WHITNEY PIPKIN
Bay Journal News Service
As a recently retired surgeon, Howard Berg has always had an uneasy relationship with death. But the four-year process of opening a cemetery at the end of 2022 – Maryland’s first certified natural cemetery – on land that’s been in his family for decades has made him far more comfortable with the subject.
“Your last act on Earth is to go back to the earth, dust to dust,” Berg said. “To me, rather than impact the environment, why not improve the environment?”
Berg didn’t initially decide to open Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum, located in Baltimore County, Md., for such lofty reasons. He and his two brothers were looking for the best use of former farmland with forested edges that they had inherited in an area with options limited by zoning.
After visiting a natural cemetery in New Jersey, Berg came to see the approach as a way to generate revenue from the land while maintaining its natural beauty.
He didn’t conceive at the time that there would be such a pent-up demand in the state, and growing interest nationally, in the type of natural or “green” burials the site offers. The Chesapeake Bay portion of Virginia has two cemeteries offering natural burials, one of them certified, like Serenity Ridge, by the national Green Burial Council. Pennsylvania, Maryland and the District of Columbia also have “hybrid” cemeteries that offer green burials on a portion of their land, and the options are expanding.
The Green Burial Council defines the term as burying “without impediment” to natural decomposition: no embalming, plastic liners, concrete vaults, metal handles or exotic wood caskets. Green burials aim to reduce the environmental impact associated with modern methods by allowing the body to naturally decompose, often in the top few feet of soil, in biodegradable containers or fabric shrouds without embalming chemicals that can leach out over time.
Most green burial facilities allow cremated remains to also be buried onsite, in biodegradable containers, as a way of giving families a place to visit. But, for many people, green burials are a conscious alternative to the growing practice of cremation, which the Green Burial Council says is “erroneously thought by many to be greener.”
Cremation, the council says, uses fossil fuels to reach and maintain 1,900 degrees for about two hours per body, releasing mercury and other pollutants into the air in the process. In 2021, nearly 58 percent of bodies in the United States were cremated, a number projected to reach 64 percent by 2025, according to the Cremation Association of North America.
Increasingly, facilities offering alternatives to cremation and traditional burials are focused not simply on reducing impacts; they want to transform burials into a benefit for their surroundings. They see caring for the dead in congruence, not in conflict, with conservation.
This is no longer a fringe movement. As of March of 2022, there were 350 green-burial cemeteries in the U.S. and Canada, according to the Green Burial Council, and more have been added in the Chesapeake Bay area since then.
While only about 5 percent of today’s burials are green, the association considers them a fast-growing segment of the funeral business. In the National Funeral Director’s Association’s 2022 consumer report, more than 60 percent of survey respondents said they would be interested in investigating green funeral options.
Jewish, Muslim and Orthodox Christian traditions have practiced forms of green burial for generations, eschewing cremation and embalming to promote natural decomposition. Facilities opening now say they are getting inquiries not just from those who would normally be considering end-of-life decisions, but also from younger people interested in doing things differently.
Jennifer Downs, a founding board member of the Green Burial Association of Maryland, a nonprofit focused on educating the public on green burial, sees her generation fueling much of the natural-burial interest.
“There are a lot of us Baby Boomers out here,” said Downs, who helped start the group in 2015. “We were around for natural food, natural birth. Now we’re getting to the end of our lives and saying, ‘What do we do with our bodies when we die’?”
Chris Palmer, who recently became president of the Maryland association, agrees.
“I’ve spent almost all my life working with environmental organizations,” he said, making it unpalatable “for me, when I die, to dispose of my body in a way that creates pollution and energy consumption.”
Whitney Pipkin is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Virginia. You can reach her at wpipkin@bayjournal.com.
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Howard Berg (left), founder and owner of the Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum in Maryland, stands with general manager Kelly Joseph (center) and community outreach liaison Chelsea Berg in a burial area called Inspiration Point. (Bay Journal photo by Dave Harp)
