Photo copyright Laura Silver 2008

by Laura Silver

Just before Thanksgiving I lost one of my best friends to a seven-year struggle with breast cancer. She put up a valiant fight, confounding her physicians by ignoring most of their advice and going into a remission that lasted nearly six years.

We never talked about the possibility of her death, or what she wanted done if she passed away. Her focus was always on life. She was still laughing the morning of the day she died, so perhaps I cannot fault her choice. But for her friends and family, not knowing her wishes made a difficult time even harder.

Once we’re dead, I doubt we care much what happens to our remains. But for the sake of those we leave behind we should make some kind of decision and communicate it to them. And for the sake of the future, our decision making should include the impact funerary practices have on an already-imperiled environment.

The Eco-hazards of “Traditional” Burial

As the population grows, so does the number of bodies to find a place for — and resistance to providing land for cemeteries. Environmentalists object to putting more land under development, especially land that requires heavy water and pesticide use for maintenance.

Developers and local governments object to using land for the dead rather than the living, (since the latter tend to buy more buildings and pay more taxes).

What we in the U.S. consider “traditional” burial — formaldehyde-based embalming, pricey caskets, and a vault under manicured, (and pesticide-filled), lawns, is actually relatively new. After the collapse of Egyptian civilization, embalming all but disappeared, making only brief appearances in ensuing cultures.

It was the massive casualty count of the Civil War that brought embalming back into routine use in this country. Though most of the 600,000 soldiers killed were buried in mass graves, prominent families wanted sons and husbands brought home, and an entire industry sprang up seeking ways to preserve the dead for transport.

Many chemicals were tested in an effort to retard decomposition. All were toxic by necessity, since their job was to slow the work of living organisms. Ultimately formaldehyde became the preferred main ingredient in embalming fluid, and continues to be used today in a variety of mixtures that may also contain methanol, ethanol, and other harmful substances.

By some estimates, more than five million gallons of embalming fluid—enough to fill eight Olympic-sized swimming pools—is buried in the United States every year. Eventually all of it will leach into our water, air, and soil.

In addition to embalming fluid, every year the nation’s 22,500 cemeteries also bury:

• 1.6 million tons of concrete as vaults
• 30 million board feet of tropical and native hardwoods as caskets
• 104,272 tons of steel as caskets and vaults
• 4,336 tons of bronze and copper caskets

The embodied energy in these materials alone is staggering. When you add transportation costs, the pesticides on cemetery lawns, and the pollution put out by the equipment used to manicure the lawns, the cost to the environment is clearly unsupportable.

It’s hard to avoid much of this negative impact if you want to be buried in a standard cemetery, however. Biodegradable coffins of plain wood, cardboard, and other natural materials are readily available, but even metal coffins decompose over time. As they do a “void” is left under the earth that can cause the ground to collapse when a cemetery visitor walks over it. Therefore safety regulations require all coffins in standard cemeteries be buried inside lidded vaults of concrete or polypropylene.

And, while embalming is not legally mandated in any state, it is required by OSHA regulations for any body scheduled for public “viewing” at a funeral home. This alone can affect many families’ decisions about whether or not to allow the use of chemicals.

So you can skip the embalming and choose a biodegradable casket—but you cannot escape the vault in a standard cemetery. The most they can offer is an option used in the Jewish tradition — which requires the deceased to be buried in contact with the earth. They leave the bottom off the vault and place the coffin directly on the ground. But you are still encased in hundreds of pounds of reinforced concrete or in thick, nearly indestructible plastic above the coffin.

Alternatives to Standard Burial Practice

Cremation has become a popular alternative to cemetery interment over the last 40 years. Ashes can be scattered in the wild, put in a garden, or placed in a much smaller space in a traditional cemetery. But current cremation technology requires large amounts of fossil fuel and produces air pollutants, so it still falls short of a truly green solution.

Biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak of Sweden has pioneered a cremation alternative for those who don’t want to decompose slowly in the earth. Her process flash-freezes bodies, then dips them in liquid nitrogen so they become brittle and shatter easily into an odorless organic powder that can be buried in a shallow grave. The literature does not indicate how much energy this process uses, however.

For those willing to go the dust-to-dust route, a growing number of “green” cemeteries have begun to appear around the country. Some are traditional cemeteries offering greener options, such as embalming-free burial in biodegradable coffins, (there’s still that vault issue, and the lawns). But a newer option combines a cemetery with a nature preserve—interring unpreserved bodies in shrouds or natural coffins, or “planting” them standing up to take up less space and produce a smaller “void” area.

The bodies decompose naturally in larger-than-normal plots, and feed the native plants and grasses as they grow. The sites may be marked with trees or flowers, low stones, or only GPS coordinates. This solution preserves wildlands nearly undisturbed, and allows the plants and animals of the wilderness to be the memorial. The availability and affordability of land to use for this purpose will remain a limiting factor.

Returning to the Old ”Traditional”

Some families are choosing to return to older funerary traditions as well, avoiding funeral homes and sometimes cemeteries altogether. Rather than have their loved one handled by strangers, they wash and prepare the body at home, using ice—or windows open to cold weather—to preserve the body just long enough for a home viewing or wake.

The body may then be buried in a cemetery, cremated, or buried on private land. While technically most states have no laws against burial on private land, the majority surround it with enough paperwork, permitting, and health and safety statues to make it nearly prohibitive.

There are no green cemeteries, per se, in San Diego County, though any funeral home will skip the embalming if a viewing is not planned, and biodegradable caskets are readily available.

Three cemeteries in Northern California appear on “green burial” lists. Two, (Memorial Lawn in Sebastopol, and Davis Cemetery in Davis), are standard cemeteries offering green options but requiring vaults. One, Forever Fernwood, in Mill Valley is a combination burial site and land reclamation/preservation project.

No single solution is likely to reconcile funerary practices with ecological needs. Much will depend on changing the culture surrounding death here in the U.S., both among individuals and in the funeral industry.

It will be a difficult road to walk, traveling as it does through emotions, death taboos—and the profit margin of a very lucrative industry. But the conversation is healthy, and alternatives are being found and put into practice. If we think about the issues, and plan ahead for the sake of both our loved ones and the planet, the task is not insurmountable.

Laura Silver is freelance writer, web designer, and the Managing Editor of SD GreenLife. She is a lifelong “practical” environmentalist, and works primarily out of her off-the-grid straw bale home in Jamul, CA. More of her writing can be seen in her weekly column The Green House in the Temecula Valley News which ran through February 2009. Laura can be reached at lauras@sdgreenlife.com or through either of her web sites: www.silverweb.biz or www.strawbalediary.net