Greener Ways to the Great Beyond

Image Gallery COURTESY FINAL PASSAGES

Here's how to ensure your final resting place is earth friendly and priced right.

By Nancy Smith

A typical, no-frills funeral and burial in the United States costs from $6,000 to $10,000, uses formaldehyde in embalming, nondegradable steel caskets and concrete vaults placed shoulder to shoulder in established cemeteries.

Burial in a green or natural cemetery, on the other hand, can cost half as touch, and embalming mortal caskets and concrete burial vault's are prohibited. Instead, biodegradable caskets, usually made of wood or cardboard, or burial shrouds of natural fibers are used. Green cemetery graves are placed randomly throughout a woodland or meadow, and marked only in natural ways, with the planting of a tree or shrub, or the placement of a flat indigenous stone, which may or may not be engraved. Burial locations are mapped with a GIS (geographic information system), so future generations can locate an ancestors final resting place.

There are more than 200 green cemetery its in Great Britain, and the idea is beginning to catch on here in North America. Lisa Carlson is executive, director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in South Burlington, Vermont, and author of Caring for the Dead, which tackles the topic of funeral law state by state. She reports embalming, expensive caskets anti concrete vaults are: not required by law in any state. Bodies can be kept cool until burial rather than being embalmed and cemeteries require vaults only to prevent soil settling and facilitate grass mowing.

The leader in the emerging green-cemetery business in this country, Carlson says, are Dr. Billy and Kimberley Campbell of Memorial Ecosystems, founded in 1996 in Westminster South Carolina. Their idea is to Use green cemeteries to preserve open space. You can be buried at the Campbells first green cemetery, Ramsey Creek Preserve, in Westminster, and visitors can walk on trails through 32 acres of mixed Woodlands and open fields there.

In Florida, a green cemetery called Glendale Memorial Preserve is being established to save a 350-acre family farm from development. And groups in several other states, inducting Colorado, California, New York, Washington and Wisconsin, have efforts under way to established green cemeteries that center on land preservation. In Canada, the Memorial Society of British Columbia also has a formally funded green-burial initiative under way.