Legacy Matters

Politically Correct Corpse

The New York Times is cottoning on to the trend of ecological burials in Eco-Friendly Burial Sites that I wrote about a year ago in Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Mulch.

It's Forever Fernwood in Mill Valley, California, where

redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.

But the NYT examines the politics in burials and in the funeral industry.

In the green scheme of things, death becomes a vehicle for land conservation and saving the planet. "It is not enough to be a corpse anymore," said Thomas Lynch, an author, poet and Michigan funeral director. "Now, you have to be a politically correct corpse."

But just what is a politically correct corpse is an increasingly thorny issue. In recent months, there has been a struggle for the soul of the emerging industry between Mr. Cassity, an enfant terrible of the funeral business, who has made a fortune producing A&E-style digitized biographies of the dead, and Dr. Billy Campbell, who pioneered the movement in the United States and who has the studious intensity of a somewhat nerdy birder.

Dr. Campbell, a small-town physician prone to quoting John Muir and Coleridge, opened the first of the United States' green burial grounds, the 350-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. There, the departed are buried dust-to-dust-style without embalming - a practice called toxic, artificial and bizarre by critics - in biodegradable coffins or cremation urns that make impervious coffins and grave liners obsolete.

Dr. Campbell who fantasizes about being buried in a shroud made up of old T-shirts, has established a consulting firm in Marin Country dedicated to land conservation and 'little boutique cemeteries with a social justice component".   

"There is a huge generation of people entering accelerated mortality who grew up with the first Earth Day," said Dr. Campbell, who started his eco-cemetery after he was left cold by the prepackaged funeral for his father. "People are ready for something more meaningful."

As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north

Cassity who produces commissioned video biographies of the departed called "LifeStories" at Forever Network, has performed an "extreme makeover" of Hollywood Memorial Park with his brother Brent.

Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.

Compare that with Fernwood.

The presence of Fernwood, where the official hearse is a black Volvo S.U.V., in the cool verdant shadows of Mount Tamalpais, reflects Northern California's status as the nation's capital of alternative, artisanal death. The area is home to the death-midwifery movement, supporting home funerals, as well as a cottage industry in plain pine boxes and Funeria, a fraternity of funerary artists who have their own Biennale in San Francisco.

From surfing to sushi,  most trends seem to start in California.  Consider this a glimpse of the future of the burial industry that will slowly drift eastward.