I have always loved nature.  I have fond memories spending long hours with the neighborhood children running and playing in the woods.  I have always felt a strong love of the woods.  The majesty of the trees and the delicate undergrowth has always made me feel at home and at peace.  As children, my sister and I were taught to respect nature in life and in death.  We were taught that we were stewards of the earth and if we did not use it properly we would lose it. We discussed cremation as the best way to return the body back to nature.  We did not realize at the time that cremation was not so green. I came to the notion of green burial very naturally.  What is green burial?  The simplest definition is - burial with a natural body, in an eco-friendly container (shroud or coffin) no vault.  This definition is simple, but does not give the depth to what green burial is about. 

First, green burial advocates for the use of resources in a proper way.  This means keeping the earth free from poisons of conventional embalming fluids, adhesives and other material used in conventional burial.  Green burial is also about keeping our natural resources for future generations by not putting them in the ground.  Let us look at burial vaults. Why do we need vaults and why do we need vaults lined in precious metals?  We don’t. The conventional industry tells us that vaults keep the ground level in cemeteries.  If buried properly in a shrouded or in an eco-friendly coffin and the ground mounded up, the grave should be just fine.  

Green burial also allows us to take up the traditions of the past, and move forward into the future in a gentle way.  We take up the simple, traditional, and loving process of our ancestors who bathed and dressed their loved ones at the time of death.  How much more simple it is to follow the greener and traditional path in burial than it is to follow the conventional means with their embalmed bodies, fancy caskets and vaults for us to keep our precious treasure in.  Our treasure lives in our hearts and in the stories we tell our children, not in the tombs of our loved ones. We need to be honest with ourselves, we are organic beings and at death we return back to the earth.

Finally, green burial is about preserving the land for generations to come.  In a conservation burial, the cemetery lies juxtaposed to a certified conservation land.  Other certified green burials are not situated in this way, but are no less dedicated to preserving the land.  They take the stand that in this place, we take care of our loved ones and preserve this land, natural and free for the generations to come.  It’s kind of like squatting rights.  As long as it is a cemetery, the land remains free from development.  In death, we can preserve the land one person and one patch of land at a time.  

Last week I stood under the canopy of an oak savanna and felt the timelessness of the sounds and wind around me.  Here, I thought I would love to remain until the end of time.  Here, I would love to be buried beneath these strong boughs and here, I would love to nurture this ancient and timeless place.  Alas, there are no such places yet in Illinois where people can be buried on conservation land.   With time and effort, we hope this will change.

To begin our quest, we need to begin in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when people were looking to the past to create the future of their nations.  One need only take a walk through Washington DC to see what I am saying is true.  DC is filled with classical temples. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Napoleon conquered Egypt where he not only took treasure, but also had a group of men who mapped the Valley of the Kings and the discovered of the Temple of Luxor.  If any of you have been to Paris, you have seen the Obelisk, which originally stood at the entrance of the Temple of Luxor. These Napoleon experts published their finding and images made there way throughout the western world, and mark the first wave of Egyptian craze.  Other men would follow in their footsteps and archeology would be born.  The deep-seated desire to look back at our roots would cause nations to seek out their cultural roots.  Museums also were born from this desire.  People began to collect things from their cultural past and display them.  What began as small curios cabinets became treasure houses for nations.  We need only look to such museums as The Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.  I could go on to discuss the impact of this craze on the cultures that were giving up their treasure, but that is a subject for another time and the reason I do not work in museums.

In this soup of nationalism and love of Egypt, we began embalming our dead.  I am not surprised that in the US Civil war, we romanticized embalming as a way of emulating the great Egyptian Kings and Queens.  At first, embalming could only be done for the very rich.  (A regular soldier’s monthly pay was $13 and embalming for him would be $25, where an officer would have to pay $50 whose pay was about $100+ depending on rank.) Probably the image that most imprinted our national psyche was the death of the beloved Abraham Lincoln. His body was embalmed and traveled many miles on the railway making stops for people to pay their last respects to the fallen leader.  I believe our society began its journey idealizing embalming and vaults in this climate of love for things ancient and Egyptian, and our admiration of Lincoln.

In 1922, Howard Carter and George Herbert found King Tutankhamen’s tomb.  The find of a nearly intact tomb sparked an even greater Egyptian Craze.  In the US, the construction of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Buildings, most dramatically demonstrate our love for all things Egyptian.  The Chrysler Burling with its stylized papyrus leaves and a year later the streamlined form of an Egyptian temple in the Empire State Building.  The Egyptian craze gives birth to art deco. 

The 1920s also marks the when most Americans began to be embalmed and funeral homes became the place of private homes were visitations took place.  We were becoming an urbanized society and no longer had front parlors to receive visitors wanting to pay their respects and offer condolences.  It’s so easy to see our society who was looking backward to move forward, who wanted to emulate kings and queens of the past and our own fallen leader.  Now, in the midst of the Egyptian craze, we wanted to be just like the King and Queens of old.

So here we are today, with acres of cemetery plots filled with kings and queens under the earth, in some cases above the earth like the Pharaohs of old. Do we really think we are ancient kings and queen and that our bodies should be preserved forever?  Then again, that is so American.  We stand against such class differences.  If it’s good enough for the king, it’s good enough for Aunt Suzie.  I understand that.  I am an American after all.  What I wonder about is do we want to continue our conventional funeral practices as normative?  Do we really want to keep the bodies of our loved ones preserved forever?  Look at the mummies of Egypt in the nineteenth century.  They were not treated well, especially if they really weren’t really a king or queen. Some were turned to medicine, made into paint, dug up and unwrapped for scientific study or entertainment. I am sure I do not want to end up in a museum.   I am also sure I do not want to end up as paint or medicine.  Why do we want to keep our loved ones bodies sealed up under the earth so that in several hundred years or so their tombs might be open again by people who may or may not share our same sensibilities?  For me, I want to return to the earth from which I came.  I have no desire to have my body treated in death in any extravagant manner. Please, place me in a shroud, and return me to the earth.  If my body helps preserve land, and especially a forest, that would be even better.  I do not want to be a queen sealed in a tomb under the earth.  Please treat my body in death as a simple human being that I am in life.  I am not a queen. I am just a woman trying to do her best in this world. 

I was trained and worked in a cemetery run by one of the largest death care corporations.  We had a brief training on vaults.  Much of our training was brief because the purpose of a family service councilor is to sell.  We were told that vaults maintain the integrity of the grave, help keep the ground level for the cemetery and lined vaults kept out the elements (or nature) from reaching the casket. We sold all kinds of vaults from the simple to the high-end precious metal lined vaults.  To be quite fair, we were never trained to push the high-end vaults.  Our training also made it clear that vaults were not a legal requirement, but a requirement of the cemetery.

Let us look at this video demonstrating how tough the vault is.

My first comment about this video is about their scientific process.  We have no idea how long this vault remained buried before it was dug up again.  We have no idea if heavy equipment rode over this spot. Finally, the casket is empty.  We have no idea about the state of an occupied coffin buried for an unspecified amount of time.  I realize that they are selling vaults not coffins, but to be sure coffins and vaults are used together.   When I was a family service counselor, I became close to the grounds workers at the cemetery.  One member of the team who had been a grave digger for many, many years, told me that whenever he has been present at a disinterment, the vaults have always been cracked or otherwise breached.  Sometimes the breach was dramatic, other times, not so much.  Once interred, there is very little way of knowing the quality of the structure of a vault.  Some vaults are sturdier than others.  I do not mean to imply that vaults are designed to break or that all vaults do not stand up to the pressure.  What I am saying is no one really knows how tough any vault can be until you dig it up after use. 

Here is another video:

This one plays at the heartstrings.  As you know, I am all in favour of personalization of death rituals.  I find it odd that personalized vault that will spend most of its time underground, and that the only people who will be seeing it again will be those who would dig up the grave.  We are told in this video that a lined vault secures the casket and contents from water and insects.  It makes me wonder what it is we think we are doing when we bury our loved ones.  Do we really want to keep their bodies preserved for generations in hopes that one day an archeologist will dig them back up again? I think perhaps vaults are a hold over from the anti-theft devices developed for higher end burials in the 18th and 19th centuries when corpses were sometime dug up for scientists to study anatomy.  It’s not a pretty thought, but there you have it.  It’s not a huge leap from protecting bodies from body snatcher to protecting bodies from anything and everything. 

There are solutions for vaults in graves.  I suggest that vaults are not a necessity at all, providing steps are taken to prevent sunken graves. In green burial the grave is filled mounded with dirt on the graven so that once the settling of the grave takes place, the grave is not sunken.  A shrouded body creates less concern for grave settling than those using a biodegradable coffin because there is much less matter be broken down. In green certified burials, care is given to maintain the ground.  Green Burial does not mean haphazard burials without forethought.  To the contrary, certified green burial grounds undergo extensive planning and go through a strict process for certification.  Thought is given to preserving and restoring the land and in that maintaining the integrity of graves and the land in general.