Green burials offer an eco-friendly alternative to traditional methods
If you’re like most people, you probably think that your environmental footprint disappears from the planet once you’re dead and gone. After all, what harm could you possibly do? But it seems even the dead aren’t off the hook. Whether you choose to make your final exit six-feet under or up in smoke, according to Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council, and Dr. Billy Campbell, founder of Ramsey Creek Preserve, your death will leave a mark, and it’s going to hurt.
“I think people have really been lied to about how neat and tidy conventional death care is,” Sehee said. “It is anything but that.”
So, if you are looking for an eco-friendly way to check out that doesn’t require fossil fuels and pollute the air with cancer- causing dioxins and mercury, like cremation, or potentially leach formaldehyde into the ground, like conventional burial, according to Campbell and Sehee, what you want is a green burial.
Death warmed over
In a conventional cemetery, your corpse would be placed in a casket, which is then enclosed in a concrete box and buried deep in the earth.
“What people don’t understand, which I think they need to, is that the ‘hygienic’ way of death that is sold to us is not that hygienic,” Sehee said. “What you are really forcing corpses to contend with is anaerobic bacteria, which, when you’re putting bodies in vaults and sealed coffins, causes liquification and putrification and body cavities to burst and all sorts of things.”
A dying business
Besides becoming a human stew, there are ecological problems with conventional body burial such as the potential for embalmed bodies to leach formaldehyde into the ground. “There are some concrete vaults that will trap the chemicals at the bottom of the vault,” Sehee said. “However, the earth shifts, and there are vaults that crack, and it gets in there that way.”
“Formaldehyde has been regarded as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization and many other international organizations,” Sehee said. “It’s on the probable list of carcinogens by our own EPA.
“It’s been associated with nasal cancer and leukemia and other diseases, and we have no baseline data about what the environmental impact is of the nearly 900,000 gallons of embalming fluid that is dumped into the ground each year.
Thinking outside the box
In contrast, green burial works with nature, not against it.
“There is no need for toxins or materials that aren’t biodegradable to be used,” Sehee said.
Green burial allows us to “get in sync with the natural process of death and decay and regeneration that we see all around us,” he added.
While conventional burial separates the body from the earth, green burials put it to good use.
In green burial, an un-embalmed body is wrapped in a shroud or placed in a biodegradable container. It is buried in a shallow grave — about 3 1/2 feet deep — where microbe-rich soil exists to efficiently break down the body naturally. “If you bury a body 6 feet deep,” Campbell said, “you’re not going to return to kind of the living layer of the earth anytime soon.”
Above ground, two to three feet of topsoil is mounded on top, and the grave is marked with a living object, such as a tree or wildflowers, or a GPS tag or some type of inconspicuous ecologically functional marker like a boulder.
Unlike a conventional cemetery, which packs in the dead at around 1,000 per acre, a green cemetery has an underground population of around 100 per acre.
Decomposing the myths
“This way of burial has been done for thousands and thousands of years,” Campbell’s wife, Kimberley, said, “and it’s a very efficient and safe way of disposing of the dead.”
Nevertheless, burying bodies au natural today often conjures up fear of disease, foraging animals and water contamination. “I’m a physician,” Campbell, a medical doctor in practice for 23 years, said, “and I can tell you that the human body doesn’t turn radioactive when you die.
“If you have someone with a really high rate of infectious disease, the best thing you can do is put the body in a box and cremate the box and the body or bury the body. That is the safest thing to do for the public health.”
Campbell said that U.K. scientific reports and soil scientists who specialize in groundwater confirm that water contamination is not a problem with green burial.
“By the time the water percolates that many feet and outcrops in a spring,” Campbell said, “there is absolutely no way there is going to be anything alive (in the water).
“If anything, the things more likely to get into the water table would be things like formaldehyde, which really doesn’t degrade. That’s the reason why it is an embalming fluid. It lasts for a long time.”
As far as hungry beasts digging up corpses for a tasty midnight snack, Campbell said, “We get that (question) all the time, but this is a low-tech solution to that very problem. Back in the days when we had much larger omnivores like grizzly bears and things, in California the pioneer cemeteries did quite well. A very effective way of keeping animals away from a body is burying it several feet underground. It really does work.”
Life from the dead
The dearly departed aren’t the only ones welcome at a green burial ground.
“These can be places that are multipurpose,” Sehee said. “They can be suitable for weddings, you know, hikes and interpretive centers and all sorts of interesting things. We are talking about kind of reinventing the cemetery idea.”
More than an eco-friendly way to dispose of the dead, Sehee and Campbell say green burial is also a land conservation strategy.
In addition to Ramsey Creek Preserve, America’s first green burial ground, Campbell founded Memorial Ecosystems, Inc., a firm that develops and operates green burial grounds.
“Our goal, in the next 30 years, is to help save over a million acres,” Campbell said. “Our model, as far as our business right now, is not to own the land ourselves but to help land trusts, religious institutions and universities to permanently protect large pieces of land. That’s kind of our goal – to become a major force in land protection.”
In an attempt to curtail potential green-washing, the practice of falsely marketing oneself as eco-friendly, Sehee founded the non-profit Green Burial Council to establish levels of standards for green burial and provide certification.
“I think a lot of people who like this idea just think it’s as simple as digging holes in the ground,” Sehee said. “Well, I’m not one of those people who believe that, and Dr. Campbell is not either.
“We think it has to be done properly, and we are concerned that some people who like this idea don’t really have the same concerns and can potentially give the movement a black eye by causing some damage. That is why we are trying to get ahead of things with the standards.”
A grassroots movement
People seem to be warming up to the concept of going green.
In the U.K., around 200 green burial grounds have emerged over the past several years. And in the last two years, it is finally gaining ground here. The U.S. has a total of four green burial grounds located in South Carolina, Texas, Florida and New York, Sehee said.
And Michigan may soon be added to that list.
“We have two sites that we’re working on with owners in Michigan in Lapeer County and Oakland County who would like to do green burial,” Sehee said.
Although Sehee doesn’t have exact figures, he estimates that between 300 and 500 green burials have taken place in the U.S. with close to that number of plots purchased for future use.
Putting your money where your corpse is
Securing an eco-friendly ticket from here to eternity doesn’t have to eat up an inheritance either.
“Green burial is usually less than conventional burial because you’re not paying for a lot of the same things,” Sehee said. “You don’t need to have a casket if you don’t want — a shroud can be used. You’re not going to be paying for embalming, obviously. You’re not going to be paying for a concrete burial vault.”
“But some people that I know of have also paid a fair amount of money. Some people don’t mind, if they are getting value,” Sehee said. “A lot of people who don’t want to spend $5,000 on a bulletproof casket don’t mind spending more if half of the proceeds go down to restoring or acquiring or stewarding a natural area and that is part of their legacy.”
In the end, your legacy and being a good steward of the earth is what Sehee and Campbell say green burial is all about.
“It allows people to connect to a bigger story,” Sehee said. “It lets people know that their last act on earth can further a greater good and help heal
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By Wendy Lyons, Contributing Reporter, Oakland Post Online
