Loved ones’ resting places going green

Visitors to the White Eagle Memorial Preserve in southern Washington won’t find rows of headstones, manicured lawns or pathways to a loved one’s final resting place. Instead, they stroll through an oak and ponderosa forest set within more than 1,000 acres of wilderness.

Twenty acres of the wilderness is set aside as a cemetery. Bodies are placed in shallow graves among the trees, often wrapped in biodegradable shrouds, surrounded with leaves and pine needle mulch, and allowed to decompose naturally, returning nutrients to the soil. Grave markers are natural stones, said Jodie Buller, the cemetery’s manager — “rocks that look like rocks.”

“People drive their loved one out themselves, in the back of a Subaru,” Buller said.

Conservation cemeteries such as White Eagle, which was founded in 2008, are few and far between. But they’re part of a growing movement to handle the dead in eco-friendly ways.

“Green burial,” the catchall term for these efforts, takes many forms, including nofrills burials in conventional cemeteries and sprawling wilderness conservation operations. Cemetery operators say they are seeing increasing interest in these less-conventional, end-of-life options.

“It’s been a slow, slow growth, but we are seeing the groundswell happening now,” said Brian Flowers, burial coordinator with Moles Farewell

Tributes, which conducts green burials along with more conventional options on sites in Washington state.

While no state laws explicitly prevent green burial — generally defined as burials that happen in eco-friendly containers and without embalming — cemetery operators nationwide say outdated state and local laws have made it difficult for green burial to gain a foothold.

Cemeteries were little-regulated until the late 1800s, experts say, when officials began adding rules primarily for consumer protection. The goal was to prevent scam artists or ill-prepared operators from opening cemeteries that might later be abandoned. But the regulations establishing best practices for conventional cemeteries often inhibit green-burial practices.

“The bottom-line issue in pretty much every state is the statutes don’t contemplate this kind of burial ground,” said Tanya Marsh, a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law who has written books about laws pertaining to the dead. “It’s probably not that the legislators wanted to make things difficult; it just didn’t occur to them that everybody wasn’t going to set up a cemetery in what they conceived of as a regular cemetery.”

No organization keeps a comprehensive database of all state and local cemetery laws, but operators have no shortage of stories about the obstacles they have faced. Some laws, for instance, require paved roads to burial plots. Others mandate fencing around cemeteries. Both are antithetical to the natural settings required for conservation cemeteries.

Advocates say their movement is long overdue. According to the Green Burial Council in California, cemeteries in the United States put more than 4 million gallons of embalming fluid and 64,000 tons of steel into the ground each year, along with 1.6 million tons of concrete.

Consumers are shifting their behavior, as well. More than half of the dead in the United States are cremated today, according to a report from the National Funeral Directors Association, up from an industry-estimated rate of just 4% in the 1960s.

A 2019 survey from the funeral directors association found that nearly 52% of Americans expressed interest in green-burial options. Most cited environmental reasons, but others mentioned cost.

“Most people know what green burial is,” said Lee Webster, who heads education for the Green Burial Council. “They just don’t know how to make it happen.”

“Most people know what green burial is. They just don’t know how to make it happen.”

— Lee Webster, of the Green Burial Council