Going Green For Funerals
A cemetery is typically a very somber place where caskets are buried deep beneath the ground and headstones mark each grave. But at the Fountain Hill Cemetery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, there's another option: a green burial in this place called “The Meadow” which, come the spring, will be covered with wild grass and flowers.
Mark Harris is an expert on “green burials,” and is author of a book called “Grave Matters.”
“You know, we think of ‘green burial’ as this new hip, modern, cool eco-trend, but in fact it’s nothing more than a return to long tradition. The way we used to bury people in this country is what green burial is all about.”
It was only after the Civil War that bodies were taken to a room and treated with chemicals.
Says Harris, “Families would assemble either at home or at the church or just at the graveyard to consign the body directly to the earth. There was no embalmed body, there was no casket hermetically sealed against the elements, there was no burial vault. The body was just returned to the earth.”
At Fountain Hill Cemetery, green graves are mounded, but gradually sink and become level. A small temporary marker will be replaced with a permanent one made of flat, engraved fieldstone. Nicos Elias of the Nicos C. Elias Funeral Home in nearby Allentown says he plans to specialize in green burials.
“And I believe in the cause. I like the eco-friendly idea. It runs a little contrary to traditional funerals – we don't make as much money – but I just think it makes more sense. Like the Jewish and the Muslim people have been doing these kind of funerals for years and I think it makes sense. Hopefully it catches on.”
He advises clients to go as green as they're comfortable with. They can choose biodegradable caskets or urns for cremated remains, some containing seeds that bloom as the urn returns to the soil.
Harris says contemporary funerals are anything but environmentally friendly.
“Every year we divert enough concrete to the production of these concrete boxes, burial vaults, to build a two-lane highway halfway across the United States. And every year we divert enough metal to the production of metal caskets – and three-quarters of all metal caskets sold in this country are metal – every year we divert enough metal for those caskets to completely rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge once every year.”
He says one cemetery can contain enough wood to build 40 homes.
Elias hasn't yet been overwhelmed with requests for green burials, but those who have asked for them, he says, have been pleased.
“And a lot of them have said things like, 'that's exactly what my father would have wanted. This is perfect for him.'
There is only one green grave in Fountain Hill Cemetery right now but, if the demand is there, there's plenty of room in the meadow for many, many more green burials. The question is, will people be willing to forgo the traditions of today to return to the traditions of yesteryear.
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