Have you spent your life trying to live gently on this planet? Are you someone who cares about the environment, turns out lights, keeps the heat low, eats local produce, and recycles? Then what about recycling yourself? What about leaving the preservation of land as your legacy? Green burial represents a new way to go out of this world that is really an old way with a new twist. More and more people when given the choice are choosing a more humble, simple and environmentally friendly exit.

What Exactly is Green Burial?

If a burial is considered green there are a couple things you can be sure it does not include: embalming with toxic chemicals and containers like metal caskets and concrete burial vaults that are associated with a lot of embodied energy. When you take those things away what you have left is some room for acceptance of the cycle we see throughout nature. Green burial is like peeling back the proverbial onion and seeing what is really there. It removes that layer that pretends we are invincible and allows us to get in sync with the natural process of life, death, decay and rebirth. And it is the antithesis of how we’ve been caring for our dead in this country for quite some time.

Conventional funeral service was born out of the Civil War when early embalmers began to disinter the bodies of Union Army officers and infuse them with an arsenic mixture so they could be sent home for a burial. The war would eventually come to an end but not so with embalming, which probably had something to do with our nation’s first mortuary school having been founded by chemical companies that manufactured embalming fluid. But it was the funeral for Abraham Lincoln, whose embalmed body was paraded around the country for several weeks that may have done more than anything to move “modern” funeral practices into the mainstream; at least in the US. Arterial embalming would never take hold in many other places. In some parts of the world, the practice is actually illegal. Today, this kind of post-mortem body preparation is prevalent in about a half dozen countries comprising less than 5% of the population on the planet.

According to a 2007 AARP survey of people fifty and older, 21% would like to have a green burial. Elizabeth Anton, sitting in the living room of her three bedroom retirement home, fits that demographic. She is no stranger to life and death issues. After two bouts of breast cancer she is now dealing with “a suspicious thing” on her lung. “It is all just an annoyance at this point,” she explains. Although she brushes off her current situation and doesn’t want to dwell on her health issues, she has no hesitancy when speaking of death and her fondness for green burial. “There is something so overbearing about conventional burial with the elaborate coffins and the huge concrete vaults that say that even in death we are masters of the universe. I don’t like that and I don’t feel that way,” she explains. “With green burial you are choosing to become part of the earth and that appeals to me because it is about integration rather than domination. You are fitting yourself into the cycle of life rather than superimposing your way onto everything else.”

People like Anton have been able to move past denying death. Most Americans however, have not. And part of the reason may be that conventional funeral service has fostered a great deal of fear and alienation regarding a very natural process. Verbiage like “final resting place” and the promotion of “sealed” or “water-proof” caskets and vaults make it seem as though we can somehow get by mother nature. Green burial shows us we need not.

For most green burials the body is preserved with only refrigeration or dry ice before burial. The deceased are placed in plain wooden caskets or simple shrouds. No state requires embalming except in rare instances and vaults are never required by law although they are often required by cemeteries, ostensibly to minimize the sinking of graves. For the record, vaults were developed in England to deter grave robbers in the late 19th century and are no longer used in the UK.

The Green Burial Council (GBC) is an independent, tax-exempt, nonprofit organization working to encourage environmentally sustainable deathcare and the use of burial as a new means of protecting natural areas. “We want to see eco-friendly end-of-life rituals become a viable option for honoring the dead and healing the living while furthering legitimate ecological aims such as the conservation of natural resources, reduction of carbon emissions, protection of worker health, and the restoration and preservation of habitat,” explains GBC executive director and Michigan native, Joe Sehee. “Each year in the US we bury 827,060 gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid along with 90,272 tons of steel with our caskets and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete with our use of burial vaults. What if we could turn these environmental externalities into an opportunity for healing our planet? What if we could make our deaths make a difference?

There are GBC approved providers in 40 states and five provinces of Canada with more being created all the time. Michigan has 37 GBC certified funeral homes, by far more than in any other state. One establishment in the GBC network is the Staffan-Mitchell Funeral Home in Chelsea, Michigan. It’s co-owner, Mike Mitchell, is a funeral director and avid environmentalist with a degree in Environmental Science Resource Development from Michigan State University. When he first heard about green burial he knew he had found a way to combine his environmental passions with his work as a funeral director by embracing the idea of green burial and home funerals. “I love being able to combine two things that I am really passionate about,” Mitchell explained, “And be able to help people at the same time.”

Michigan is also home to two certified hybrid cemeteries - green sections created in existing conventional cemeteries, which include Mt. Carmel Catholic Cemetery in Wyandotte and Ridgeville Memorial Gardens in Grandville.  A conservation burial ground is in the works in North Oakland County at the Upland Hills Farm where the GBC was instrumental in helping acquire a million dollar grant from the Natural Resource Trust Fund and the Oakland County Parks Agency to permanently protect 100 acres of the farm that will provide a permanent wildlife corridor connecting Addison Oaks Park with the Bald Mountain Recreation Area.

Even though there are not yet a lot of options for green burial grounds, families can establish their own cemeteries in most counties, provided they have enough acreage. Bradley Cross and his family wanted to keep their family members at home forever and created a green family burial ground on their 18 acre property in Washtenaw County. Bradley’s mother, father and one brother are buried on the property and there are spaces remaining for 13 other plots. “We dug the graves ourselves,” Cross said, “literally everyone had a role to play. My surviving brother built the caskets, my niece, an expert rope tier made exquisite knots along the rope we used to lower the caskets down into the earth and my sister made the purple draping for inside the caskets.”

Conventional burial will always be there for those who prefer it, but now the eco-conscious have end-of-life options aligned with their core values. Just like the natural birth movement, the natural death movement is about people choosing to create their own rituals. And they have many to choose from. Today, a family can have a viewing without embalming, a home funeral, a church service, and/or a graveside memorial. Some are sewing shrouds, or choosing to bury a loved one wrapped in their favorite quilt or family members are building the casket themselves. Death rituals are becoming as individualized as the people themselves.

But for many, like Elizabeth Anton, green burial’s greatest gift may be the solace that comes from knowing that our death in some way can contribute to life. “The deer that just lies down in the forest and disintegrates back into the earth has the right idea,” says Anton. We might as well give in to the natural flow of things. It is really the last frontier and it is time we explored it and recognized it for what it is - regeneration. It deserves a lot of respect.”