Dying outside the box
If you could be buried on a piece of land and turn into a tree, and you’re in a greenbelt, a conservation easement, and you’re offsetting the carbon suck that you did when you were alive, would you do it?” Cynthia Beal asks. “And everyone says to me, ‘I want to be a tree.’ ”
Beal, the former longtime owner of the Eugene natural-foods store Red Barn, is describing her latest pitch: natural burial. Otherwise known as “green” burial. Or ecoburial. Whatever the terminology, the idea is the same: returning to the earth after death in the most sustainable way possible.
It’s not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but it’s certainly the cleanest. No toxic chemicals from elaborate caskets or embalming fluids. No air pollution or energy waste from cremation. Just you, a shroud or biodegradable casket, and the earth.
In Britain, natural burial has really sunk in. The Association of Natural Burial Grounds was created there in 1994, and today the country has some 200 green-burial grounds open or planned.
Stateside, there are only six woodland cemeteries created exclusively for ecofriendly burials, with three more in the planning stages.
Operators of traditional cemeteries, keeping their ears to the ground, are starting to set aside undeveloped property for green burials. Beal’s latest venture, the Natural Burial Company, is a Eugene- and Portland-based business aiming to connect ecopurveyors of caskets, urns and other wares with consumers and funeral providers. And many local cemeteries have long offered “natural disposition,” or a minimalist burial that’s pretty close to what nature may have intended.
“Oregon law says that within 24 hours of death, the body must be refrigerated, embalmed, buried or cremated,” says David LaFollette, a funeral director at Riverview Abbey in Southwest Portland.
“But usually the burial doesn’t take place within 24 hours. If the family wants the natural-disposition option, we use refrigeration and then caskets that don’t use any metal — just wooden dowels and such.”
Most conventional cemeteries place caskets inside a large concrete box called a grave liner or outer burial container. “It’s got four sides and a bottom, with a hole to drain water out,” LaFollette says. “And there’s a concrete lid on top to complete it.”
The grave liner serves two purposes: keeping the dirt above the grave from subsiding as the body and casket decompose, and preventing gravedigging equipment from accidentally crunching into a casket. Without the liners, LaFollette points out, a cemetery eventually would take on the gothic look of old pioneer cemeteries, with tombstones slanting this way and that — the “dip effect,” he calls it.
Many communities in the Portland area, however, have long been burying their dead with a modified form of traditional burial: no embalming, sometimes no casket, and no bottom on the grave liner.
“With some of our Vietnamese Buddhist families, and with the Hmong church, they want to be buried touching the earth,” says Michael Orcutt, the funeral-home manager at Rose City Cemetery in Northeast Portland. “So we don’t use a traditional concrete liner. The casket sits directly on the earth with a vault over it to keep it from settling.”
David Noble, the executive director of Portland’s River View Cemetery, says that Jews and Muslims also traditionally require direct earth contact in their burials. “It’s a compromise,” he says.
The setting differs, too
Proponents of natural burial aim deeper than just six feet under. The country’s six ecocemeteries forgo clipped lawns and tombstone rows in favor of forested nature trails and such memorials as trees and boulders.
At Valley Memorial Park in Hillsboro, portions of the park have just been opened for green burial, with trails winding along a lake and through trees.
“It’s not neatly mowed and manicured,” says David Schroeder, Valley Memorial’s executive director. “We cut some trails through, and for memorials we use trees that were naturally growing there or that would be planted there, or a stone or rock or boulder or flat paver that would be indigenous to the area. It’s more of a parklike setting than a graveyard.”
Schroeder says that a green burial looks just like the traditional image of a burial, with a mound of dirt piled on top. “It’s more of an old-school manner,” he says. “As the natural decomposition takes place, both of the container and the body, the mound naturally sinks down. If it sinks more than what we want it to, we would just bring more dirt in.”
Schroeder’s family previously owned the Valley Memorial Park property but sold it more than a dozen years ago. In 2004, Schroeder and his company, Western Management Services, bought the property back with the intention of offering green burial as one of the park’s funeral options.
“It’s so pretty, and so close to the city,” Schroeder says. “And over the last three or four years or so, there’s been a growing interest in green burial, and not a lot of cemeteries that offer it.”
River View’s Noble agrees. “It’s really hard these days to just start a cemetery from scratch, to go out and find land that will be zoned for a cemetery and the neighbors won’t be mad at you,” he says.
“But a lot of cemeteries have undeveloped land they could use for natural burials. We have a considerable amount of wooded terrain that would be very conducive to this sort of thing, so I would not be surprised to see this be developed as demand for this service increases.”
Noble thinks that, as the baby-boomer generation buries its parents and grows old itself, funerals will change to reflect the desires of the dying. “You’ve got to be semiclose to retirement, and living where you think you’ll be staying until you die, and having people close to you dying — it’s really only then that people start thinking about what they want and start asking about it,” he says.
“I don’t think that most people in their 70s and 80s right now are terribly into (natural burials), but people in their 40s and 50s are.”
Beal, a baby boomer herself, agrees. “Friends say to me, ‘I don’t want to take up space, I want to be cremated,’ ” she says. “But would you rather be a box, or a tree?”
Cremation is generally the cheapest funeral option, and it’s the preferred exit in the western third of the country; Oregon’s cremation rate of just over 60 percent is more than double that of the nation overall. Through her company, Beal offers such crematory items as glass-ash orbs and personalized urns, but she’s concerned about the environmental fallout of cremation.
Schroeder points out that crematories built within the past 10 years are highly efficient and have “next to no air pollution.” But they do rely on fossil fuels to generate fire, and they still have some emissions.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, crematories release more than 200 pounds of mercury each year, or less than 1 percent of the total mercury emissions in the U.S. (The mercury comes mostly from dental fillings.)
Early adopters can lead way
Beal draws a parallel between natural foods, her previous career, and natural burials, her current one.
“Organic foods started as a fad, as something hippie nutcases were doing,” she says. “It took a while for the paradigm to shift and for people to understand. People really do want clean food; they just didn’t know they did, or how to describe it. In 1992, I was explaining ‘organic’ 10 times a day. Natural burials are much easier; people just get it faster.”
In the summer of 2004, just after starting the Natural Burial Company, Beal was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. “Suddenly it became more personal,” she says. “I had to do surgery, I was trying to take care of all my pieces, my will, etc. And I realized that if I didn’t stipulate what I wanted (after death), my friends wouldn’t know what I wanted.
“So I wrote it all out,” she says. “I wanted to turn into a tree, an Oregon cherry, and be harvested at 80 years of age and given to the wood turners at the technical school. And when I got through (the surgery), I thought, ‘OK, I need to go do this thing and to make this happen.’ ”
“People don’t like to talk about death, but it is healthy to talk about it,” Schroeder says. “It’s a part of life —an unfortunate part, but it is part.”
Along the lake and creek at Valley Memorial are wild tangles of blackberries.
“There’s millions growing down there,” Schroeder says. “Just yesterday I was down there. I’m going to make a nice pie.”