Green Burials

Dr. Billy Campbell's rural family practitioner's office in Westminster, South Carolina, may be the only one in the nation that shares its space with a burial service.

Walk into your average funeral parlor and suggest that your loved one be buried in a tie-dye T-shirt and a poncho, for example, and you might get some funny looks. Then, suggest that you want an unfinished pine casket rather than one of varnished mahogany with rosewood handles, and you might get some unhappy looks. Finally, tell the funeral director that you plan to bring magic makers so that mourners can sign the sides of the casket, and a can of paint so that the deceased's dog add colorful paw prints, and the funeral director might throw you out.

But such requests are not unusual at the Ramsey Creek Preserve, where such a burial actually took place. To Campbell and his wife Kimberley, who run Memorial Ecosystems, it made perfect sense. It wasn't the hippy flavor of the burial that appealed to Campbell, who is credited with starting the nation's first "green cemetery." It was the participation factor: men with shovels – not machines – dug the grave. And the deceased's father built the casket himself.

If, like Campbell, you are sensitive to the planet's complex ecosystems, prefer clothes of natural fibers, drive a hybrid car (when you're not riding your bicycle), prefer solar to nuclear power, and buy organic food, an expensive casket made of rainforest timber would be a permanent blotch on your record. Add toxic embalming fluids and pouring an underground concrete vault to keep your remains safe from Mother Nature to your funeral, and people will wonder why you bothered with tofu and bean sprouts in the first place.

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Woods …

Campbell attended the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, and served his residency at Savannah Memorial Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia. Besides his practice in family medicine, he works on-call emergency room shifts.

He is trim. His frame is slight. He reads voraciously and he jogs routinely. In Westminster, everyone knows him as Billy. He was raised here and his return after medical school was a triumph for the small community where the only other family practitioner was about to retire.

Campbell has an undergraduate degree in biology from Emory University and could once imitate the sounds of over 30 bullfrogs and toads, he says, belching out the resonant belly sounds of pine woods tree frog to prove the point. The office of his rural practice – he is still the only family practitioner in Westminster – has more conservation texts and magazines than medical books. In his youth, he also spent several summers on serious rivers, sometimes as a biology student doing fish counts and sometimes as a whitewater rafting guide. For one summer, he was a guide on the Chattooga River, where the movie Deliverance, was filmed.

His knowledge of the woods is encyclopedic. He knows the trees, the birdcalls, the flowers and ferns. He knows the moisture requirements of some of the rare wildflower species and can tell you how much rainwater will be shed off a square foot of flat stone during a one-inch rain. "Zero point six gallons," he says.

Many years ago, he said, he noticed that funeral costs in the United States topped $26 billion per year, and it occurred to him that 10% of that would fund a lot of conservation.

Then, while he was in medical school, Campbell read Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, a medical anthropology text by Shirley Lindenbaum. The book chronicled an illness in the primitive tribe, which lead to 1976 Nobel laureate D. Carleton Gajdusek's discovery of the spongiform diseases. But it also included a description of "spirit forests," which the Fore people leave untouched – never to enter. These small, set-aside forests, Lindenbaum wrote, "operate as zoning regulations for protection of small, permanent wilderness areas."

Inspired, Campbell applied the idea to American funerals. He believes that participating in the burial process, rather than simply writing a check for someone with a backhoe, offers the possibility that people will reconnect spiritually to the land.

Natural Burial for You?

Of course, you don't have to be a "greenie" to be buried in an organic cemetery. For some, an "ashes to ashes," philosophy simply includes a natural transition of one's body to the ecosystem. Still others prefer the grace and style of a natural setting. "A lot of people just don't want to be buried in a tombstone monoculture," said Mary Woodsen, who helped start Greensprings Natural Cemetery in Newfield, New York.

At Campbell's Ramsey Creek Preserve, a small, but dense woods of the Piedmont Plateau, the burial sites are not always easy to find. The burial mounds under tree cover are slow to flatten, but the tombstones, many of them made of uncut stones indigenous to the area, are all laid flat, so the landscape looks undisturbed. A bona fide conservationist, Campbell says the stone markers also make great nesting spots for snakes.

By using the legal protections from development afforded to cemeteries as a protective shield, Campbell hopes green cemeteries, if the idea catches on, can save 1 million acres in the next 10 years. They would also contribute significantly to a reduction of imported rainforest timber – estimated at 30 million board feet – that is bought and buried each year in the United States. The estimates of an annual use of 826,000 gallons of embalming fluid, thought to increase nasal and throat cancers in morticians, would also be reduced. Tons of steel, copper, and concrete, dropped in the ground during conventional burials, would also be saved.

Green cemeteries that adhere to the standards laid out by the Green Burial Council, which Campbell began in 1998, have already begun in other states, including Texas, Florida, California, New Mexico, and Washington. In Maine and Georgia, green cemeteries are in development stages.

Another advantage, say organic cemetery proponents, is price. Non-profit cemeteries can sell you the burial plot and charge an annual fee for maintenance. Where the idea is to let the land alone as much as possible, however, maintenance costs are greatly reduced. Also, biodegradable cardboard coffins are much cheaper than teak or mahogany, and for those who think that looks tacky, you can borrow a wooden shell that looks fancy, but has a trap door at one end so you can slide the cardboard coffin out when you get to the cemetery.

Woodsen's Greensprings Natural Cemetery is comprised of a 100-acre site on a hilltop in central New York that includes 70 acres of open fields where the burials will take place. The caretaker's cottage, which is the only building on the property, is solar powered. The profit for their venture is more saved land, Woodsen says. Otherwise, they leave Mother Nature alone.

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