The headstone that stands at the north end of Fountain Hill Cemetery doesn’t tell you much about John Simsack’s brief sojourn upon this
earth:
Born: 1849
Died: Jan. 11, 1905
Aged: 55 Years
Even then the inscription's hard to make out. The
elements have pocked and faded the script. Mold obscures much of the face. The
“k” in Simsack is disappearing, so too the fateful day John passed away that January
of 1905.
A century after his death, Mother Nature has all but rubbed
out these last words on John Simsack. In another decade or so, She’ll wipe them
away for good. And then the limestone marker that fixes this final resting
place will more closely resemble those of its older neighbors: blank-faced and
leaning, sinking deeper into the ground.
It’s a sobering thought and, as I studied Simsack’s grave recently
on walk through this historic Pennsylvania cemetery, it reminded me of the
growing debate in green burial circles about biodegradable grave markers.
Most natural cemeteries in the U.S. ask families to mark
graves with fieldstone, river rock, or some other “natural” material that’s collected
on site or from a similar geological stratum. Unlike the granite or bronze markers
you see in standard cemeteries, fieldstones and their ilk break down quickly out in the open.
Within a hundred years, they’ll weather into the landscape, leaving future
visitors to consult cemetery maps or GPS coordinates to locate the graves of
their beloved departed.
The policy on markers is in keeping with the dust-to-dust
philosophy that guides natural burial. It's also one not everybody -- green
burial advocates included -- agrees with.
Some critics, as I noted earlier in this space, argue that
an (eventually) unmarked grave devalues the individuality of the deceased, the
uniqueness of that one life. From that perspective, the dead serve as mere soil
amendment and the natural cemetery little more than a mass, utilitarian
composting scheme. Genealogists dislike the practice, too, as it denies descendants the chance to see evidence of their ancestry and thus feel
their rightful place in the long chain of family.
All these arguments have real merit (enough so that some natural cemeteries are working to address them, something I'll explore in my next blog).
Even so, I think it’s important to keep in mind the lesson
of John Simsack’s weathering headstone. Which is this: No grave marker
lasts forever. None of the headstones in Fountain Hill Cemetery will endure. Not the fieldstone that will one day cover my grave in the natural burial ground I’ve started within this cemetery. But neither the markers of limestone, slate, and
marble that rise from the old section here. Nor the headstones that were cut from seemingly
impermeable granite, which came to replace limestone in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.
A harder stone buys time, for sure, but it doesn't buy eternity. In due
time, all the headstones that populate this cemetery, no matter their durability, will degrade. Inscriptions will eventually fade. Stones will
eventually topple or, like the bronze marker that rests on the grave of my
great-grandmother in a Rochester, NY, cemetery, sink into the earth.
The green policy on biodegradable grave markers is a tough
one to like. In part, I think that’s because it asks us on a very practical
level to accept, if not fully embrace, our mutability. A readily-degrading fieldstone
inscribed with our name and dates acknowledges that we really are only here for
a time. We’re just passing through.
What endures is not the overt reminder of our one, short life
but the on-going pageant of all life.
Mark Harris, author
Author, Grave Matters
“The manifesto of the [green burial]
movement,” Indianapolis Star
Decades ago, cremation was the odd exit strategy for
Americans heading to the Great Hereafter.
Today, it’s fairly common. By the end of 2015, it will be more common than not.
That’s the upshot of a new survey showing the cremation rate
rising above 48% later this year, overtaking the rate of burials by nearly 2
percentage points.
The result is a sea change in American funeral practices: For
the first time in this country’s history – nearly 140 years after the first
modern cremation on U.S. soil took place in a makeshift hearth outside of
Pittsburgh – more of us will be cremated than buried.
The American Way of Death? It's looking more like Cremation
Nation.
And, well into the future, if that survey is right. By 2020,
the cremation rate will reach 56%. Ten years later, we’ll see 70% of all
Americans heading into the hearth.
Even more may follow their lead. According to one industry
official I spoke with, the U.S. cremation rate is likely to track to that of European countries where cremation is firmly entrenched: Sweden (77%),
Denmark (77%), and the U.K. (73%). Some, like Switzerland (85%) and the Czech
Republic (80%), boast higher rates yet.
Given our somewhat similar demographics to those countries and
the growing acceptance of cremation in this one, the official saw no reason we
wouldn’t, literally, go the way of that part of Europe.
But I’m not so sure. And here’s why: the green burial
movement.
From hundreds of conversations I’ve had with families, I can
tell you that the vast majority who come to green burial are converts from
cremation. Cremation, they tell me, had been their default choice. It was more
environment-friendly than modern burial, plus cheaper and a whole lot more
convenient.
Then they learned about natural burial. They read about RamseyCreek Preserve, where the dead are buried sans embalming in a Southern pine
forest. Saw pictures of handsome caskets made from wicker, sea grass, plain
pine boards, and other readily biodegradable materials. Learned that it was
possible to hold home funerals, build their own coffins, and return one’s
remains to some beautiful natural environment -- to push up a tree, nourish a
meadow, and rejoin the natural cycle that turns to benefit all those we leave
behind. And all this without the environmental drag of cremation, with its high
energy costs and resulting emissions.
Those families promptly changed their plans.
My evidence is anecdotally, I know. But it’s in keeping with
a couple of early surveys showing that roughly a quarter (and more) of
respondents say they are interested in green burial. A percentage that will
only grow, I’m convinced, as word about green burial spreads and as the number
of green cemeteries, home funeral providers, eco-casket makers and the like
continues to increase.
As it does, the cremation rate will dip. At the very least,
it won’t climb anywhere near as high as industry prognosticators would have us
believe.
An early sign that a shift may already be underway comes from one of
those Euro-cremation nations itself, Sweden, where a couple of years ago the
popularity of earth burial rose for the first time in 70 years. The environmental
benefits of burial over cremation was a main driver.
Green burial. When I look to the future, I see it's where
we’re headed.
Mark Harris, author Grave Matters, “The signature book of the green burial
trend,” Bangor Daily News
When I first began investigating the emerging green burial movement back in the early 2000s, you could just about survey this country's natural cemetery
landscape in a single sweep.
There was a budding graveyard on a family farm halfway across
the Florida Panhandle, another one ensconced in a pine forest north of Houston,
a few others. And then the flagship operation at South Carolina’s RamseyCreek Preserve, ground zero for the chapter in Grave Matters on the natural cemetery
What a difference a decade makes.
Today, my very rough tally puts the number of natural
cemeteries in the United States near 150, all scattered across nearly 40 states.
And counting. (My definition of the green cemetery is equally rough: it’s one
that allows for the vaultless burial of an unembalmed body, which is then shrouded
and/or casketed in biodegradable material).
Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these new natural burial
grounds take root within the environs of existing, traditional cemeteries. As anyone
who has tried to start a natural cemetery can tell you, it’s a lot easier to pull off when you have the land, infrastructure (backhoes, staff, etc.), and approvals
from the get-go.
Some of these “hybrid” cemeteries, as they’re sometimes
called, are places like Mound Cemetery (in the greater Minneapolis area), which
allow for vaultless burial anywhere on their grounds. Others have set aside special
preserves for green burial only. That’s what we did at Green Meadow (in eastern
Pennsylvania, pictured below), transforming a fallow field at the edge of the cemetery into a
meadow of wildflowers and native grasses (not as simple as it sounds, turns out).
If my conversations with alt.burialists and cemetery
managers is any indication, the natural burial movement is poised to take off in
these established hallowed grounds. One recent indication: Mount Auburn
(Boston area), the first rural cemetery in this country (1831), is set to go green. (Join me in celebrating that at a free, afternoon event, on June 14th.)
A number of other natural cemeteries have rooted themselves
on their own property, be it a forest, family farm, municipal land, or, in one
case, a golf course. The greenest of the bunch -- the conservation burial ground -- uses the green cemetery model to preserve land and restore it to ecological health,
ala Ramsey Creek, that first and enduring flagship.
My survey of the green burial movement since the publication
of Grave Matters has shown me what I felt would be true from the moment I first emerged from Ramsey Creek all those years ago: that green
cemeteries are changing the face of death in America.
In large part, I think
that’s because green burial is not, in the end, a concept that speaks solely -- or even largely -- to off-gridders and hybrid drive motorists. With its lower
cost, simplicity, DIY approach and respect for tradition, green burial speaks
to old-fashioned American values that still have a strong purchase on this
country. Which explains, for one, why there are both Wiccan and Jewish green
cemeteries (click on Gan Yarok), plus some dozen Catholic graveyards to boot.
The numbers don't lie: Green burial is a big tent, not fringe, phenomenon. And it’s just getting started.
You’ll find a list of green cemeteries that have earned the
Green Burial Council’s seal of approval here. Some two dozen have signed the Natural End Pledge. A listing maintained by the Funeral Consumers Alliance is
here (click on 2014 Green Cemetery List). Don’t see anything near you? Email me: mark@gravematters.us
Mark Harris, author Grave Matters, “The signature book of the green burial
trend.”
Bethlehem, PA. Moravian
College, 1200 Main Street.
I’ll be giving a presentation on memoir writing, at a wonderful,
weekend writers’ conference. If you’re a writer, this conference is well worth
attending.
On a bright, sultry morning a few weeks ago, my family hiked up the small, blueberry-topped mountain that lies a few miles from the summer home my in-laws own in the wilds of New Hampshire.
When we reached the summit, Theresa set her pack on a granite boulder, looked out to the forested horizon and made the announcement that's become a standard feature of our annual trek into local blueberry territory: "Now don't forget," my wife said to me, our two teenage daughters and, seemingly, the universe. "This is where I want to be buried when I die."
We hardly needed the reminder. Theresa has talked long and openly about her final wishes. Even in grade school our daughters could (and sometimes did) recite the brief of her burial plans to their astonished classmates: My Mama wants to be cremated, have her ashes put in a paper bag and buried under a blueberry bush in New Hampshire.
The blueberry mountain is, our girls know, Theresa's special place. From early childhood on, my wife has been coming to this lush and verdant hill, to hike, pick blueberries, and for at least a few hours commune with a natural world that couldn't look any more pristine and untrammeled. Stand at the peak beside the lone fire tower here and all you'll see is a hilltop overrun in blueberry and raspberry bushes and, beyond, stretching into the far distance in every direction, an undulating and unbroken landscape of trees.
For almost fifty years, Theresa has absorbed this place. Its clean air has filled her lungs; its colors and calm and rhythms have filled her being. In all that time, this wooded corner of the Granite State has, metaphorically but also quite literally, become a part of who she is. Of course, she would want to return here at the end.
When it comes, my wife's green burial on blueberry mountain will rejoin her with the elements that so infused and inspired her in life. At the last, she will simply be one with her beloved patch of earth.
And when she is, her children can come and find their mother in Mother Nature -- in these blueberry bushes and red maples, on the winding trail up this mountain and at its peak -- where she lives on.
A green burial can save us money. It's good for the planet, hews to honorable tradition, and celebrates our loved ones. More than all that, it returns our departed to the natural cycle of life -- of life and death, decay and rebirth -- that turns forever. And in that way, gains them immortality.
Mark Harris
author of Grave Matters
"The signature book on the green burial trend." Bangor Daily News
Upcoming Events:
November 7, Northampton Community College (Bethlehem, PA)
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)
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) On Facebook (Grave Matters)
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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
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)
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.
*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)
