cremator. The latter, after all, sometimes doubles as a funeral director who, as a matter of course, may himself remove pacemakers from the deceased's chest prior to cremation.

The strategy would, at the very least, cost significantly less than outfitting cremation units with mercury-scrubbing filtering equipment, an option that can run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Targeting teeth is a sensible enough idea, in fact, that legislators, environmentalists and the cremation industry itself have all considered it. A government agency in Sweden, a country with a 70% cremation rate, proposed the practice back in 2004. On this side of the Atlantic, the state legislature of Maine recently debated a bill that would require crematory operators to remove their deceased's mercury fillings (or install mercury filters).

Like many logical proposals, however, this one held little appeal to human sensibilities. That Maine bill, for example, promptly died because funeral directors said they didn't want to engage in pulling teeth from cadavers, in part because they found the act both "repulsive" for themselves and potentially stressful to grieving family members. Cremators, on the other hand, contended that laws prohibit them from "tampering" with bodies in their care.

All legitimate reasons, certainly, though ones that do nothing to actually solve the very real threat mercury deposition from crematoria poses to the environment -- and, ultimately, to the health of the living.

Which leaves us with mercury filters, a technology, as I wrote earlier, I believe will come to crematory smokestacks. In the meantime, each of us can take a few steps now to ensure a green send-off later. One idea comes from those Maine legislators: include a provision in your will that allows your mercury-laden teeth to be removed prior to cremation. Another is even more obvious: the next time you have a cavity, ask your dentist to pack it with a composite -- mercury free -- filling.

Natural Return by the Numbers

2007-02-09T12:32:00.000-05:00

Percentage of Americans who were cremated in 1964: 4
In 1984: 13
In 2004: 31
Number of years from now when more Americans will be cremated than buried, for the first time in our history: 18

Percentage of Americans cremated in body bags/wrappings: 2.5
Percentage cremated in cloth-covered caskets: 5
Percentage cremated in wood caskets: 9
Percentage cremated in cardboard/pressboard containers: 82

Of twenty-four countries surveyed, rank of Japan for highest percentage of population cremated: 1
Rank of Ghana: 24
Rank of U.S. 11
Of U.S. states, rank of Hawaii for highest percentage of population cremated: 1
Rank of Mississippi: 50

Average cost of funeral in U.S.: $6,500
Typical cost of funeral plus burial: $10,000
Average cost of cremation, including casket/container: $1,800
Cost of burial at the natural cemetery of Ramsey Creek Preserve, including cardboard container: $1,950

Percentage of caskets sold in U.S. that are metal: 68
Percentage made of hardwood: 18
Percentage made from pressed wood, softwood, or cardboard: 12.5

Average cost of casket: $2,200
Cost of plain pine casket, made by woodworker Loren Schieuer: $800
Board feet of lumber used to produce standard wood casket: 140
Board feet of lumber Loren Schieuer uses: 50

The bamboo "Eco" coffin pictured above is manufactured by the SAWD Partnership, a British company headquartered in Kent which the London-based Natural Death Centre recently named best coffin manufactuer in the U.K. The bamboo is handcrafted in the company's workshop in China's Hunan Province. It is sold in the U.K. and not distributed in North America.

Coming to a Crematory Near You: Mercury Filters

2007-01-26T12:30:00.000-05:00

Mom was right: we should have done a better job brushing our teeth. For us Baby Boomers at least, better brushing would have meant fewer silver fillings. And for us Baby Boomers who plan on heading to the hearth when the time comes, that would have meant that much less mercury polluting the environment.

Mercury is a prime ingredient of those dental/silver amalgams. When a body with silver fillings is cremated, its cache of mercury doesn't disappear in that final blaze. The hearth's searing 1,600 degree temps transform it into still-potent vapor, which then escapes up the smokestack and rides the prevailing winds. At some point, the mercury falls to earth, on ground and/or water, where it's consumed by wildlife, including fish. When we, in turn, eat that tainted fish, we ingest a bit of its mercury makeup.

Mercury, as scientists and consumer health advocates continue to document, is highly hazardous to human health. Exposure to the metal has been linked to a host of ills, from infertility to developmental delays and brain damage, particularly in the young.

It's hard to say just how much cremation contributes to mercury pollution. The EPA, which conducted tests with the cremation industry in the late 1990s, contends that U.S. crematories collectively emit a mere 230 pounds of mercury into the atmosphere every year. The non-profit advocacy coalition New England Zero Mercury Campaign, however, argues that the release is significantly higher, accounting for some 2.5 tons.

Either way, the amount of mercury pollution from crematoria pales next to the 100 tons emitted every year by our coal burning power plants. That said, less mercury fouling the environment is clearly better than more, particularly given the raft of recent reports showing the greater extent of mercury pollution than previously believed and the minute amounts needed to actually harm human health.

The government of Great Britain, 70% of whose population is cremated, is concerned enough about the issue that it recently required the country's cremation operators to outfit their units with filtering equipment sufficient to cut mercury emissions in half by the year 2012.

No such rules appear on the horizon here. Still, word about the mercury issue will gain traction and select cremators will, I believe -- in part, per a phone call with a U.S. cremator just this week -- begin voluntarily installing filters in order to appeal to consumers looking to "green up" their final exits via the hearth.

The Green Burial Council will make it easy to find them. The non-profit organization is looking to certify and then list on its site those crematories across the country that boast mercury filters.

The Benefits of Caring for Your Own at Death

2007-01-19T09:20:00.000-05:00

It's hard to image being able to muster the will or energy to conduct a home funeral for someone you love when death comes calling.

Beth Knox had the same thought. Readers of Grave Matters know Beth as the "deathcare midwife" and director of Crossings who in chapter six describes the home funeral she conducted for her seven-year-old daughter, Alison. Recounting how she learned of Alison's death from a low-speed auto accident, Beth admitted to participants in one of her recent deathcare workshops that she'd have expected to want someone "to give me a tranquilizer and wake me up in five years."

In fact, just the opposite happened. "When it happened, the last thing I wanted was anything clouding my consciousness," Beth said. "I wanted to be nowhere else than at my daughter's side and to care for her myself as I had always done" when she was alive. Over the course of three days, a period she calls both "terrible and beautiful," that's just what she did.

Beth's workshops make the idea of the home funeral easier to contemplate, and then actually pull off. For a full afternoon, Beth gives participates the nuts and bolts of post-deathcare -- how to wash and dress a body, buffet the remains with dry ice to enable a home wake.

Sure, the work isn't easy, the engagement with the deceased intense. Still, for Beth and others I interviewed, the challenges proved well worth the effort. "There are rewards from having a home funeral," Beth told me. "There's a comfort and healing that comes from physically caring for the dead and from spending quiet, private time in the presence of death."

I thought of Beth's comment this week when I read a new Johns Hopkins health policy study on the benefits that accrue to family and friends who care for loved ones in the final stages of life ("End of Life Care," Jennifer Wolff, Archives of Internal Medicine, Jan. 8, 2007). While reporting that the endeavor caused emotional, physical and sometimes financial strain, a full 2/3rds of the caregivers said they nonetheless reaped significant rewards as well. Nearly 70 percent, for example, said that the experience "ma[de] me feel good about myself" and "enable[d] me to appreciate life more." More than 3/4ths said their role made them feel useful and needed.

No one, to my knowledge, has as neatly quantified the benefits to the living that come from conducting a home funeral for their dead. Yet the rewards must be similar to -- and a continuation of -- the very ones that begin with caring for loved ones in their final days.

Note: The photograph above was taken at one of Beth's home deathcare workshops. For information on upcoming workshops, contact Crossings (www.crossings.net. E-mail: crossingcare@earthlink.net).

Ed McKenna: 1918 - 2006

2007-01-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

A number of readers have told me they were moved by the story of Ed McKenna. Ed -- or "Eddie" as his family and friends know him -- is the eighty-seven-year-old retired meatpacker from rural Salix, Iowa, who buys a plain, pine coffin from woodworker Loren Schieuer in chapter seven of Grave Matters. Ed buys Loren's no-frills coffin for his eventual funeral, but, as he told me in couple of phone conversations and later during my visit to his farm, ends up having to use it to bury his wife, Evelyn.

Eddie liked the idea of the basic wood casket, which squared with the philosophy of simplicity by which he led his life. So, a couple of months after Evelyn's death, he returns to Schieuer Woodworks (www.schiwoodworks.com) to buy another plain, pine box, for just himself this time.

Three weeks ago today, on December 29, Eddie McKenna put that coffin to its final use. Surrounded by his family, he died of lung cancer and, per arrangements he'd settled long ago, was buried in Loren's second wood casket next to Evelyn, that very same day.

The family-only funeral Mass that was held for Eddie just hours after his death and his subsequent burial in the church cemetery is a fitting tribute to this hardworking, thoughtful Irishman. In the late Depression, he farmed his hundred-plus acres and took a part-time job at the Swift meatpacking plant in Sioux City to support a family that would eventually include 10 children. For a time, Eddie farmed by day and by night worked the late shift at Swift, earning, he told me, 70 cents an hour, $28 a week. "We didn't have a whole lot coming up," he said simply, "but we never went hungry, either. And our kids all turned out well."

In part, it was the hardscabble farm existence and no-nonsense mindset of the post-Depression era that informed Eddie's view of life -- and just how to depart to the afterlife. "In those days you took life as it was. You stood on your own two feet and did the best you could," he said. Death, as unwelcome as it is, was "a part of life, another step down the road, and you just accepted it and moved on." For Eddie, his grandmother's death, home funeral, and simple burial in a wooden coffin, all of which he witnessed as a kid in 1925, was representative of that ideal and would influence the plans he'd eventually settle on for his own passing.

In our conversations, Eddie talked of how he was moved to see his family rally around Evelyn in her long decline. His girls, he told me, were particularly helpful. "They took real good care of their mother for that whole length of time," he said, "and I wouldn't trade that for all the money you could have piled up in this house." Not two years later, the McKennas, with the same love they showed Evelyn, would do the same for their father.

To the McKennas, I offer my condolences on your loss. To Eddie: I thank you for the gift of your story. May you rest in peace.

USA: Cremation Nation by 2025

2007-01-05T11:06:00.000-05:00

In media coverage of green burial, it's whole body interment in the woodland cemetery that garners attention. Yet it's another, lesser form of natural return that's gaining the converts: cremation.

A look at the figures shows cremation's steadily rising arc. From 1876, the date of the first modern cremation in this country, the cremation rate ticks inexorably upward, accounting for less than 1% of all dispositions in the early part of the last century to more than ten percent in the 1980s. By the end of the '90's "Decade of the Environment," a quarter of all our dead are heading to the hearth; today it's nearly a third. Within the next two decades -- by the year 2025 -- the number of cremations will overtake burials for the first time in our history.

How popular will cremation become in a country where the modern funeral -- with its chemical embalming of remains which are then coffined, packed into a vault and buried beneath a ton of earth -- has defined the American way of death for the better part of the last century?

If historical precedent elsewhere is any indication, some 70% of all Americans will eventually opt for cremation's purifying fires. And not look back. "In almost every country where cremation surpasses burials and continues, the cremation rate gets to anywhere from 60 to around 70 percent and then holds," according to Jack Springer, director of the Cremation Association of North America (www.cremationassociation.org), per Great Britain (70%), Sweden (69%), and Denmark (71%). The same trend, Springer contends, will happen here.

No historical event or great awakening accounts for our turn to the flames. A recent survey points to the same impulses that are driving the popularity of green burial in general: low cost, simplicity, and environmental benefit (i.e., preserving land).

The funeral industry has fought our growing preference for cremation, which represents lost sales on the very goods and services that boost its bottom line -- embalming, metal coffin, the burial vault. Though it's starting to come around, however reluctantly. Witness the line of handsome urns being cranked out by coffin manufacturers, the addition of cremation services on the funeral director's General Price List. Even cemeteries are catering to the coming Cremation Nation. A recent newsletter from one memorial park heralded the opening a "nature trail" on its grounds, where cremated remains can be buried beneath a tree, along the trail or beside a pond.

New York State's First Natural Cemetery

2006-12-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

At the end of May, I spoke at the dedication of the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve. The fifth natural cemetery in this country, Greensprings takes root on 100 acres of rolling meadowland that adjoins thousands of additional acres of protected forest just outside Ithaca, New York. Like its inspiration, Ramsey Creek, Greensprings offers the best of natural return: a green burial (vaultless and embalming-free) in a green setting, with plans to use the woodland cemetery scheme to not only protect this bucolic site from development but to restore it to ecological health.

At the dedication, I spoke with Michael d'Estries, managing editor of GroovyGreen.com, a vibrant web outlet for environmental issues. The video he shot that day -- above -- offers a compelling, inside look at the genesis of Greensprings and the growing green burial movement it's giving rise to.

For more information on Greensprings, visit the group's web site: www.naturalburial.org

I'm on vacation through next week, back with a post on January 3rd. Happy holidays!

Natural Burial via the Local Funeral Home

2006-12-13T13:53:00.000-05:00

The modern funeral can't help but work at cross-purposes with the aims of natural burial. Chemical embalming of the dead, metal caskets sealed against the elements, the burial vaults that serve, in the words of one manufacturer, "as a last line of defense against mother nature," all seek to preserve the body from the dissolution that's a natural part of the life cycle -- and from the very goal of natural return.

So, don't expect the local funeral director to cheer your request for a green burial. Particularly, as it represents the lost sale of the very goods and services that provide such a boost to his bottom line.

But that may soon change. A handful of funeral directors around the country, recognizing that there are still profits to be gained by giving families what they want, are adding green burial options to their General Price List of offerings. One of them is Steve McCowen. A licensed funeral director based in Michigan and manager of a family-friendly funeral planning organization called the Today Center (www.todaycenter.com), McCowen works with sixteen funeral homes in the state that give families just what they ask for -- and no more -- hassle-free. "We'll pick the body up from the place of death, and bring it wherever the family wants, including their home, for home funerals," says McCowen. "They can even file the death certificate on their own." Families can skip embalming and choose from a cloth-covered, pine or cardboard coffin. Cost of the basic package runs less than $4,000, roughly half as much as the standard sendoff.

You can find other family- and eco-friendly funeral providers like McCowen by contacting the Green Burial Council (www.decentburial.org). A non-profit group that's working to advance the cause of natural burial in this country, the Council directs families to providers that offer the group's green "Burial Package," which prohibits vaults and formaldehyde-based embalming, and permits only biodegradable caskets.

So far, the Council has approved providers in seven states: California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New York and Wisconsin. For contact information, e-mail the Council at: info@greenburialcouncil.org.

You don't have to work through the funeral home to arrange a natural burial, of course. In most cases, you can do it yourself. But for families that prefer the assistance of the local funeral parlor, the Council's burial package identifies those that understand the tenets of the eco-friendly burial -- and will help families arrange it.

By making inroads into the funeral industry, the Council hopes over time to change it for the greener. The Burial Package is one small step in that direction. Still, as McCowen himself has found, the road is long. "I called the three-county area recently to find a cemetery that would allow one family to bury their dead without a vault, and couldn't find one," he says. In that case, McCowen arranged for the dead to be transported to a natural cemetery in another state. He has also successfully pursued another option that legally allows for vautless burial in Michigan: helping families designate a parcel of their rural property as a private burial ground.

Welcome to the Grave Matters Blog

2006-11-22T13:03:00.000-05:00

Natural Burial

On a family trip back from the Georgia coast in the summer of 2003, I stopped off in the tiny town of Westminster, South Carolina (pop. 2,000), to see the Ramsey Creek Preserve for myself.

Sitting in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from the Georgia border, Ramsey Creek is the first -- and at that time only -- "natural" cemetery in the United States. On this thirty-plus acre woodland, heavily forested with mostly yellow and shortleaf pine, the dead are buried in simple graves, interred in either cloth shrouds or plain coffins made from cardboard or plentiful pine. Vaults are banned, embalming prohibited. The idea, so at odds with modern burial, is to allow the body to re-join the elements, to perpetuate the cycles of nature, to return dust to dust.

I'd read about Ramsey Creek, and knew that some 200-plus similar woodland burial grounds were scattered throughout in the U.K. I'd come to South Carolina see if the reality matched what clearly on paper promised such a compelling alternative to the excessive, costly and tired sendoff on offer at the local funeral home.

For the better part of an afternoon, I walked the rough trail that cut through the memorial preserve, and afterwards talked with its founder, Billy Campbell -- the town doctor -- and his wife and business partner, Kimberley. By the time I got back to the Greenville hotel to collect my family, I felt sure Ramsey Creek represented not only a viable "green burial" option but one resonant enough to define a new, more truly natural American Way of death.

I'd also walked into a book project. For the next two years, I traveled the country in pursuit of other burial options that, like interment at Ramsey Creek, returned remains to the elements, were sparing of resources and, thus, light on the pocketbook. The result of that effort is Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, which Scribner will release on January 9th.

I found, and reported on, a dozen families who opted out of the standard funeral experience in favor of more natural return. For some, that meant woodland burial, cremation and burial at sea, or interring the ashes of their loved ones in concrete "memorial reefs" that were later dropped into the Atlantic to serve as habitat for aquatic life. Still other families conducted home funerals and backyard burials; one hired a local carpenter to build a plain, pine coffin. By way of contrast, I wrote a pair of opening chapters that provide a step-by-step review of the embalming process and chart the potential environmental consequences that follow from standard burial.

I had two goals. One, to inform families that they don't have to submit to the strictures of the modern funeral when death comes calling (i.e., embalming is almost never required). And, two, to offer a picture of the many more truly natural alternatives that exist and then show how to access them.

I hope this blog will serve as a useful companion to the book. I'll use this space to report on developments in the field of natural burial, share ideas and engage in discussion. I welcome your participation.

Mark Harris