Story Tools
This past summer we found ourselves convening in Midwestern farm country, burying my grandmother’s ashes in a small, hilly graveyard across the narrow street from her old parish church, alongside the graves of her parents and little brother, planting sunflowers on top, and leaving them to mingle with the Earth in the part of the world where my grandmother grew up.
But more often than not, in my family, salt water is usually our preferred final resting place. We mourners charter a boat to take us out into the bay where we have swum and sailed for more than 50 years. When the boat stops, someone says a few words and then we take turns reaching into the box of ashes, grabbing handfuls and scattering them over the side. We toss flowers in, too, and watch those bob on the surface while the ashes disappear. And then, no matter how bereft we are without the person, we wipe their granular, oily sticky ashes off our hands and head back to shore.
Burn or Bury?
Once considered taboo in Western cultures, cremation has resurged as an environmentally responsible way to dispose of the dead, speaking to what is a larger case for the greening of the death industry.
The Roman Catholic Church prohibited the practice from 1886 to 1963 because of its belief that the human body was created in the image of God and therefore sacred. Destroying it through burning would be a sign of disrespect. American culture frowned on it, too, vastly preferring the approach to death that funeral directors established in the mid-19th century—one which involved laying out a body for mourner’s to view, often with the aid of embalming fluids to stave off decomposition. In 1975, only six percent of people who died in the United States were cremated, according to the Chicago-based Cremation Association of North America. But the cultural preference has changed so swiftly and steadily that by 2005, the figure had risen to 32.28 percent. In New York, it was 23.03 percent.
Cremation is considered better than burial according to environmental journalist Mark Harris who makes an astonishingly gruesome case against the standard death-care route in his book, Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 2007).
Harris arranges the alternatives in a hierarchy of least to most green, beginning with cremation, which is a step up from burial partly because it avoids burying wood (30 million feet a year go into making caskets), concrete, metal and formaldehyde-pumped bodies in cemeteries whose greenery is most likely maintained by heavy use of pesticides. It also doesn’t use up any land—a reason, surely, that acreage-limited Hawaii leads the nation in cremation rates, at 66.32 percent. But cremation burns fossil fuels and releases carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, trace metals and mercury into the environment. (The Green Burial Council is developing standards for ecologically responsible cremation, expected to be finalized this year.)
“ ‘Ashes to ashes’ didn’t come out of thin air,” says Joe Sehee, founder and executive director of the Green Burial Council, a Santa Fe, N.M.-based non-profit dedicated to environmentally sustainable death-care practices. “It’s really in our cultural DNA.
What’s more, Sehee adds, with many baby boomers having reached the age when they’re thinking about practical issues of mortality, there’s a built-in market of people who care about issues like environmental sustainability and legacy—a whole generation that, as it happens, has always bristled at the idea of doing things the way their parents did them. Like the midwives who challenged the American medical establishment 30 years ago and changed the way babies came into the world, Sehee says green-burial activists will change the way this country deals with death, making burial more natural, more personal, less mediated by industry.
Yet, burial still remains the preferred funeral practice among most Americans, but unlike standard funerals and burials, rife with chemicals and non-biodegradable materials, the green variations have little, if any, negative effect on the environment. Ideally, they have a positive impact, as in burial grounds like Greensprings Natural Cemetery in Newfield, N.Y., the state’s only natural cemetery, where land restoration is part of the mission.
During the next couple of months, the Green Burial Council will unveil its directory of approved cemetery and funeral providers in various states, including New York. So far, those providers tend to be upstate rather than on Long Island, but Sehee says the council will work with consumers here to help them get the eco-friendly services they need and decline the environmentally harmful practices they don’t need.
An Unnatural End
Harris writes that “the once simple and natural act of laying our dead to rest has been transmogrified into a large-scale industrial operation that, like any other manufacturing process, requires the inputs of vast amounts of energy and raw materials and leaves a trail of environmental damage in its wake.”
His book makes an astonishingly gruesome case against going the standard death-care route by beginning with a chapter on embalming that follows the body of a young woman (a composite character, unlike almost all of the other people in “Grave Matters”) through the usual preparation for an open-casket wake, followed by a church funeral and burial in a typical cemetery.
The stomach-turning details are not in the organic processes that occur after death but in the wholly unnatural ravaging of the body that takes place in the embalming room: the phenol-soaked cotton that’s stuffed into orifices, the shaving of the face (whether the body is male or female, adult or child) so that makeup goes on smoothly, the binding and sometimes sewing together of breasts so that they display properly in the casket, the cementing shut of eyelids, the wiring of jaws to keep them closed, the filling and shaping of mouths with putty so that they look more pleasing to mourners. And then there’s the embalming itself: the draining of the blood through the jugular vein, the injection into the carotid artery of a formaldehyde solution, the puncturing of organs in the torso and vacuuming out of the materials they release, the flooding of the abdominal cavity with an undiluted combination of formaldehyde and phenol.
Although individual funeral homes may require that bodies be embalmed, the law does not—a point Harris and green-burial advocates like Sehee make repeatedly, in part because of the widespread impression that embalming is non-negotiable. “No one wants to be embalmed,” Sehee says. “This should’ve been an anachronism years ago, and it will be, I predict.”
As Harris writes, “Embalming restores a lifelike appearance to the deceased. Refrigeration, an alternative means of preserving a body, does not, which may only matter if you expect the dead to resemble the living.”
But embalming, which uses 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde each year, is not the only environmental culprit. Metal caskets, Harris says, use nearly 2,700 tons of bronze and copper and more than 90,000 tons of steel annually in the United States, while the burial vaults stipulated by most cemeteries, but not by law, require more than 1.5 million tons of reinforced concrete and 14,000 tons of steel each year. (Though Muslim and Jewish law require that the body come into contact with the soil naturally, Sehee says even some Muslim and Jewish burial grounds now require vaults—a regulation that can be disturbing to their customers.)
Metal caskets and burial vaults, Harris writes, are “industrial structures expressly designed ... to prevent [the body’s] contact with the Earth and the elements that surround [it] on all sides.” Decay is inevitable, of course, but any normal organic process of returning dust to dust is forestalled. Harris bolsters his case with plenty of repellent details here, too.
Better Burial
Unsurprisingly, then, each of the other options he describes in the book seems more appealing, and more ecologically responsible, than standard-issue funeral and burial. They are also, by the way, cheaper; each one comes in at significantly less than the $10,000 price of the average American funeral.
In rural Virginia, for example, Harris profiles a woman who chose to be buried in a clearing on a friend’s land, a short walk down the lane from her home. There was no casket; instead, she was wrapped in a sheet. He delves into home funerals, which are not legal in New York, and, in one of the book’s most moving chapters, examines the option of being buried in a carpenter-made wooden casket. The man he profiles, an octogenarian retired farmer in Iowa, is no activist, just a man who sees being buried in an unadorned pine box as the most sensible course to take.
Harris reaches the green-burial pinnacle with the story of a young stonemason who was buried at Westminster, S.C.’s wooded Ramsey Creek Preserve, an ecological cemetery. Embalming and burial vaults are prohibited there, and bodies are placed in the ground in cloth shrouds or in biodegradable caskets of untreated wood or cardboard. As at Greensprings, burials there are intended to restore the natural ecology.
These examples make a strong point: Eco-friendly death practices—long in use in Europe may be gaining support here. This past summer, even People Magazine ran a multi-page spread on the subject. It seems that to a growing number of activists and ordinary citizens, it simply makes sense to return to the Earth in a way that doesn’t harm it—a way that was the human tradition until the funeral industry took hold.
Hallmarks of a Green Burial
The body is not embalmed. While standard, it is not required by law.
The body is buried in a cloth shroud or biodegradable casket made of cardboard or plain wood.
The grave does not house a burial vault. While standard they are not required by law.
Ideally, the burial not only does not harm, but actually restores the land as the body’s decomposition contributes to the ecosystem.
Green Funeral Resources
Green Burial Council: Can supply names of cemeteries and funeral directors willing to provide services without the use of formaldehyde-based embalming, cemetery vaults or non-biodegradable caskets. (888) 966-3330, info@greenburialcouncil.org, or www.decentburial.org
Greensprings Natural Cemetery, 293 Irish Hill Rd., P.O. Box 415, Newfield, N.Y. 14867 (607) 564 7577, or www.naturalburial.org
Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 2007) by Mark Harris, $24.
Kathleen, Friday, November 09, 2007 at 11:34 AMMy sister passed away just one year ago and astonished many with her request not to be embalmed. It was her fervent desire that her body not poison the earth after her death. We willingly complied with her wishes. The funeral director was first reluctant, but met our demands. She was later cremated and her ashes scattered over an Adirondacks lake.
Jo Ann, Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 12:57 PMI am interested in Green burial, is there a list of states that permit this?
Thank you,
Jo Ann
