Eco-Friendly Burial Sites Give a Chance to Be Green Forever

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August 13, 2005
Eco-Friendly Burial Sites Give a Chance to Be Green Forever
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Tommy Odom's remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.

When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.

With Fernwood's debut, Mr. Cassity, who likened Mr. Odom's burial to the musical "Hair," became an impresario in a fledgling movement that originated in England.

Fernwood, which has designated about half of its 32 acres green, tries to make death palatable to baby boomers and to simplify an inevitable aspect of life dominated by "the black suits" in America's roughly $15 billion funeral industry. In the United States, the "green" concept is now in use at a handful of cemeteries, compared with about 140 woodland cemeteries in England.

In the green scheme of things, death becomes a vehicle for land conservation and saving the planet. "It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse."

But just what is a politically correct corpse is an increasingly thorny issue. In recent months, there has been a struggle for the soul of the emerging industry between Mr. Cassity, an enfant terrible of the funeral business, who has made a fortune producing A&E-style digitized biographies of the dead, and Dr. Billy Campbell, who pioneered the movement in the United States and who has the studious intensity of a somewhat nerdy birder.

Dr. Campbell, a small-town physician prone to quoting John Muir and Coleridge, opened the first of the United States' green burial grounds, the 350-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. There, the departed are buried dust-to-dust-style without embalming - a practice called toxic, artificial and bizarre by critics - in biodegradable coffins or cremation urns that make impervious coffins and grave liners obsolete.

Dr. Campbell was consulting until seven months ago on Fernwood, where eco-interment, also known as an "easement," can cost upward of $15,000 for a prime plot or as little as a few hundred dollars for a scattering of ashes.

Frustrated that conservation easements were not yet in place, he left to form a nonprofit group and a consulting firm in Marin County, Calif, dedicated to land conservation and "little boutique cemeteries with a social justice component," in the words of Joe Sehee, 44, a former Jesuit lay minister and marketing consultant, who is Dr. Campbell's partner.

Dr. Campbell and his former partner are a study in contrasts: Mr. Cassity fantasizes about being buried in cashmere; Dr. Campbell, in a shroud made up of old T-shirts, including "inflammatory ones from the last election," he said.

They are vying for the millions of baby boomers who are expected to die by 2040. The generation of composters who wrote their own wedding vows and opted for natural childbirth is expected to look for something different in death, as a lead character in the HBO series "Six Feet Under" did recently, receiving a green burial in a wooded nature preserve.

"There is a huge generation of people entering accelerated mortality who grew up with the first Earth Day," said Dr. Campbell, who started his eco-cemetery after he was left cold by the prepackaged funeral for his father. "People are ready for something more meaningful."

Mr. Cassity, a GQ-ish sort with rock-star stubble who wears sunglasses indoors, has cultural feelers well tuned for the business. He previously did an extreme makeover of Hollywood Memorial Park, the formerly bankrupt final resting place of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr. With his brother Brent, 38, he runs Forever Enterprises, a Missouri company with cemeteries, cremation societies and a coffin business.

Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.

As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north.

"We're in a market, Marin County, where 81 percent chose cremation, an extreme and unprecedented number," Mr. Cassity said.

"Death goes in cycles," he continued. "My best guess is we're finished with the nihilistic 'Let's get it done quick and throw me into the sea thing.' Now, it's, 'Return me to nature and help save the planet.' "

The presence of Fernwood, where the official hearse is a black Volvo S.U.V., in the cool verdant shadows of Mount Tamalpais, reflects Northern California's status as the nation's capital of alternative, artisanal death. The area is home to the death-midwifery movement, supporting home funerals, as well as a cottage industry in plain pine boxes and Funeria, a fraternity of funerary artists who have their own Biennale in San Francisco.

Those opting for eco-burial at Fernwood can buy coffins made of wicker or bamboo, shrouds in a hemp-silk blend and soon, $5,000 "Eco-pods" - a British import made from recycled newspapers and non-toxic glue meant to be a cross between a sarcophagus and a seed pod.

Near the forest path here lies Carolyn Reese Sloss, who died this year at age 84, her cremated remains interred in a biodegradable papier-mâché urn.

Her daughter, Martha Sloss, 52, a psychotherapist, and son-in-law, Murray Silverman, 62, a professor of management at San Francisco State, have reserved their easements in the natural part of the cemetery, a woolly landscape devoid of conventional headstones and navigated by a handheld GPS system. (To come is a lightweight computer that will allow strollers to view digital biographies.)

"As an American, I take up too much of an environmental footprint already," Mr. Silverman said. "To me, taking up more of one after I die is pathetic."

This year, Dr. Campbell, 49, "went ballistic," he said, when he discovered that Fernwood was not adhering to strict environmental precepts, planting inappropriate trees in coastal prairie and digging up land reserved for natural burial with a backhoe.

Dr. Campbell also said he thought that refrigeration would be promoted rather than embalming, which still endures in the older, conventional part of the cemetery, accomplished by a freelance embalmer, known as Dead Ed, on a bicycle.

Dr. Campbell's nonprofit Center for Ethical Burial is developing environmental standards and a strict eco-aesthetic that will preclude hothouse flowers or "gaudy markers marching up the hill," he said.

Ernest Cook, senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, the national conservation group, who is on the center's board, said that although cemeteries were by nature essentially open spaces, conservation easements to nonprofit land trusts or government agencies would ensure that "the environmental values and concepts you're buying into would be absolutely guaranteed in perpetuity."

If the cemetery is part of a larger landscape undergoing conservation, people who wish to be interred or their heirs could bequeath money to the cause. "If land can be preserved and restored," Mr. Cook said, "it could potentially change the way Americans feel about burial."

The future of green burial may lie with people like Jerry Draper, 53, a computer systems analyst and organic farmer in San Anselmo who is thinking about putting in a green cemetery on an 11-acre lot he owns to avoid selling it off for subdivisions.

"It's about taking responsibility, leaving the campground cleaner than when you left it," he said. "It's about being a Prius instead of a Hummer."