Conscious Choice: Dust to Dust?

March 1999

Dust to Dust?

A Greedy Death Industry Prevents Our Return to Nature

by Martin Kaufman

Oak Grove International’s "Summerfield" line is fairly typical of the caskets American funeral directors sell these days; it’s available in nine rich colors, with plush interior velvet trim. And because it’s made of thick, reinforced fiberglass, it won’t biodegrade, "thereby protecting the body from the environment, and the environment from the body, for countless tomorrows," as the Michigan-based company claims on its web page.

And Doric’s "Lydian" burial vault seems a fine receptacle to encase one’s Summerfield. Weighing "as much as an automobile," as the company exclaims, this baby is made of special concrete bonded to reinforced plastic and a third layer of copper. It’s designed to resist 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. With an inner liner of fiber-reinforced Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (the same material used in NFL football helmets), and a butyl seal, the unit nicely resists penetration by soil, air, water, and other things that might "contaminate" the dead body. Who wouldn’t want to be buried in such beautiful, sturdy, protective containers?

Ken West, for one. A founding member of England’s Association of Nature Reserve Burial Grounds, he finds the idea "totally repulsive." Barbara Butler, for another. The proprietor of England’s "Green Undertakings" funeral shop, she is "absolutely appalled" by the idea. "Our jaws dropped when we read about this. It’s so alien to anything we do here I can hardly talk about it. Our belief is that the most humane and natural thing is to let bodies return to the earth and be recycled into trees, grass, and shrubs."

West and Butler are part of a small but growing "green burial" movement that’s providing an illuminating British counterpoint to the lavish American burial. Few Americans even think to question the prevalent practice of isolating the corpse from the earth with strong, nonbiodegradable containers. Perhaps that’s because the death industry has worked hard to give such highly profitable practices the cloak of respectability. Indiana-based Batesville Casket, the U.S.’s largest coffin maker, intones on its web page, "The urge to keep our loved ones protected and safe is fundamental to all of us. No wonder so many families are comforted by the ability to protect their loved ones with the Batesville Monoseal protective casket...designed to prevent the entrance of grave site elements (like water, soil and air) into the casket." Asked whether it was ecologically sound to "protect" the dead body as opposed to letting it return to earth naturally, Batesville spokesperson Chris Feeney emphasized that the company simply was providing a product that consumers demand. But Father Henry Wasielewski, co-founder of the Interfaith Funeral Information Committee, insists such products "are continually being designed and pushed upon families by the funeral industry worldwide to increase profits."

Together, the concrete vault or grave box (required by almost all U.S. cemeteries) and today’s stainless steel, bronze, copper, and fiberglass caskets make for one imposing fortification. Indeed, since defending the corpse from nature seems to be the industry’s goal, someone might legitimately ask why they bother installing it in the earth at all (embedding the body in a cube of Lucite would preserve it better and make an interesting heirloom coffee table). Even wooden caskets buried without a vault have sometimes remained intact for over 300 years. Encapsulated in an airtight vault, they can undoubtedly last much longer.

Then there’s that other nagging matter —because mahogany, commonly used to make "prestige" caskets, grows sporadically, loggers destroy 28 trees for every mahogany tree they harvest, according to Rainforest Action Network. With between 275,000 and 300,000 hard and softwood caskets made in the U.S. each year, according to the Casket and Funeral Supply Association, and assuming Batesville’s claimed 150 to 225 board feet of wood per casket to be fairly standard, the American death industry buries between 41 and 67 million board feet of mostly hardwood per year, and that doesn’t even include the wood used in particleboard caskets. Naturally, this takes its toll on forests here as well as in the Amazon.

England’s green burial movement, spearheaded by the London-based Natural Death Centre, has spawned over 80 nature reserve burial grounds in the U.K., with 40 more planned. In these cemeteries, people are buried in a shroud or biodegradable coffin of wicker or cardboard or other simple material. Instead of a headstone, a tree is planted over the grave. West, who runs the Carlisle Cemetery in northwest England, says people take comfort in knowing their bodies will decompose and become part of the cycle of life. "’From death is created life,’ they often tell me," West comments. The U.K.’s green cemeteries also serve as habitats for many endangered animals.

Another thing they don’t do in green burial is embalming, or "packing people with poison," as Butler describes it. In The American Way of Death, Jessica Mitford offered a vivid description of embalming, and blasted the practice as just another way funeral directors turn a profit. Mitford cited a pathologist who said it ultimately turns the corpse into a "repugnant, moldy, foul-looking object." But embalming does at least enable Oak Grove to advertise its fiberglass caskets as "100 percent environmentally friendly." That’s because they contain the formic acid from formaldehyde embalming fluids and keep it from getting in the groundwater.

Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead, says it’s common for funeral directors to misinform people that embalming is required by law, but in fact no state requires it for the first 24-72 hours after death, and even after that, every state but Minnesota allows the alternative of refrigeration.

In Britain, over a dozen companies sell inexpensive, biodegradable burial enclosures ranging from cloth body bags to wicker burial stretchers to cardboard coffins. In the U.S., where the whole industry is geared toward luxury caskets, you can find a cardboard coffin, but it isn’t easy. Many funeral directors don’t carry these less profitable items, and many cemeteries won’t accept them, or, if they do, will insist it be encased in a vault or grave box.

When someone announces a new woodland burial ground in the U.K., the community rallies to support them, according to West. When Ken Ulrich tried to open several green burial grounds in the U.S. a few years ago, a different group rallied — the Montana funeral directors. After Ulrich started promoting his inexpensive green burial sites, the Montana Board of Funeral Services, comprised mostly of funeral directors, got the legislature to change the burial laws to prohibit such endeavors. Where previously a Montanan could bury anyone he or she wanted on private land, the new regulations decreed one could only bury one’s family, so what might have been the U.S.’s first green burial grounds remains nothing more than a vision.

Ulrich got interested in green burial after helping disinter bodies for a cemetery relocation in 1975 . Most of the coffins were still intact, and the bodies, deprived of the cleansing effect of soil, were pretty frightful. "If people could see a video of what goes on in those boxes they wouldn’t want to be put in one" he says. Ulrich adds that white funeral directors have even gone onto Montana reservations and talked many Native Americans into buying "protective" steel luxury caskets. Considering that the Natives’ heritage has always been one of simple green burial, it would seem some "salesperson of the year" plaques are needed over in the Big Sky State.

Is cremation an ecological alternative? Nicholas Albery, Natural Death Centre director and an editor of The New Natural Death Handbook, writes, "anyone with green pretensions should think twice about cremation," which pollutes the atmosphere "with dioxin, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide."

The green burial movement reminds us of something Americans have been conditioned to forget: that humans are part of nature. Ecological planner Ted Buehler of Vancouver, B.C. writes, "By denying our own bodies the opportunity to return to the earth, we have fundamentally severed our spiritual and material relationship with the biosphere." Buehler adds, "Because we do not accept that our bodies are part of the natural cycling of the ecosphere, we may find it easier...to ignore the maintenance of the ecosphere." Which, it might be added, is precisely what we’re doing.

Until a green burial movement gets under way in the U.S. — one powerful enough to stand up to the machinations of the death industry — options will remain very limited for Americans who want to return to earth when they die. They can be buried on their own rural land, which, according to Lisa Carlson, is legal in most states. Or they can have their remains shipped to a British green cemetery.

But don’t fret. In case neither scenario is practical, Batesville offers optional "nature scene" panels inside their caskets, enabling the dead to at least gaze upon the nature from which they’re being kept.

An abridged version of this article appeared in E, The Environmental Magazine, Nov/Dec 1998.

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