Going green

It's environmentalism after death: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, just hold the concrete

Sue Cross (left) and Ruth Faas with an ecopod at their Arlington business, ''for people thinking about death and dying.'' (Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff)

"I feel like we've been indoctrinated to do death care in a certain way in this country," says Ruth Faas, co-founder of Mourning Dove Studio LLC in Arlington, "and I'd like people to consider the environmental impact of their choices and whether or not these rituals hold meaning for us."

The studio includes a biodegradable casket display - with options that range from an $80 cardboard box to a $3,500 wicker coffin - and a spacious area for bereavement groups, workshops, art-making and coffin decorating. In Mourning Dove's reading room, people can browse through books about alternative death-care practices.

Prominent among those books is Mark Harris's 2007 "Grave Matters," which some consider the bible of the natural-burial movement.

"The modern burial is unnatural, alienating, and extremely expensive, $10,000 to $12,000 on average," said Harris during a phone call from his home in Bethlehem, Pa. "The modern green burial is nothing more exotic than the standard way Americans in the early years of the Republic memorialized their dead." Placed in a simple wooden coffin, a body consigned to the earth would return to the earth, and shortly thereafter become part of it, he said.

Today, bodies are typically embalmed to preserve their appearance, then placed in a hermetically sealed coffin that is set in the ground inside a concrete liner. According to Harris, many people don't realize that embalming is not required in most states, including Massachusetts. Once considered pagan in this country, chemical embalming only became popular during the Civil War, when battlefield surgeons recommended the treatment to preserve soldiers' remains on long train rides back to families.

Key to the natural-burial movement are natural cemeteries, where bodies are buried in a shroud or biodegradable box and their locations noted with Global Positioning System coordinates. Instead of upright monuments, flat fieldstones or natural plantings are sometimes used as grave markers, and the land is maintained without chemicals or nonnative plantings.

There are 11 natural cemeteries in the United States, according to Joe Sehee, founder and executive director of the Green Burial Council in Santa Fe, N.M., but none in Massachusetts.

Judith Lorei, a board member of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts, a nonprofit, Boston-based affiliate of the national organization, is working to change that as she talks to land trusts across the state.

Cemeteries in the US set their own rules, and typically install concrete grave boxes to keep the landscape even, for easier maintenance, and prevent the ground from caving into a grave site. For Jewish burials, in which an unembalmed body is placed in the earth in a pine box, a cemetery will forgo the bottom of the concrete liner, allowing the casket to make contact with the dirt.

Faas and Mourning Dove co-founder Sue Cross are betting that a generation of aging baby boomers will start requesting green burials as awareness slowly dawns.

"We've been afraid to look at death, plan for it, and talk about it," said Cross, who came to this work by studying death rituals of her own Hungarian heritage. "We also end up spending a lot of money on things like concrete vaults and metal caskets that keep us from returning to the cycle of life."

While running a booth last May at the Down to Earth Expo, which drew 8,000 visitors to the Hynes Veterans Convention Center in Boston, Faas was not surprised by the number of environmentalists who, like herself a few years earlier, had never considered the impact of their final carbon footprint. Most assumed cremation was the obvious green choice, not realizing that running a cremator for two hours at 1,800 degrees requires an immense amount of energy for a process that, given the right conditions, will occur naturally.

Green burial represents the most significant change to funeral practices since cremation, according to author Harris, and the industry is scrambling to figure out how to make it financially viable. "There are ways that the industry can engage and make a profit," he said, "but the margins may be smaller."

Harris said the cost of a green burial can run from a couple hundred dollars to the low thousands, with an average of $3,000. But expensive caskets could bring the cost higher.

"If someone were to ask for an eco-friendly funeral, we would get them the information they needed," said Chad Keefe, of Cambridge's Keefe Funeral Home. In Quincy, Keohane Funeral & Cremation Service has jumped ahead of the trend by establishing the New England Green Burial Society, making it the first funeral home in the state to be certified by the national council. Funeral director Dennis Keohane said, "The challenge right now is getting the word out there. Many people don't even know this is a possibility."

Still, Harris believes green funerals will start moving into the mainstream in leaps and bounds. "There is something appealing about returning to the earth as your final act on earth, and using your remains to push up a tree."