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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC. And joining me is a guest who's come on before to talk about things like weather and climate change, and now is on for a completely different topic. We have Michael Furniss here to talk about green burial. Welcome to the Econews.

MICHAEL FURNISS:

Hi, thanks for having me, Tom.

WHEELER:

Well, I am excited to have you on this show. It's kind of an interesting show because it's, it's a topic related to death. And I think that a lot of us try to avoid thinking, talking about death here in Western culture, but let's dive into it. Green burial. Let's just start off by defining terms and defining what we're talking about here. What do we mean when we use this terminology, green burial?

FURNISS:

Yeah, that's come to be the term that we use now. Those of us that are kind of nerdy about this topic like to call it natural burial because it's the way it's been done as far back as we can remember until about the Civil War when burial practices, especially in the United States, changed, but also in a lot of places in the world, especially Europe. And we're getting back to that natural burial approach and away from the conventional burial that has developed.

WHEELER:

And so I guess we are defining it in contrast to the standard American burial system. So what's wrong ... or what is standard, and maybe what's wrong with what is normal?

FURNISS:

I'll tell you what green burial is, it's just really three factors and they're all related to let's go in the ground and decompose and go back into nature, go back into the soil, go back into the ecosystem. And so that encouragement of decomposition and conventional burial, you're typically in a box in a box. So you're in a casket, usually a fairly fancy, sometimes hermetically sealed box, often very fancy woods and metal and whatnot on it. And then that's placed in a concrete or a heavy duty plastic liner that underlies most modern cemeteries. And there's a lid on top of that.

And so you're in a box in a box. And the reason for the liner is that the cemeteries prioritize lawn maintenance and they don't want any settling as the casket or the body decomposes. Not that that would be difficult to deal with, but that's how it has developed. So you're basically in a buried mausoleum, often with embalming. And it's an approach that actually discourages decomposition and tries to hold it off, which is futile, of course. So that's the conventional approach. And it has a pretty big footprint in terms of the use of fancy woods, the steel and concrete that typically go into these underground vaults that underlay most modern cemeteries. And the embalming, which is basically formaldehyde, is very toxic material.

And so green burial, by contrast, is no embalming, only a biodegradable casket or a shroud, and no liner, no concrete or heavy duty plastic entombment underground. And so those are the basics of green burial. It tends to be much less of a footprint and actually because you're decomposing and going back into the system, you're actually giving back. So your final act is giving back to the ecosystem rather than having the footprint of conventional burial. And then a lot of people these days choose to be cremated, which is fine, but it's actually has a pretty big footprint as well. It takes a lot of energy to burn a body down to bones, about as much as it would take to drive to New York and back. And then your remains basically go into the air and become air pollution.

WHEELER:

PM 2.5 air pollution too, right?

FURNISS:

2.5, even dioxins are developed and sometimes mercury in your teeth or your knee replacement or something like that, all that goes back into the air. Mostly we're made out of plant nutrients, no surprise. So if you go back and decompose in the ground, that goes right back into the ecosystem and you become, your remains anyway, become part of nature. And that's what a lot of people like. Once they find out about it, they go, oh yeah, that's what I want, I'd like that. And a lot of people I think choose cremation now because the conventional burial is just not attractive. So this is a big movement, there's a big demand for it. The supply of green burial cemeteries vastly trails the demand for various reasons. We're trying to fix that here.

WHEELER:

So Green Burial also seems like it is, it's a statement in part, it's a statement about how your values were when you were alive, you're, you're making this choice, you know, you're writing it into your will or, or, or whatever, you're, you're telling your family that this is what you want. It is, is a reflection about who you are as a person when you were on this planet, that in leaving this planet, you, you are having a lighter touch.

FURNISS:

Would you like your final act to be something that gives back, or that something is as green and as mild to the environment, or even enriching to the environment, rather than something that has a big footprint? And I would say a lot of green burial advocates pound on this, how ungreen the conventional burial is. I think people should have it any way they want. If you want that conventional approach, if you want embalmment, George Floyd's casket was gold. It was symbolic of how important we think people's lives are. Have it any way you want. The cemeteries are not a priority environmental problem. There is impacts. There is a footprint.

But it's not like, we have to stop this because we're ruining the world. It's not that kind of a problem. People should have their final act should be any way they want. But usually when people find out about green burial, or a natural burial, or this put me in the ground, let me decompose, dig a hole and roll me in, it's like, yeah, I want that. That's what I want. And in fact, a lot of people actually would like a sky burial or a funeral pyre. That's not legal in the US and probably isn't going to be.

WHEELER:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let's talk about the legality of green burial. Can I bury grandma in my backyard? What are the restrictions? What are the rules in place? We live in California, famous for having lots of rules.

FURNISS:

Yeah. Yeah. Green burial is legal in all states, but backyard burial or burial on private property is illegal in two states. It used to be three, but Washington changed that, but California and Indiana do not allow burial on your private land. It's a little bit hard to tell that to develop, but basically the real estate industry doesn't like it because it encumbers the land. It may reduce the value. You really should, if you bury somebody in your backyard or in a lot of places where it is legal, it's only legal in rural areas. You don't want people doing it in their backyard, say on South G Street. If you think about it, there's good reasons for that, but really if you do bury somebody on your property, you should put an easement on that to make constructive notice that there's somebody that's buried there and it shouldn't ever be disturbed or at least some sort of recorded notice that that exists there.

We could probably, with some real effort, which I don't have the bandwidth for right now, change this in California, but as it stands right now, it's not legal. You could establish a cemetery, an official state certified cemetery on your land, but there's a lot of steps to that and it's costly and difficult to do.

WHEELER:

So green burial, it sounds like there's kind of a spectrum here in green burial where you can, you can be buried in sometimes a conventional cemetery among caskets that are in a box in a box and have the normal cemetery experience. There's also in other places and there are special green conservation area set aside cemeteries where it's more of a park like setting or, or it's hard to distinguish that you are in a cemetery, that it feels more like you are in nature and that might be the, the, the top of the line or the greenest option here is that you can use money that would go towards a normal cemetery plot, but instead use it for lands conservation and have wildlife habitat and have a beautiful place for people to experience. Can you talk about that, that like extra model?

FURNISS:

Yeah, that's the best question, Tom, because that's really the essence of this and what we're trying to do is what's called conservation burial. And that was first articulated by Dr. Billy Campbell back in South Carolina a few years ago. But it is something that's been happening, especially in the UK and now in the US. And that is, in addition to just the basics of green burial, that we encourage decomposition, there's no embalming, it's biodegradable, everything, there's no burial vault, lots of add-ons to that.

So yeah, it's an attractive place to go. Most people don't like to go hang out in cemeteries, maybe they do on Halloween, but beyond that, it's not a place of relaxation and joy and spiritual fulfillment, it's just a graveyard looking thing. But what if it just looked like a wild land? Conservation burial is, if you bury a fair number of people, the revenues add up, even if it's reasonable, and you take that money, whatever's extra, and use it for restoration or to acquire more land for conservation. And that's this idea of conservation burial, where the best practices are really strict. You keep the land in natural state as far as you can.

WHEELER:

When telling people about this show, it's something that I receive questions on is, you know, how safe is this, right? A decomposing body left out of a casket in the ground. People had concerns about water and waste and disease. Is Green Burial safe?

FURNISS:

Yeah, green barrel is absolutely safe and bodies basically are not dangerous and they're not toxic. Now, this developed very strongly during the bubonic plague when people thought that there were vapors from dead bodies that would make you sick or kill you. And so, get rid of the body quickly, bury it six feet down, be afraid of dead bodies and that was just incorrect. Bodies that died of a particular certain few infectious diseases have to be handled very carefully. Sometimes they're not even allowed to be buried.

But for the most part, a body is not a dangerous thing. The things that decompose bodies are not infectious to living people. It may be creepy to you, but it's not dangerous. And this is well confirmed. And the people that handle bodies, including if you do a home funeral, you have to know what to do and you have to work with the coroner and whatnot. But the burial part is just not a dangerous thing. We have a little slogan called "trust soil." So once you're in the soil, it can assimilate all sorts of things, many of which could be a lot more toxic than bodies are.

For example, we have septic fields that if they're done right, they can accept sewage for many, many years. And so bodies are no problem for assimilation in any kind of a decent soil. And people say, well, aren't we full of pesticides and preservatives and all that and wouldn't that be toxic? Absolutely not.

WHEELER:

Nothing's more toxic than the formaldehyde that you'd be pumped with.

FURNISS:

That is a thousand times more toxic than anything you're gonna find in anybody's body. So, yeah, so bodies are not dangerous and they're not toxic. And the handling in very special situations, say if you died of Ebola, that the county health will get involved and there'll be special considerations in handling that body. But for the vast, vast majority of bodies, that they're just not dangerous. And that's not something we need to worry about. And we do like to encourage a relatively shallow burial depth. California allows 18 inches of dirt on top of the casket or on top of the body.

WHEELER:

That's, I'm not worried about skunks or anything else.

FURNISS:

But he mentions that animals will dig you up. They won't. Animals don't dig down a foot and a half. They're not evolved for fine food at that level. And they just don't do that. And I've talked to many grave diggers. I've researched that. There's a reason that's the rule in California is it's plenty deep. And the smell isn't gonna get up above a foot and a half. And even if it does, that smell will go away just a few days. And if you're really worried about it, there's some measures you can take by putting down some things that will tangle up an animal and whatnot. So, and actually, California allows it 12 inches if it's a double burial, if you put two people on top of each other, which some married couples or couples choose to do. So that's enough. And we have to, you have to trust the assimilative power of soils. It's really substantial.

WHEELER:

And so a shallower burial would work faster or you would be turned over quicker because it's more of a living soil as you get closer to the surface, is that right?

FURNISS:

Exactly, yeah. There's a very strong relation between depth and biological activity. And the shallower you are, the more biological activity there is. And so 18 inches is getting a little bit deep, but you're still within the root zone and still within the biologically active zone. If you go down six feet, you're kind of getting out of that. So that relatively shallow burial, and we like to be thinking of it in the root zone of trees or of deep-rooted grasses, is another aspect. It's not essential to be called green burial, but it's something that we want to do. That it's shallow burial in the root zone of trees is really what we're looking at.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We are talking about green burial with Mike Furniss. So Mike, you are a man of diverse interests. You have taught at Cal Poly Humboldt. You've been on the show before talking about climate change and severe weather events. How did you get into this? Why are you now focusing so much of your time and effort on green burial?

FURNISS:

Yeah, I ask myself that question sometimes. It's like, why am I doing this? And it harkens back to my studying soil science at UC Berkeley. And I have a couple of degrees in soil science. And as I was doing that and falling in love with the properties of soil and the amazingness of soil and how biologically active and diverse it is, I said, you know, I would like to be in the topsoil with a tree planted on top of me. This is back in my 20s. And there wasn't anywhere you could do that. And I've looked and looked, and it's like, no, there's no really place to do that. Nobody's ever set that up. And so it's like, okay, I'm gonna set that up then.

So there's a few minor exceptions to that. But for the most part, that wasn't available, even though it's kind of obvious. And a lot of people go, yeah, I'd like that. I'd like to be taken up in a tree, my remains. Plants are very good at recognizing nutrients. And so you very quickly be, your remains would ascend into the tree. That's not immortality, but it's nice.

WHEELER:

Oh, when you're talking about a Coast Redwood, that is, that's quite old. There we go. Quite old. Yeah. Potentially.

FURNISS:

And we've got the time for that when we're...

WHEELER:

Yeah, right. Yeah. Hang around for another 1600 years. So as you said, natural burial, it's the way that we've done burial since the beginning of time. And this has been interrupted by the modern burial practices, which were a product of the civil war. I am a great fan. Perhaps that's probably not the right word of scholar of the civil war. Myself. I I've read about how it was important. Then if your son died on a battlefield somewhere in the South or wherever you wanted to have that body back. So, you know, we pump bodies full of formaldehyde. We put them into metal boxes to transport so that it wouldn't be too smelly or too gross by the time it would get back to loved ones. So that divorced us from, from this history. And now we are re-approaching natural burial.

FURNISS:

That's right, and they also, there was a desire to carry Abe Lincoln around through the colonies on the back of a train, and the embalming was essential for doing that. So that's how that got started.

WHEELER:

And so now we're in this new period. Can you talk about how we have come back to rediscover? You said it originated in England and then South Carolina. And now here we are in Northern California talking about it.

FURNISS:

Yeah, and it kind of originated in how everybody used to do it. But it really took hold in the UK. And there's lots of green burial cemeteries now in the UK. And it made its way over to the eastern US. The bulk of existing green cemeteries are actually in the eastern part of the US. And now it's come to the west. And they're establishing in the west in a number of places. We don't have a good one here. Blue Lake Cemetery says they'll do green burial, but half the people that call are told it's full, and other half said, yeah, we can do it. But you can't pre-buy a place. They just put you in next to the last person. And the cemetery is not well taken care of. And it's owned by a big corporation that has bought up a lot of cemeteries.

WHEELER:

Wait, so corporations own cemeteries? Is that, that's, it's a business?

FURNISS:

Yes, there's a corporation, I think they're from Pennsylvania, I think it's called SCI or something, and they've bought up cemeteries all over the country and funeral homes. And so, like a lot of industries, it's been consolidated into one big corporate enterprise that really just cares about the bottom line.

They do operate a lot of cemeteries, and Blue Lake Cemetery is operated by one of those, but by that corporation, and I'm not very impressed with it. It's a beautiful place, and there is a little bit, it looks to me like there's a little bit of land left for basic green burial. It's not conservation burial, and it's what's called a hybrid cemetery. It's a lot of conventional burials with a lot of concrete and whatnot, but they did set off an area where they can do this very natural, decomposition-oriented burial there. But there's no other place to do that here.

There's a really nice place in Oregon called The Farm or something, and then there's one in Marin County that's quite expensive but very nice, but there's nothing here. And the baby boomers are looking at it here. We're all above 60, many of us are above 70 now, and it's like confronting the inevitable, as people must do, and they don't want the conventional burial. They wanna be green, and that's the trend in the culture, and this is a natural response to that trend. We want our burials to be ecologically appropriate, and so we need these cemeteries to be established. It's not easy.

There's a lot of barriers or a lot of reluctance to even think about it or talk about it, so thanks for having me on. I was reluctant to talk about it for a long time, and then once you kind of break it open, it becomes very interesting, the burial culture and what that means and what these places could be used for. A lot of people say, well, what difference does it make I'm dead? Well, it's really for the people that are coming after you or the people that need the final memory to be one that isn't sad or isn't quite as sad as it might otherwise be. Burials tend to be kind of somber and sad, and they don't need to be. They can be affirmative and in a beautiful place, and so that final memory you have of that person is one that's not positive necessarily, but it isn't as negative as it might otherwise be.

WHEELER:

So you said we have a couple of options locally-ish, Southern Oregon, Marin County, maybe Blue Lake Cemetery, but maybe not an ideal solution. I know that you're working towards another option for folks. It's still in the works, so can't promise too much, but tell us about what you're working on right now. Yeah.

FURNISS:

We are working on a conservation burial project. We're pretty far along on it. All green flags so far. I'm not gonna tell you just where it is because we're not open yet and I don't wanna promise something that we can't yet deliver and we're not ready for public visits or appointments or anything like that. We're not in the sales business yet, but I have a very good reason to believe that we'll be open by summer or by late summer. We have a few more things to get nailed down.

WHEELER:

Well, tell us about what goes into establishing your own cemetery or your own green burial area. Well, quite a lot.

FURNISS:

There's all sorts of design considerations to make. It's like, do you allow monuments? And if you're going to use trees, what trees are you using? And what is the spacing? For example, in conservation burial, the spacing is no greater than 300 graves per acre. Whereas in a conventional cemetery, it's 1,000 or 1,200 at least right next to each other, basically. In conservation burial, they're much more sparse.

WHEELER:

Is that for some sort of an environmental reason, the capacity of the land to naturally break down bodies at a rate in which we put them in, or is it we wanted to maintain the natural feel, and if we have too many bodies in one area, it ruins the aesthetics?

FURNISS:

Yes, that's right. It's the latter, really. Again, the soil could accommodate a thousand graves per acre, but that's not how we want it to be. And if you want to meet the Green Burial Council's standard for conservation burial, they have that limit of 300 graves per acre. And we plan to do quite a bit less than that, actually, so that there's a lot of space, and it doesn't feel like a cemetery. It feels like a restored grassland or a restored woodland that happens to have some graves.

WHEELER:

I can, I can say I would love to be buried under an oak tree and to, to imagine that, right. I, the, the, the dropping of acorns and like to, to imagine myself in those acorns then being spread would be phenomenal.

FURNISS:

There you go, and it doesn't take much, if any, thinking for people, when people hear about this, it's like, yeah, I want that, that sounds good to me. I don't wanna be in a box, in a toxified body, in a box in a box, that doesn't make any sense. I'd like, or I was thinking of being cremated because I just don't like these graveyards I see and what I know about the burial practice that exists now.

And cremation's okay, there's some air pollution, there's some energy use, it tends to be a fairly economical thing to do, and it's fine. It's also really nice, though, to put those ashes in a place of memorial, under a tree, or someplace that you can go back and visit so the remains are there. You can also put them in the ocean, or you can dispose of ashes anywhere you want that isn't specifically prohibited. Even the national parks will tend to give you a permit for scattering ashes, just so people know that. And they want them off-trail and not very obvious, and you can't put in a marker and whatnot, but you can put them in a particular place. And some people like that, that they're not just tossed over a cliff or out of an airplane or something, but that's cool, too.

So whatever you want is fine, but we think that green burial is a really good option. There's another option that's available in Washington and several other states, and has been legalized in California, but not until 2027, and that is human composting, where they put you into, there's a little company called Recompose in Washington State that figured out how to do this and got it legalized in Washington. Very savvy, wonderful people. And you're in a drum with hay and alfalfa for about a month, and you turn into compost.

And like cremation, they kind of take the bones and grind them up and put them back in and roll it around some more. And I've seen the compost, it looks like compost. Yeah, and it makes about a cubic yard of compost, a whole pickup load, and that can be disposed of most anywhere. California working out where you can put that and exactly the rules for doing it, but California, I think, is the fifth state that has legalized human composting. I think green burial is a simpler and cheaper way to do that.

WHEELER:

Accomplishes the same thing.

FURNISS:

Accomplishes the very same thing. Yeah, you break down very, very quickly in a decent soil. Soils are teeming with life, and you don't need to add fungus or be buried in a fungus suit or any of that.

WHEELER:

I was going to say, this is, this is, I think it's like the Facebook problem that I experienced in lots of parts of my job where for, for wind turbines, for example, people always point out to me, Oh, well, I saw on Facebook, there's this new design of a wind turbine that doesn't have spinning blades. And why aren't we considering that? And it's like, well, it's conceptual sometimes. Sometimes these things that we see online are only conceptual or they're not, they're not commercialized yet. And at least in the case of green burial, it seems like the way that we've done it since the beginning of time, works out just fine that you don't need to have the complex mushroom based burial shroud that won't do anything.

FURNISS:

Oh, and there was a very popular TED talk, the Mushroom Burial Suit, she called it. And it did raise awareness about natural decomposition. And so that was great. But it's a $1,200 thing that is absolutely unnecessary. And what we know from soil science is when you put exotic microorganisms into the soil, they are simply immediately eaten by the locally adapted flora and fauna. You'd waste your money by doing that. Besides, it's bacteria that do most of the work. Bacteria, they have a PR problem that fungi don't have. But they're every bit as amazing as fungi. They just don't look as cool, and they don't make mushrooms and what not.

WHEELER:

Whoever the fungi PR person was in the last decade has done their work and really nailed it.

FURNISS:

Yeah. Yeah. So fungi are great, but you don't need to add fungus or have a fungus, a casket made out of fungus or Green Burial Council calls this solutions to invented problems. And so we need green burial cemeteries, not gimmicks.

There's also another product where the ashes go into an urn and there's a tree seed at the top of it. Well, that doesn't make any sense. The ashes are much too hot to use by, they need to be spread. And sometimes it's good to neutralize them. They're very basic and you wouldn't do a seed. You do a seedling, which has much better chance of survival. So it's kind of a gimmicky thing and it makes some of us uncomfortable that, that people think they can get green by using these odd little expensive products. But basically what we just need is a cemetery with a decent soil. And as Laurie Lewis says, don't pickle me or char my skin, just dig a hole and roll me in.

WHEELER:

It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. So, so maybe we can close on cost. So it, it sounds simpler, right? You're not embalming, you're not putting body into a concrete box or into a wooden box, then put into a concrete box. You're, you're sometimes just burying somebody in a shroud made of cotton or linen, so I, I imagine that the costs are going to be different here for green burial, maybe not at your Marin Ritzy Bay area green cemetery, but inherently the costs are going to be lower here.

FURNISS:

Yes, the costs are considerably lower and so are the carbon emissions. So if you look at the carbon footprint or the dollar cost, green burial is much better than conventional burial. So with these liners, the concrete liner, sometimes a plastic liner, heavy duty plastic liner, they already exist in the cemetery. They're put in before when they develop the cemetery, but they charge you for them when you use them. It's typically like $1,000 or more, even $1,500 for the liner. And so the costs really add up with conventional burial. And if you want a really fancy casket, that's fine, but that's not very green. They're usually full of shellac and heavy metals and things that actually are not good for the ground. Rare hardwoods. Rare hardwoods, yeah. Mahogany or worse. Again, if you want that, okay, but if you want your final act to be something that is low impact and green and giving back, then green burial is for you.

WHEELER:

Well, I want to give you an opportunity to plug whatever resources that people might be curious to, to access or, or how to get in contact with you.

FURNISS:

We would like people to let us know that they're interested and the way to do that is to go to our website which is www.sacredfamilygroves.org One word, sacredfamilygroves.org, not .com but .org, sacredfamilygroves.org And there's a place to sign up for our newsletter. And as soon as we're close to opening, we'll let everybody know Also just give you news about other things.

If another green burial cemetery develops here, great. And we'll let you know about that. Get on our mailing list. We've got a few hundred people on there now. We want everybody to know that this is going to become available in our area. Maybe you haven't thought about what to do when you die and there's a lot to think about there besides burial, actually. And it's worth it to do that. It's a gift to your to the people you leave behind, to let them know what you want and so they know what to do when the time comes. Oh, it can be actually fun to think about so mostly we don't think about it. We think oh, I'll be okay I don't need to think about that.

WHEELER:

You don't want to saddle your kids or your loved ones.

FURNISS:

And it's nice for them to have the experience and closure and to know that there's a nice place that your remains went. Or if you don't drop dead quickly, most people die over time, to know that you're going to be taken to a beautiful place rather than, oh, my family will figure out what to do with me. You should do that yourself.

WHEELER:

All right, Michael Furniss. Thank you so much for joining the Econews. Glad to have you back on.

FURNISS:

My pleasure.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again on this channel next week for more environmental news from the North coast of California.