Green Burials: Opting for Eco-Friendly Graves

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These are the people Dr. Billy Campbell, a South Carolina physician and owner of Ramsey Creek, is thinking of when he offers his land for "green" burials-a natural, environmentally sensitive option that bans metal caskets, concrete vaults, and toxic embalming fluids. Campbell believes funeral homes take advantage of people's grief in order to sell them expensive services, and he appeals to the top two reasons cited by those who choose cremation: lower expenses and land conservation.

"If you come to Ramsey Creek, it's a walk in the woods. You wouldn't even know you were in a cemetery," says Campbell. "You see trees fallen, butterflies in the air, metallic green damselflies with black wings, pit-mound topography. It looks like an old-growth forest. And that's different from being on the side of the road in a casket." Ramsey Creek is more than a burial site; it is a nature park where anyone can visit and learn about indigenous animals and plants. It is, as Campbell calls it, a "community nature sanctuary."

Because laws protect cemeteries from future development, turning these sanctuaries into burial grounds is a means of preserving wilderness. Since opening Ramsey Creek for burials in 1996, Campbell has worked hard to preserve more pristine wilderness. He helped John Wilkerson open the Glendale Memorial Nature Preserve, a 350-acre longleaf pine and wiregrass ecosystem in Florida's panhandle. And a recent partnership with cemetery owner and operator Forever Enterprises will soon result in the dedication of sixteen pristine acres of an existing forty-acre cemetery in Marin County, California, to natural, low-density burial.

These partnerships will test the response of both the funeral industry and the green burial market. "When you innovate, you have to know from within what you are changing," says Forever Enterprises president Tyler Cassity. He considers Ramsey Creek a strong prototype because, although it has seen only twenty burials to date, people from as far away as California have sent remains of their loved ones to the site in the deep South and forty more plots have been purchased in advance.

But Campbell thinks the appeal of natural burial lies deeper: in our universal yearning for simplicity and a connection to nature. "Even people you would not identify as environmentalists, they've always loved the woods," he says. "You come to see this site as sacred, no matter what you think about nature."

In the unmanicured woods of Ramsey Creek, native, wild plants flower and fade with the seasons. Burials are limited to 100 per acre, in contrast to the average of about 1,000 per acre in a modern cemetery. The dirt from a gravesite is carefully extracted, preserving the soil profile, and then replaced above the body, which can be buried in a simple, untreated cardboard or wooden box, or no box at all. As the body decays, the burial mound settles back to level. Ramsey Creek allows an engraved flat stone from the property to be lain flat over the burial site, but even unmarked gravesites are easily located with modern-day global positioning systems.

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