Going green - all the way to the grave

As the setting sun filtered through red and yellow leaves, West Laurel Hill Cemetery's Nevin Mann stuck a shovel in the ground.

He was planting a tree. And, in a way, nurturing the seed of an idea: a shift in the American way of death - a departure from chemicals, concrete vaults and manicured plots.

Mann, cemetery president and CEO, was ceremoniously opening a 31/2-acre "natural" burial ground at the 1869 Lower Merion cemetery, where 100,000 people are buried, including a Titanic survivor and sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder.

No embalmed bodies will be allowed in this area, which has room for 400. Only untreated wood and biodegradable shrouds can be used.

Markers will be little more than fieldstones; Bringhurst Funeral Home, which is on site, will help families conduct at-home funerals and make caskets.

Each year, along with their dearly departed, Americans bury 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid and 30-plus million board feet of timber, according to the Green Burial Council, an advocacy and certification organization in New Mexico.

Its founder, Joe Sehee, says we bury enough steel to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge, and enough concrete vaults - to keep the ground over graves from sinking, which makes maintenance easier - to pave a highway halfway across the United States.

"A lot of people don't want to feel like their last act is one of pollution," he said. "I don't think people have embraced conventional funeral options as much as tolerated them."

Now people are being buried in coffins made of wicker or bamboo. In Ecopods of recycled paper. Even in simple shrouds. A San Francisco company offers them in linen, silk and ethnic textiles.

Green burial sites even include forests, grasslands, and other natural areas - with the burial money helping to keep the land undeveloped.

Markers might be nonexistent, with GPS coordinates the only thing guiding loved ones to the spot.

Sehee founded the certifying group in 2005.

So far, the council has approved seven casket and urn companies, more than a dozen cemeteries, a couple of cremation-disposition programs, and nearly 200 funeral-service providers.

Though still just a tiny part of the $11 billion annual U.S. funeral industry, green burials and funerals are gaining ground, industry officials say, because of the growth of a broader green ethic.

"It's a great movement," said Ellen Wynn McBrayer, spokeswoman for the National Funeral Directors Association and a Georgia undertaker who is "heading in that direction" herself.

"Some religions, and some people, prefer ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

True, some are repulsed by the idea of not embalming. But in a 2007 AARP funeral survey, one-fifth of respondents said they were interested in something more eco-friendly.

"If you drive a Prius, live an environmentally conscious life and read Dwell magazine, you are not going to settle for the options offered at a traditional funeral home," said West Chester's Donna Larsen, with A Natural Undertaking, a resource center for home funerals.

At West Laurel Hill, people had been asking about green funerals, Mann said after the opening a week ago. "We took the position of, if people want to do it, we ought to figure out how to help them."

Indeed, green burials are also seen as one more way people are taking back hallowed rituals, loosely akin to outdoor weddings and birthing at home with a midwife.

The home funeral may be the ultimate expression of a green burial.

About an hour after Rima Synnestvedt's father died in his bed, surrounded by his family, his three daughters and others bathed him with flower-scented water and dressed him in his favorite pants and corduroy shirt.

They lit candles and put on soft music. For about 10 hours afterward, friends visited John Synnestvedt, 78, and said their goodbyes.

Then the male members of the family lifted him into a coffin made of compressed cardboard. The next day, he was buried in a wooded plot at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral.

The ceremony four years ago fulfilled a promise Rima Synnestvedt had made to him. And to herself. "I think the body should be left in its natural state," she said.

In places that allow it, families are digging the graves themselves. They're decorating plain caskets with poems, messages, and grandchildren's tiny handprints.

In 2005, the movement got a boost from the HBO series Six Feet Under, which followed the lives of a family of funeral directors.

In the last episode, Nate, one of the owners, dies and his family lowers his shroud-wrapped body into the grave.

Lauren Ambrose, who played Nate's sister, later told a reporter that she wanted a green funeral, too: "I'm not really interested in being pumped full of chemicals and painted with salmon-colored lipstick."

Some have sneered that only among baby boomers, so obsessed with youth, could the idea of a green funeral gain traction. They wouldn't so much die as be replanted.

But Liz Cohen, a hospice social worker from Princeton, sees it as "a true return to the earth, letting our spirits go where they go, and letting our bodies help to preserve life."

Prices for funerals, traditional or green, range widely, so it's hard to compare. But Sehee said an eco-death could cost about half of a traditional funeral, or $3,000 to $5,000.

Advocates say it's not just a way to cheap out. Direct cremation - without embalming - is still the least expensive.

Tawana Ford Sabbath, a social worker and manager of the Walter E. Sabbath Jr. Funeral Service in West Oak Lane, worries that green plots will command a premium, out of reach for some.

In a way, eco-burials are only a new label. Many in the Jewish and Muslim faiths already incorporate some of the same elements.

And caring for their dead is something families have done for centuries. It has only recently been relegated to funeral homes.

Among all the "new" green burial grounds is a small wooded area deep in the Pinelands, near Tuckahoe, N.J.

Dating to the 1700s, the Steelmantown Cemetery belonged to a Southern Baptist congregation that did not allow embalming or vaults.

The church burned in the 1950s and gradually was forgotten. Litter piled up.

But housing developer Ed Bixby knew about it. His mother had belonged to the church. And his infant brother had been buried there in a wicker basket in 1956.

It's a long story, but Bixby now owns the one-acre cemetery. He has protected it with a deed restriction, and plans to expand it onto an adjacent 7.5 acres. "Everything seems to come around in this life," he said. "All of a sudden, here we are, back to the way it was."

Bob Fertig, owner of the Fertig Funeral Home in Mullica Hill, has handled some of the services. He's seen family and friends carry a loved one to the grave, dug with a shovel.

"To watch the family be a part of that . . . to have them help lower the body in the ground, and then watch them as they replace the dirt. . . . It's a very profound, moving experience," he said.

"We, as a funeral home, decided we wanted to be a part of this."

A chapter on green funerals is included in Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial, by Mark Harris (Scribner, $24; a $15 paperback edition is due in December).

Links to organizations mentioned in this article: http://go.philly.com/earthEndText