Greening Death by Suzanne Kelly

Author:Suzanne Kelly [Kelly, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

7

Obstacles and Other Challenges

Aldo Leopold was certain that “when we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”1 But sometimes seeing is not enough. We’re in need of practices that give us more direction on how best to act in partnership with the more-than-human world. As green burial grounds are manifesting death care practices and rituals that are honoring dead bodies that matter to nature, they’re also offering us immediate and intimate contact with the land community, an anchor from which we can better understand that we are, in fact, in community. It’s only from there that all green burial’s other goods—deeper care of the land and deeper connection to each other—are made a living possibility.

But barriers block the way to these goods. The movement has been struggling with obstacles from the get-go, some of which have been chipped away at a bit, and others that only seem to be growing insurmountably. Like any movement building, getting past fierce opposition requires naming these obstacles and other challenges for what they are. Here, I’ve pared them down to five (not listed in order of importance): 1) adherence to certifiable standards; 2) the death care industry; 3) laws, land, and money; 4) environmental injustice; and 5) the language of “choice.”

Adherence to Certifiable Standards

In 2003, Joe Sehee and Billy Campbell joined forces with Tyler Cassity, a young and dynamic cemeterian, who’d recently purchased a thirty-two-acre cemetery named Fernwood in the heart of Marin County, California. Fernwood had been around since the 1800s, but, in more recent years, had fallen into terrible disrepair. Rooted in a family of cemetery owners who’d built up something of a death kingdom of their own, Tyler Cassity bought the property and then spent over a million dollars fixing the place up.2

Sehee was Cassity’s communications consultant in the years leading up to the purchase. Their conversations about future green burial at Fernwood would eventually lead to bringing in Campbell, with his expertise in developing what was at the time one of the only green burial grounds in the nation. With the Golden Gate National Forest as its neighbor, and sited within a progressive area not far from San Francisco, the project seemed destined for collaborative success. After working together for a couple of years, however, their partnership would dissolve, and Cassity would go on to establish green burial at Fernwood solo. In a 2005 New Yorker article, Tad Friend would tell of this collaboration breakdown without ever really getting to the bottom of what happened. And yet, one catalyst for their disbandment shines through Friend’s telling—the plan for Fernwood lacked a shared vision.3 Indeed, by all accounts, Sehee agrees.4

Lessons are often the best fuel for innovation. Sehee and Campbell longed to see the movement grow, but not in ways that would denigrate its purpose. Billy Campbell had already written his own “management guidelines and classification system” for green burial grounds prior to the Cassity collaboration.5 They

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