When I Go, I’m Going Green

Our annual family vacation on Cape Cod included all the familiar summer pleasures: climbing dunes, walking beaches, spotting seals, eating oysters, reading books we had intended to get to all year.

And a little shopping. My grandkid wanted a few small toys. My daughter stocked up on thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles at the game store in Provincetown. I bought a pair of earrings and a couple of paperbacks.

And a gravesite.

It’s near a cluster of oaks, in a cemetery in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where some mossy Civil War-era headstones are so weathered that you can no longer decipher who lies beneath them. The town permits nonresidents to join the locals there, and it welcomes green burials.

Regular summer visitors like us often share the fantasy of acquiring real estate on the Cape. Admittedly, most probably envision a place to use while they’re still alive, a daydream that remains beyond my means.

Buying a cemetery plot where I can have a green burial, on the other hand, proved to be surprisingly affordable and will allow my body, once no longer in use, to decompose as quickly and as naturally as possible, with minimal environmental damage. Bonus: If my descendants ever care to visit, my grave will be in a beloved place, where my daughter has come nearly every summer of her life.

“Do you see a lot of interest in green burials?” I asked the friendly town cemetery commissioner who was showing me around.

“I don’t think we’ve had a traditional burial in two years,” he said. “It’s all green.”

Nobody can count how many Americans now choose green or natural burials, but Lee Webster, former president of the Green Burial Council, is tracking the growing number of cemeteries in the United States that allow them.

The first, Ramsey Creek Preserve, began its operations in Westminster, South Carolina, in 1998. By 2016, Webster’s list included 150 cemeteries; now she counts 497. Most, like the one in Wellfleet, are hybrids accommodating both conventional and green burials.

Although a consumer survey conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association found that fewer than 10% of respondents would prefer a green burial (compared with 43% favoring cremation and 24% opting for conventional burial), more than 60% said they would be interested in exploring green and natural alternatives.

“That has to do with the baby boomers coming of age and wanting to practice what they’ve preached,” Webster said. “They’re looking for environmental consistency. They’re looking for authenticity and simplicity.”

She added, “If you nursed your babies and you recycle the cardboard in the toilet paper roll, this is going to appeal to you.” (I raise my hand.)

Aside from their environmental concerns, many survey participants attributed their interest in green burial to its lower cost. The median price of a funeral with burial in 2023 was about $10,000, including a vault but not including the cemetery plot or a monument, according to the NFDA.

Although advocates of green burials, like Webster, decry cremation’s toxic emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, the method now accounts for nearly two-thirds of body disposals in the United States, the association reports. One reason is its median cost of $6,300, without interment or a monument.

Such numbers vary considerably by location. I live in Brooklyn, where real estate is pricey even for the dead, and where Green-Wood Cemetery — a jewel and a National Historic Landmark — charges $21,000 to $30,000 for a plot. Burial in its new, green section is a comparative bargain at $15,000.

About 40 miles outside Nashville, Tennessee, though, a green burial at Larkspur Conservation costs $4,000, including the gravesite and just about everything else, except, if the family wants one, a flat, engraved native stone.

Larkspur is one of 15 conservation burial grounds in the nation operating in partnership with land trusts — The Nature Conservancy, in this case — to preserve the space. “It’s what keeps forests from becoming subdivisions,” said John Christian Phifer, Larkspur’s founder.

He listed the common elements of green burials: “No chemical embalming, no steel casket, no concrete vault. Everything that goes in the ground is compostable or biodegradable.” A small industry has evolved to produce artisanal woven caskets, linen shrouds, and other eco-friendly funerary items.

Green funerals often feel different, too. Mourners at Larkspur tend to walk the trail to the burial site wearing denim and hiking boots, not black suits.

“Instead of observing, they’re actively participating,” Phifer said. “We invite them to help lower the body into the grave with ropes, to put a handful or shovelfuls of soil into the grave,” and to mound soil, pine boughs, and flowers atop it afterward. Then, they might toast the departed with champagne or share a potluck picnic.

When Larkspur began operating in 2018, with Phifer as its only employee, 17 bodies were buried on its 161 acres. Last year, a staff of eight handled 80 burials, and the burial ground is acquiring more property.

Other alternatives to conventional burial have emerged, too. The company Earth Funeral has facilities in Nevada, Washington state, and, soon, Maryland, for so-called human composting. In this process, a body is heated with plant material for 30 to 45 days in a high-tech drum, where it all eventually turns into a cubic yard of soil.

That’s 300 pounds, more than most families can use, so local land conservancies receive the rest. The cost: $5,000 to $6,000.

Alkaline hydrolysis, which is legal in almost half of all states, dissolves bodies using chemicals and water, leaving pulverized bone fragments that can be scattered or buried and an effluent that must be disposed of.

Environmentally, when you include standard cremation, “there are ramifications for all three processes that we can avoid by simply putting a body in the soil” and letting microbes and fungi do the rest, Webster said.

Cemetery acreage near major population centers is limited, however, and increasingly expensive. “I don’t think there’s a perfect option, but we can do a hell of a lot better than the traditional methods,” said Tom Harries, founder of Earth Funeral. Debates about comparative greenness will certainly continue.

But green burial made sense to Lynne McFarland and her husband, Newell Anderson, who heard about Larkspur through their Episcopal church in Nashville. “The idea of returning to the earth sounded good to me,” McFarland said.

Her mother, Ruby Fielden, 94, was one of the first people buried at Larkspur in 2018, in an open meadow that attracts butterflies.

Last spring, Anderson, who had Alzheimer’s, died at 90 and was buried a few yards away from Fielden, in a biodegradable willow casket. A dozen family members read prayers and poems, shared stories and sang “Amazing Grace.”

Then they picked up shovels and filled the grave. It was exactly what her outdoorsy husband, a onetime Boy Scout leader, would have wanted, said McFarland, 80, who plans to be buried there, too.

I’m not sure if my survivors will undertake that much physical labor. But my daughter and son-in-law, though probably decades from their own end-of-life decisions, liked the idea of green burial in a place we all cherish. The prices in what I now think of as my cemetery were low enough — $4,235, to be precise — that I could buy a plot to accommodate myself and seven descendants, if I ever have that many.

I hope this plan, besides minimizing the impact of my death on a fragile landscape, also lessens the familial burden of making hurried arrangements. At 76, I don’t know how my future will unfold. But I know where it will conclude.

The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with The New York Times.