Author: Charles

Cremation: an alternative to burial or an alternative to bother?

13 April 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: burial, cremation

There’s a fine new essay by Thomas Lynch in the The Christian Century. It’s as wonderfully well written as you’d expect – seductively so. Much of what he says about the modern funeral he has said before: that it “too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience.”

Here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

“When I’m gone just cremate me,” Hughey MacSwiggan told his third and final wife as she stood at his bedside while the hospice nurse fiddled with the morphine drip that hadn’t kept his pain at bay. The operative word in his directive was just.

…

And Hughey was just cremated, which is to say his body was placed on a plywood pallet, covered with a cardboard carapace and, after the paperwork and permits were secured, loaded into the hearse and driven to a site toward the back of an industrial park where a company that makes burial vaults operates a crematory on the side.

…

Of course, the problem is not with cremation, which is an ancient and honorable, efficient and effective means of disposing of our dead. Nor is the fire to burn our dead any less an elemental gift of God than is the ground to bury them in. The problem is not that we cremate our dead, but how ritually denatured, spiritually vacant, religiously timid and impoverished we have allowed the practice to become. It is not that we do it, but how we do it that must be reconsidered.

…

In cultures where cremation is practiced in public, among Hindus and Buddhists in India and Japan, its powerful metaphoric values—purification, release, elemental beauty and unity—add to the religious narratives the bereaved embrace. The public pyres of Bali and Calcutta, where the first-born brings fire from the home fire to kindle the fire that will consume a parent’s body, are surrounded by liturgical and civic traditions. Elsewhere, however, cremation is practiced in private, the fire kept purposefully behind closed doors. Whereas the traditional funeral transports the corpse and mourners from parlor to altar, then to place of disposition, cremation, as it is practiced in the U.S., often routes around, not through, such stations in the pilgrimage. We miss most if not all of the journey, the drama and metaphor.

There’s a good, clear-eyed critique of Lynch’s essay at Fr Jonathan’s blog here.

Dead reckoning

12 April 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: funeral cost

No UK funeral director ever went far wrong by slapping a more or less stonking margin on the price of a coffin. Coffins are much cheaper to make than almost anyone would realise. An oak foil veneer MDF coffin with a trade price of £50 looks to any uneducated eye as if it’s easily worth £250. This being so, most funeral directors ‘bury’ some of what they call their professional fee in the cost of the coffin. It makes them look like better value.

It doesn’t necessarily make them exploitative however bad it may look (when you find out). They are spreading, not adding, remember. And UK funerals are not so expensive that people want to bypass funeral directors by whatever means they can. Over here, we can have a decent funeral for a little over £2,500. In the US it’s difficult to reel away with any change from £6,000.

There’s nothing to stop anyone here from saving themselves a few bob by buying a coffin direct from the manufacturer – if they can find anyone to sell them one. Most won’t. In the US, however, there’s more urgent demand and a growing online marketplace. You can buy a coffin (okay, casket) at Walmart and Costco.

Because US undertakers also ‘bury’ some of their professional fee in the cost of the casket, it embarrasses them financially when any client proposes to supply their own. There’s an amusing recent tale in a Chicago paper of a dodgy sod of a funeral director who throws all manner of preposterous objections in the way of a client who discovers she can save $1,600 by sourcing her own casket and burial vault. You can read it here.

UK funeral directors price their services and merchandise in such a way that they could never make a living if people did not buy a complete package. This is why the itemised price lists of the majority are not itemised in a way we understand by itemised. If, say, you tell them that you will not need bearers to carry the coffin, then ask how much that will be off the bill, there’s every chance you will be told that bearers are part of the professional fee (you’ll pay for them anyway).

There are precious few truly itemised, fully transparent price lists out there. So let’s hear it for Paul Sullivan, a brave new start-up in Dover, whose price list is as transparent as it gets, whose coffin prices are very fair and whose bearers are optional. See it here.

You can pick from Paul’s list, jot down the figures, do the maths. You’ll get only what you pay for. Hurrah. This is very empowering for clients. Paul and his ilk might even like to go a step further and offer what Basic Cremations of Milton, Ontario, provide on their website. They call it a Quote Builder. You check what you want, it keeps a running score and, at the end, gives you a bottom line. I love it. See it here.

The reluctance of so many UK funeral directors to take to the Web has become risibly absurd. People expect to be able to price shop online. Wakey wakey!

Rocky 3

11 April 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Once the principal place of worship for Portlanders, who trekked here from earliest times from all parts of the island, St Andrew’s church was severely damaged by a landslip in 1675, but only finally abandoned in the mid-eighteenth century. In its ruined graveyard some of the headstones and monuments bear the skull-and-crossbones motif, a customary memento mori. Portlanders do not see them in this way. So far as they are concerned, these are the graves of pirates. They call this Pirates’ Graveyard and, in their genially pig-headed way, will hear of no other interpretation.

Rocky 2

9 April 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised
Here’s the Royal Naval cemetery on Portland. Is there a burial ground in the UK which commands better views?
 
There are 65 First World War burials and 103 Second World War burials. Of these, 10 are unidentified, one is a Norwegian merchant navy seaman, and one a member of the Imperial Japanese Navy. There are twelve German airmen buried here side by side with British casualties. Almost everyone here is distressingly young.
 
Perhaps the most famous resident is Leading Seaman Jack Mantle of HMS Foylebank. In an eight-minute attack by German Stukas on 4 July 1940 the ship was hit by 22 bombs and sank. Out of a crew of 300, 176 died and only 40 were uninjured. Mantle, though mortally wounded, carried on firing until he died. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously.




Rocky 1

8 April 2010
Charles
No comments
Categories: Uncategorised

This blog is on holiday in its seaside cottage on the Isle of Portland. This little island, just four miles long and two wide, is where some of the world’s best limestone has been quarried. Find out what it’s built here.

Beauty comes at a price. The devastation of the island goes on (above).
Here are some details from headstones in the churchyard of St George’s, Reforne.
 

The bureaucracy of bereavement

7 April 2010
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: bureaucracy, Cryomation

Good piece by the George Pitcher in the Daily Telegraph:

I’m afraid I slipped into a daydream in church on Easter morn yesterday. It started by wondering how different the story might have been if the Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago was like the London Borough of Bromley today.

The idea that Joseph of Arimathea could have got a quick verbal consent from the head of the local cheap authority to take possession of Jesus’s body would be ridiculous; he’d never have got the paperwork organised in time. Mary Magdalen would have been so tied up with the bereavement services she’d never have got back to the tomb before dawn. And that’s before having to explain to the bureaucrats that the tomb turned out to be empty.

Read the rest of it here.

Sense and sustainability – 2

5 April 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: natural burial

I am incredibly grateful to Cynthia Beal for this long and deeply considered response to this post. I wish I felt I were worth it, Cynthia! But I know that all readers of this blog will find in your words a great deal of food for thought.

Dear Charles,

Thanks so much for another provocative post! I’m not sure I can add any light here, but I’ll try.

First, you mention my position on “sustainable cemetery management” and help to remind all of us that a cemetery is, at the practical end of the stick, the fulfillment of a fiscal, environmental and social obligation, serving a vital public purpose – the management of our dead. I believe Ken and I are in agreement on that score, and I think sometimes it escapes people that those three tasks of sustainability are NOT about the perpetuation of an individual in human memory.

I don’t believe either of our countries’ laws requires that we pay for the memorialization of a single person in perpetuity, nor mow, irrigate and pesticide their little scrap of lawn. There are a number of businesses that have marketed and sold that promise to people, however. Just because they can’t deliver on it doesn’t mean they won’t keep the fiction alive as long as possible – but it also doesn’t mean that society is responsible for picking up that tab.

I find it’s often helpful for people if I break down “natural burial” (I don’t use the word “green” any longer) into three components:

1) the funeral – a natural one, generally without toxic embalming, often with a spiritual accompaniment that can include home or institutional presentation, virtual or face-2-face components, or even circus parties

2) the burial – using biodegradable “packaging” (coffin, shroud, etc.) in a liner-free grave at a depth suitable for decomposition, often done in the rain in both the UK and Oregon, my home state

3) sustainable cemetery management – what’s done with the surface of the land after the burial has occurred. “Memorialization” – the personal bit about how the future is forced OR permitted to remember the past – is a subjective choice that’s dictated in part by the landscape management style, and should be seen as a function of what the maintenance budget, the site’s aesthetics, and the grave fees allow.

One can think about each of these elements – funeral, burial, and landscaping – separately from the other two, and clarity comes. Some folks in the “green” burial movement have an “all or nothing” attitude and speak as if these form an inseparable ‘whole’, suggesting that if one doesn’t do all three perfectly there’s no point in doing any one of them alone. That’s a mistaken position in my view, and also leads to all sorts of mis-understandings and mis-representations.

Your second writer – the fellow who’s offended by the “non-allowance” of things “green” – exhibits this confusion when he talks about all the things he can’t do. It’s not about ‘can’t’ in his mind – it’s about ‘won’t” and there’s a difference.

While there are some members of the “green” community that adore rule-making (hence all the “thou shalt nots” with respect to the “greenest” burials, which can too easily devolve into a holier-than-thou marketing competition, if you ask me, instead of an educated continuum of option) the fact of death is this:

Idealized end or not, one gets buried in a hole. There’s dirt there. The dirt will someday touch the body – sooner or later. The relative handful of people who cannot tolerate contemplating that fact and don’t have the powers of mind to ignore it have the readily available option of an underground bomb-shelter (casket and vault) to comfort them. I don’t deny them that choice.

However, the rest of us should be able to go into our chosen dirt just as easily, without a lot of extra handwringing, especially from business people whose income streams are wrapped up in selling the packaging that keeps the dirt off. I’m an Earth Girl – I like dirt. I’m not a fan of excess packaging. I don’t like it that I can’t easily go back to my maker in a compostable plain (or fancy!) wrapper if I choose.

The fact is that the earth-phobic aging public (a generation that seemed afraid of the planet itself, addicted to germ-killers, artificial environments, and insurance against the world in general) is shrinking, and rapidly being replaced by people who are not repelled by Nature. Many in this next wave of future dead-people actually like to lie down on bare grass and some even indulge in visions of sinking into the soil and becoming trees and daisies someday.

Regarding the implied invincibility of vaults securing the body from a cave in- your second cited writer’s logic is a bit faulty, too — there are MANY vaults and liners sold on the market that collapse eventually. The cheaper they are the weaker they are. Some collapse very quickly. Some take longer. None are allowed to state that they will not leak or they will NEVER collapse (truth in advertising laws require this).

In fact, when I talked to Ken West about vaults and asked why the UK didn’t use them he said “We tried that. They don’t work. Sooner or later they all cave in. That’s just the way of it. Give yours a century and they’ll collapse, too.”

One thing this writer also misses is the fact that natural cemeteries, if operated properly, need never run out of income. There is no science-based reason NOT to practice grave reuse, especially by families who would like to maintain the plots over many generations. (Queen’s Road Cemetery at Croydon in London is experimenting with this and having good success). In 2006, UK cemetery management that included the possibility of grave reuse was growing as a common position in your own local authorities, and it’s continuing ever faster today:

http://www.cholseypc.org/Default.asp?PageId=viewdetail&ValuesID=1001

There are plenty of alternative memorialization options, too, and creatively run cemeteries can offer MUCH more than just a place to dispose of the dead, while still being environmentally and socially respectful, and administratively prudent.

EDIFICE COMPLEX

The UK’s cemetery space conundrum came about in large part because of all the cement and marble and granite loaded into each grave. That, coupled with a prohibition on the desecration of a grave monument, as well as the grave itself, prohibited removal or disturbance of remains – i.e., reuse – without the invocation of public health laws. Since skeletonized remains are not hazardous, graves have been sacrosanct and highly resistant to intelligent intervention.

If the Victorian-fueled “Edifice Complex” (that we were infected with over here, too) hadn’t required such a land-grab of stone-like stuff the soil microbes can’t possibly digest in a reasonable period of time, you’d still have room in your cemeteries today and all this would probably be moot.

We still have plenty of grave space in our cemeteries over here, but they’re eating up an increasing amount of resources every year, the service infrastructures are increasingly prohibitive to install, burial’s giving way to cremation, and sooner or later we’re going to have to pull the cheap-resources plug.

“NATURAL” IS OUR FUTURE (BECAUSE UNNATURAL IS TOO EXPENSIVE)

If I have my druthers (“I’d rathers” in hillbilly talk), we won’t even be talking about “natural burial grounds” in 10-20 more years because so many of our existing cemeteries will have transitioned to sustainable techniques out of necessity — we’ll be talking about cemeteries, plain and simple.

(Hence, please be careful about making up a new set of rules for a new class of cemetery…try to stay on task with the issues of pollution, energy use, and staying out of peoples’ private business if it’s not REALLY about public health, and you’ll probably do just fine, and set us a good example, as well. We’re counting on you, UK!)

In my preferred future with respect to cemeteries, “Natural” will be an increasingly prevalent style of activity reflected in management as a function of COST-SAVING and ENVIRONMENT PRESERVING “sense”; it will be connected to resource-use reduction and habitat support, will use fewer toxins and pollutants, and will be the common-sense approach of any landscaper worth her salt and paying attention to the triple bottom line.

We’ll be funding affordable basic disposition of the dead through natural earth interment for people who don’t WANT to be burned, and people who do will have the ability to be cremated in energy-efficient crematoria that don’t create pollution.

We’ll do this because the fulfillment of LAST WISHES in line with ecological as well as spiritual principles with respect to one’s own physical body – while not a clearly articulated right but still a preference worthy of notice – should be honored to the degree possible. And we’ll make this basic Last Right affordable, and not channel it into an industrial interest’s pocketbook automatically, just because we all die and someone’s going to be paid to put away our pieces.

FINAL DISPOSITION AS A UTILITY

It makes sense that an environmentally friendly and economic option should be available to everyone, equally. It makes so much sense that I’m surprised a simple natural burial isn’t a public utility, offered equally to every single one of us, without charge. That’s the definition of a public utility – it’s something we all need, that we agree to pay for collectively, and that we pull the profit out of in order to make it most affordable to all. Since we all die, and we’re made of water and earth, it seems perfectly obvious to me that we should be put back where we got ourselves.

PRIVATE OPTIONS

The aesthetics – the “sensibility” of the thing – seen in the dressing up of the cemeteries; the decency clauses that reach beyond a national consensus (that rightfully includes atheists, pagans and open-pyre-cremationists); the rules and prohibitions that make up a “club” and gather members based on shared assumptions or desires for similar treatment – should really be left up to individual groups, churches or private cemetery budgets. Local public authorities can provide the basic no-frills options. The private market can pick up the rest.

PAYING FOR THE LONG-TERM CONTROL

People who want their voice regarding land maintenance to last long after their bodies should probably go to either their local cemetery and leave a directed cash endowment for the establishment and preservation of cemetery habitat, VIA the local Living Cemetery/Living Churchyard program OR they should be buried in one of the more responsible natural burial parks that Leedam mentions.

They should also expect to pay top dollar, and these cemeteries should charge it. They’ll need it to do everything they claim they’re going to do, without public funds, forever, so yes, Leedam’s right and buyers should scrutinize the fine print here. After all, they’re buying a gardener “forever”, and wages and taxes in 2200 may not come cheap!

LETTING GO

People who don’t care about who disturbs or visits their body, or what happens to the land after they’ve decomposed – i.e., they’re done with their bodies and they’re putting them back into the earth; come on in and plant corn, for goodness sake! – are the IDEAL candidates for low-cost farmers’ field cemeteries, and I say let them have their INEXPENSIVE natural burial without castigating the operators or the future residents for their choices.

This seems a private deal between two free individuals. As long as public health is not compromised, and bones are identified so that forensics’ teams don’t have expensive community headaches in 50 years, I fail to see the rationale for interference from anyone in the transaction. The cemetery operators can have the buyers sign releases saying as much and that should be the end of it. (Maybe I’m over-simplifying a bit but I don’t think this is beyond reason…)

So, in short Charles, I’d say you were right when you say we’ve already idealized our future vision. In fact, having a variety of burial options that suit our particular tastes is one great step to idealizing the beyond, in whatever fashion we choose. I like looking through a lot of choices. It’s inspiring and fun, and even makes me less nervous about what might be “next.” To think I may have a choice in the matter, even if it’s just ‘being a tree,’ is awesome.

I’m sure you’ll end up with scandals. The question is whether or not everyone will go all a’twitter because of an individual’s disappointment about how “green” the lawn care is, and whether or not the guy next to you gets buried in polyester. (If it matters that much, do go somewhere with a written dress code, and read the rules before you rent the space for the hole!)

It’s rarely the best business of government to defend people from disappointment, hurt feelings and failed expectations outside of clear breach of contract – going down that road is a formula for either disaster or too many meetings one doesn’t have the time nor patience to attend. And where privately run cemeteries are concerned, there are plenty of examples of gross negligence coming our way – seehttp://www.baysidecemeterylitigation.com for a US case in point.

There’s NOTHING that’s perfectly “green”. Every option anyone has shown to me has plusses and minuses. All are context-dependent. Taking off the green-coloured glasses with respect to natural burial won’t do a bit of harm. Natural burial can stand up to the test of time and functionality – Ken West’s proved it. So have your local authorities. They wouldn’t be doing it in these tough economic times if it didn’t work.

“Green” is being sold heavily these days, and arguments do sell. “Who’s the greenest of them all?” creates a lot of buzz and fills papers and conference-panels and even makes for sometimes-useful trade associations. But language is important, and I don’t want to see important meaning – the ecological “sense and sensibility” of moving to saner interaction with the environment via smarter disposition – lost in the catfight.

“Green” is a color. Traditionally, it has meant “youthful”, “jealous” or “naïve.” It’s the naïve who are often disappointed. Jealousy compares. The youthful need nurturing – that’s true – but somehow I fear that “green” will soon reveal itself to be too much blush and not enough skin unless its proponents take themselves down a peg or two, strip off the righteousness, innuendo and hype, and get about the real task of making quality businesses, practices, and institutions that demonstrably work AND clean up the mess, both. A tall order, but it’s a tall time.

“Green” needs to grow up, and when it finally does it will no longer be “green.” It will, instead, be what we do. We’ll just do it more naturally.

What do you think?

Cynthia

Skulduggery

4 April 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Embalming

Hat-tip to FuneralWise.com for this cheerful story:

 

In Guatemala City, morticians called skullmongers speed to murder scenes looking to snag customers. When rival firms meet on the street, price wars ensue. Some skullmongers offer combos: a coffin, a wake and a funeral for as little as $150. Some mongers even receive tips about murders from the police.

A Guatemala City man who goes by the nickname Don Carlos has transformed his mechanic shop into a funeral home, although the initial décor remains. Saw blades and drill bits hang on concrete walls and “in the back, among the old gaskets and engine blocks, the corpses are disemboweled, cleaned, embalmed and dressed for burial.”

In Mexico, with drug violence spiraling out of control, there is even more money to be made beautifying corpses, but more danger involved too. Funeral home operators from southern and central Mexico head for crime-ridden border towns like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, looking to expand their businesses. Some border city funeral homes send agents into the streets to hand out promotional fliers.

“Gun battles and gangland mutilations are also boosting demand for facial reconstructions,” reads a 2008 Reuters article. “And because of the rise in decapitations in the city, undertakers offer to hold the body and wait for the head to be found before proceeding with the funeral.”

 

Read the full post here.

Promising them the moon

1 April 2010
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Uncategorised

Disturbing reports about China reach me from a contact in the US Pentagon who, for reasons which will become apparent, I cannot identify.

The victory of the Communist Party in China marked a clean break with the past, a reinvention of the nation. But some traditions just wouldn’t lie down and die. One of these was ancestor worship, the veneration of the dead, based in the Confucian belief that the living owe a lasting duty of care to deceased family members. The most visible manifestation of this is the annual Quingming Festival when families gather to sweep graves and leave offerings. Quingming falls this year on 5 April.

In a country with a huge population and sparse land resources, burial space is now exhausted. A recent government initiative to encourage the living to maintain virtual graves on the internet instead was greeted with, ominously, the threat of civil unrest. It seems that only physical resting places will satisfy the Chinese people.

That being so, the astounding news is that the Chinese leadership is now looking to outer space. And its gaze has come to rest on the moon. Can the moon provide a satisfactory final resting place for this numerous and increasingly affluent people? Initial feasibility studies have included focus groups of ordinary Chinese citizens. Results show that they would be entirely content with lunar burial. It seems that the brilliant whiteness of the moon makes it particularly acceptable. White is the Chinese colour of mourning.

The Chinese government is now actively seeking to bring this about. My Pentagon contact reports that pressure is being placed on a reluctant US government and, in particular, on its capability, through NASA, to convey China’s dead to the moon until such time as China’s space industry can take over. This is just one last-ditch, hopeless struggle being fought by a dying superpower against a rising star. As my contact expresses it, “These guys have bailed out our economy and stuffed the pockets of ordinary Americans with dollars so that they can buy Chinese-made goods. We are already economically enslaved, dammit. Now they want to annexe our space exploration capability, and there’s not a thing we can do to stop them.”

Even though, under international agreements, the moon belongs to no one, this cuts no ice with the Chinese. Said my contact: “These treaties are as much use as tits on a boar hog. I mean, who’s gonna go after them and stop them?”

I decided to check out these allegations with the Chinese embassy in London. After the usual interminable delays I was finally put on the line to someone willing to speak to me, a Mr Lim Yu Zin. He asked me to describe exactly what I had heard. Then, with immense politeness, he responded, “Sir, I regret to inform you that I cannot possibly comment.” As he spoke I could hear in the background both suppressed laughter and open-mouthed guffaws.

I hope to bring you further updates to this story on the same day next year.

Sense and sustainability

31 March 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: natural burial

Cynthia Beal heads up the Natural Burial Company in the United States. She’s a friend of many in this country. This blog is her most ardent admirer. Before becoming a green burialist Cynthia spent a good many years in organic foods. That experience has proved invaluable to her and to many others looking for greener, more sustainable ways of disposing of their dead. Cynthia is not only an idealist with a long and admirable commitment to environmental responsibility, she is also a seasoned realist with the nous and experience to show dreamers how to make their dreams doable. Big heart, big brain, that’s our Cynthia.

She does something that we in the UK are in danger of losing sight of, I sometimes feel. She honours all that Britain has contributed to the natural burial movement and she honours those whose vision it originally was. Above all, she uses the K-word a lot. I like that. Because it was Bereavement Services Manager Ken West who, in 1993, translated an upsurge of best intentions into practical action by seeing through the opening of the first natural burial ground in 1993. What it took to get that past the good burghers of Carlisle I can’t begin to imagine. It must be a heck of a story, a little piece of history which we should cherish in the recounting. Ken is writing a book at the moment. I hope he will reveal all.

Cynthia has written an article about sustainable cemetery management which can’t be beat. It’s intelligent and it’s wise and it’s a very good read, especially the section on sustainability.

“Sustainability” has three primary components: social, ecological, and fiscal. Each of these affects the other two when a “full-cost lifetime accounting” is done, and the overall sustainability of an endeavor – i.e., its likelihood of success – is best served when all three aspects are in balance …

 
[D]eveloping a well-conceived sustainability plan may be your next order of business. Future capitalization may depend on demonstrating you understand all the bills coming due – the social ones and the ecological ones, as well as the fiscal ones. Chances are a superficial greening won’t pass muster – you’ll need to demonstrate you understand (and believe in) what you’re doing, and you’ll have to shop carefully, as there are plenty of companies that will sell “green” hype to you, too.You don’t need hype – you need tools that work. Quarter-to-quarter expense management may require immediate resource-use analysis and reduction, transitioning the landscape to new conditions and developing new techniques and networks of experience. Master planning that proves your future income stream is in touch with environmental and consumer trends while addressing liability in a balanced manner may be what keeps your investors on board. After all, a cemetery is still forever – and sustainability is a big part of forever.

Read the whole piece here.

Another piece about natural burial caught my eye a few days ago. The writer, an American, raises two matters of interest to Brits. The first is aesthetic:

If I am not allowed the option of a casket, or a burial vault, what happens to my loved ones body when the burial is complete and a couple of tons of dirt are dumped on their body? This is a viable question, considering I buried my Dad, Grandmother, and Grandfather some years back and would not care for the visual this gives me. Personally, I like the idea that my loved ones weren’t crushed by the weight of the dirt during backfill.

Well, what do we think? Do people know that a cardboard coffin will be crushed as a grave is filled in, an MDF one within a few weeks? While they’re tending the grave in the time thereafter, what picture do they have of what’s going on below? My supposition is that they have none: their dead person is already idealised. What’s your view?

The writer’s second point is a strong one and it’s all about sustainability:


Green burials are great if you are into getting back to the old ways of performing burials. No casket expense, no vault expense, no memorial expense because in a true green burial space no memorial is allowed. This for a burial business means little or no streams of revenue to keep the cemetery profitable and in business. In 20 years, when the business is no longer solvent what happens to those burials? Who looks after the properties and maintains any record of those burials? I offer this as a brain teaser to this question: Many pioneer cemeteries and other old non marked cemeteries are disturbed annually with new road construction, new housing developments, etc. etc. I see this as a repeat of those same issues, 50 or 100 years from now. So for those who preach green, I want to know how they intend to protect the sanctity of these “new” green burial places for generations to come? Or, does that matter?

This is a matter which was raised by James Leedam a few weeks ago in this blog. At the time I thought it had the quality of dynamite. I still do:Sadly, the majority of the general public are not savvy when it comes to the environmental credentials of individual natural burial grounds, which vary enormously. In the absence of a “Go Compare” comparison website for natural burial grounds, consumers should interrogate the burial ground operators about their long-term future plans for the land – what happens in 30, 50 or 100 years time, when the income from burials ceases? How sustainable is their long term future? Many trading under the “green burial” banner, have apparently little concern for long-term sustainability (but are profiting nicely in the meantime). Others can offer you well considered plans and more confidence, their natural burial grounds will be future assets, not long-term liabilities.

Do not accept fuzzy visions – some operators suggest that a wildlife trust will take over when the ground reaches capacity – but be sure to ask the wildlife trust before accepting this; they might well have a different view. Ask yourselves how can these places sustain themselves once the income from burials dries up?

I’m not sure that many of us would feel competent to conduct this sort of due diligence. We’re in small-print territory here, where everyone speaks legalese. Have the seeds of our first natural burial scandal already been sown?

Strange and bitter crop, if so.