Publication: Personal Blog of John Young
Author: John Young
Publication Date: October 7, 2009
John shares his thoughts about the recent land set aside in Fort Collins Colorado cemetery for green burial.
I still prefer to be barbecued. Or broiled — however it is that my remains can be reduced to the kind of dusty nutrient that makes fields and ravines grow greener.
If it can’t be the Viking way — by floating pyre — let my bones retire the cremation way.
That doesn’t mean that folks promoting a new, back-to-nature form of burial haven’t got my attention and admiration. The same goes for local governments that are making it possible. For some unfathomable reason, their numbers are few.
Fort Collins, Colo., the new city of my residence, is one of the nation’s first to facilitate so-called green funerals — burials in which the body truly is committed to the soil with or without preservatives, and in a container that will decompose along with it. Hear, hear. Let a thousand flowers bloom with this approach to dying and decomposition.
John- It is actually rare that local governments make “laws” preventing Green Burial. It is the cemeteries themselves. There are actually very few State or local laws preventing this practice.Like the Health insurance industry ,the huge funeral industry has made alot of good money requiring burial vaults ($800-$5000)that line the graves to put those expensive metal caskets in. And although actually Ft. Collins Colorado is about 12 years behind the 1st Green cemeteries to offer green burials specifically (which were in Ramsey Creek in South Carolina 1998 and Fernwood in Northern California in 2004 which is where and when I was fortunate to begin working in Green Burial (www.greenburialproducts.com) it is grand that they are starting to offer them now like Goes Funeral Care in Ft. Collins who has been offering families natural deathcare.
Thank you for this !
I am a funeral director in the Chicagoland area and I will be advertising Green funerals in the spring.Anybody out there that can help me in this endeavor?