Nearer My Sod to Thee

When it came time to bury his dad, Billy Campbell wanted a plain pine box -- no frills, no satin lining, no filigree. But the only wood casket at his local mortuary was a varnished beauty of Spanish oak that would have been suitable for the leader of a small republic. The funeral director pointed out it was the same model used by Dan Blocker -- Hoss, of the old “Bonanza” television series -- but to Campbell that was cold comfort.

An environmental activist and a small-town South Carolina physician, Campbell is a big believer in simplicity. To him, “dust to dust” does not include formaldehyde injections, fancy monuments or marble-finished burial vaults guaranteed to protect the deceased from dirt and moisture for a century or more. He had hoped his furniture-dealer father could simply become part of the earth instead of being gussied up as if to attend “the great sales meeting in the sky,” he said.

Eighteen years later, Billy Campbell is at the vanguard of the tiny but growing “green burial” movement in the U.S. He is also the inspiration for a Los Angeles cemetery entrepreneur who is planning a nature-friendly burial ground that will be a haven for hikers as well as a home for those who have taken their final step.

The entrepreneur, Tyler Cassity, is the head of Forever Enterprises, which runs Hollywood Forever Memorial Park, the resting place for such film legends as Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power. His company owns seven other cemeteries, as well as a unit that does video biographies of the deceased for display in cemetery kiosks.

Cassity has purchased a suburban San Francisco cemetery with 20 pristine, wooded acres that will remain just that, even after graves are dug amid the trees. There will be no emerald-green lawn with row after lock-step row of white monuments. New arrivals will not be embalmed. Some could be planted sans casket.

In a multiple use never envisioned by the U.S. Forest Service, hikers will meander down woodsy trails as the less fortunate come to the end of theirs. With the deal just recently concluded, Cassity plans to open his green-burial ground next year.

Such cemeteries could give the dead a way of making a statement from the grave. Cassity sees them as prototypes for larger natural cemeteries in Southern California, where land preserved for the dead could be protected from suburban sprawl.

“This would give people a tangible way to put a permanent stop to that with their own bodies,” he said. “You would know that your death is a way of preserving a piece of this world forever in its natural state.”

A partner with Cassity in the pending venture, Campbell points to his Ramsey Creek Preserve as a model.

Amid the hardwood trees and longleaf pines on his 350 acres outside Westminster, S.C., two dozen families have buried their loved ones in shrouds, in biodegradable boxes of unfinished wood, and in nothing at all. The bodies are not embalmed. There are no burial vaults. There are no plastic flowers. Some graves are unmarked while others are unobtrusively topped with small, flat, inscribed stones.

“It’s not a one-dimensional deathscape,” Campbell said. “It just looks mainly like the woods.”

The only doctor in a town of 2,300, Campbell treats patients in one part of his office and arranges burials in another, taking pains not to mix the two.

“This is the South,” he joked. “We used to have a place here that sold tombstones and fireworks.”

The founder of a conservation group called South Carolina Forestwatch, Campbell speaks wistfully of the woods along Ramsey Creek. Wild turkeys and deer roam there, and a boy sometimes comes by to splash in the creek and visit his stillborn sister Hope. Death doesn’t have to keep its sting, Campbell says; Ramsey Creek will be used for weddings, nature walks, art classes -- anything that fits in a quiet, green corner of the land.

Despite such pastoral visions, his plans for a similar spot in rural San Diego County met an untimely end three years ago.

“The neighbors didn’t want a ‘cemetery’ next door,” Campbell said.

In his hometown, some of Campbell’s clients are ardent environmentalists, but many are local people drawn by low prices and a pretty setting. One man was buried with country music blaring and friends tossing cigarettes in his grave. A neighbor who initially opposed the zoning for Ramsey Creek is buried there in his overalls. “There are Southern Baptists who like the neo-traditional aspects of all this,” Campbell said.

Running Memorial Ecosystems Inc. with his wife Kimberley, Campbell has conferred with proponents of “woodland burial” in Great Britain, where more than 180 sites have sprung up in the last 10 years. He also has been a guiding force for groups around the U.S. that are interested both in open-space preservation and in alternative burials.

In the panhandle of Florida, the Wilkerson brothers are trying to save the family farm by opening a part of it to the dead. In addition to gravesites, the Wilkersons offer homemade caskets that can be fitted with shelves and used as pre-death bedroom dressers.

“It’s a plain-vanilla box,” said John Wilkerson, who with his brother Bill grows a wild-turkey feed called chufa. “We can make a casket on site from trees that grow on site and put people in the ground to provide nutrients for the trees.”

The Wilkersons’ Glendale Preserve has yet to hold its first burial, and the brothers don’t have the $50,000 fee required by the state to sell spaces “pre-need.” Even so, John Wilkerson said, 30 to 50 prospective clients have made firm commitments to head his way when the Grim Reaper calls.

In Huntsville, Texas, George H. Russell, founder and bishop of the Universal Ethician Church, just opened an 81-acre swath of woods for family green burials. Graves must be dug with shovels instead of heavy equipment. Deceased horses and other large animals must be left out for “sky burial” by vultures before their remains are interred beside their owners’.

The dead “will re-nurture the circle of life, fertilize the soil and provide a perpetual legacy to beauty,” Russell said. “It doesn’t make sense to destroy rain forests by making mahogany coffins, or even worse, turn a person into a toxic pickle.”

Green-burial proponents also say it makes no sense to needlessly shell out thousands of dollars.

In 2001, the average cost of a standard funeral was $5,180, according to the National Funeral Directors Assn. At Ramsey Creek, burials run about half that.

Campbell says his environmental bent helps keep customer costs down. His digging equipment takes less fuel and he doesn’t spray his land with chemicals. Many cemeteries require that caskets be placed within sealed vaults that keep the surface of the lawn above them uniform for mowing, but at Ramsey Creek, vaults are taboo.

As in Orthodox Jewish and Muslim burials, embalming is forbidden at green-burial sites. Some advocates claim embalmed bodies pose a risk to water supplies, but neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor industry studies have linked the two.

“As far as I know, there’s no concrete evidence that leaching from cemeteries is a problem in communities,” said Mark Musgrove, president of the National Funeral Directors Assn. Formaldehyde, which is present in some shampoos, is heavily diluted before it’s pumped into bodies, he added.

A practice started in the U.S. for Civil War officers who died in battle, embalming is not required by any state. It’s done to preserve bodies for viewing and to disinfect them -- a job Campbell says a good scrubbing will generally handle.

Groups working toward green burials have been organized in several states, but Musgrove, who runs a funeral home in Eugene, Ore., doubted they would take off. For one thing, he said, many people prefer traditional cemeteries.

“These places are tailored and mowed and cared for,” Musgrove said. “Some people like the idea that they can go there and always find the gravestone, that there are people always taking care of the grounds, that the cemeteries are beautiful and will be beautiful forever.”

Besides, he added, people concerned about wasting precious space on Earth will opt for cremation, as did nearly half the Californians who died in 2001.

But Forever Enterprises’ Cassity said the cremation trend could cool as green burial grows.

“One of the things that motivates cremation is the thought that cemeteries are a waste of space,” he said. “This turns that on its head.”

In the United Kingdom, flying instructor and part-time farmer Steve Clarehugh is turning his 35 acres of so-so farmland in Northumbria into a burial site where sheep graze and 16,000 trees will cast their shade. So far, 26 permanent residents have arrived, most of them in quick-to-deteriorate cardboard coffins.

“People don’t want to be stuck under a slab of granite that no one’s going to be looking after in 50 years,” Clarehugh said. “After a time, cemeteries become a burden on society.”

That’s just how Michael and Shirley Megel felt after visiting the grave of Michael’s mother in Omaha. Vandals had romped through the cemetery, tilting and toppling stones that no one had bothered to set right. The sight prompted the couple to sign up for eternal rest at the woodsy place their doctor was running back in South Carolina.

When Michael Megel died of cancer last month at the age of 67, he was buried at Ramsey Creek. His coffin was raw oak. A grandson said it looked like something John Wayne would be buried in.

Not far away lay buried a rock ‘n’ roll fan who went to his rest in tie-dye and poncho. His friends had memorialized him with the Grateful Dead’s “Black Muddy River.”

“It’s out in the woods and it’s beautiful, like the land we live on,” Shirley Megel said. “A brook runs by it. It’s very calming. It seems closer to God than a regular cemetery.”