​Mary Woodsen, journalist, conservation burial pioneer, and friend, died November 4, 2025, at age 77. The following is a remembrance of this gentle soul, her contribution to the spread of natural burials, and the founding of Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve near Ithaca NY. 
 
On October 17th, 2001, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) launched an effort to establish an eastern migratory population (EMP) between Wisconsin and Florida. The whooping cranes, born in captivity, imprinted on a white ultralight and were following it on the inaugural flight to Florida.

Mary Woodsen, a New York-based science and environmental writer along with her niece were following in Mary’s car. Progress was slow. Thanksgiving week the birds and aircraft were once again grounded by bad weather but within driving distance of Ramsey Creek. Mary contacted Kimberley, explained her situation, saying she was interested in covering “green burial”, and asking if she and her niece could visit. We said of course and she asked if we could suggest a hotel. Instead, we offered our family's rustic century-old cabin for what turned out to be nearly week-long  visit.
 
Mary was kind, soft-spoken, and brilliant. We had hours of conversation about whooping cranes, politics (remember it was 2 months after 9/11)  and, of course, the benefits of conservation burial. Although we were not burying very many people in those days, a 57-year-old Marine veteran had died the day before Thanksgiving and was to be buried a couple of days after. Mary took up the challenge, helping to prepare the grave and participating in the funeral service. I think it is safe to say it was a life-changing experience for her. She became committed to setting up a project near Ithaca, NY, an idea already being pursued by Jennifer Johnson and Susan Thomas since the year prior.
 
We suggested she visit John Wilkerson, the colorful co-owner of the Glendale Nature Preserve in the Florida Panhandle. John heard about Ramsey Creek, had visited in 1999, and went on to establish the second conservation-type green burial project in the country in 2000. We had visited multiple times and assisted John and his wife Barbara in protecting their 350-acre multigenerational family farm.
 
Within several months, Mary had one article published about us in the Utne Reader, and another on John and Glendale in Outside Magazine. The Outside Magazine article (“The Green Reaper”) contained a calculation of the amount of material that contemporary burials consume each year. 
 
Each year in the U.S., 22,500 traditional cemeteries put roughly the following into our soil:

• 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid
• 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods (much tropical, caskets)
• 90,272 tons of steel (caskets)
• 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)
• 14,000 tons of steel (vaults)
• 2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)

 
It was Mary’s research, conducted in a bar with a friend (or so the story goes) that also resulted in a reframing that further fired the imagination:

• On average, a cemetery buries 1,000 gallons of embalming fluid, 97.5 tons of steel, 2,028 tons of concrete, and 56,250 board feet of high-quality tropical hardwood in just one acre of land.
• Each cremation releases between .8 and 5.9 grams of mercury as bodies are burned. This amounts to between 1,000 and 7,800 pounds of mercury released each year in the U.S. 75% goes into the air and the rest settles into the ground and water.
• You could drive about 4,800 miles on the energy equivalent of the energy used to cremate someone – and to the moon and back 85 times from all cremations in one year in the U.S.

 
In 2014, Mary refined the statistics and went on tour explaining how the industry had responded to the backlash from the sudden awareness that our burial practices were potentially wasteful and environmentally damaging. She had discovered that the amount of wood used in any given year had been reduced by a third, from 30 million to 20 million board feet, learning that caskets were simply being made with a thinner shell.
 
Who hasn’t seen these posted on Facebook or quoted, often erroneously, in every major news outlet article in the past few years? The intellectual property theft didn’t seem to bother Mary, but her contribution to the growth of the green burial movement is rarely attributed properly. More than ten years since the last revision, these figures still resonate with a public hungry for this type of consumer data.
 
We stayed in touch with Mary, Jennifer, and Susan for the next few years. One of their earlier backers was a person with a different idea about what a green burial site would look like. His vision was more like a farm, with apple trees and a more manicured setting.
 
In the years when natural/conservation burial was still a thought experiment, it had occurred to me that maybe what we were doing was a kind of trans-substantiation. I considered an option where some might choose to be buried in an area that would grow native muscadines (for wine) and either amaranth or heritage corn cultivars (for bread).
 
I discarded the idea because I decided that it would be complicated and perhaps off-putting for a significant portion of our potential market. I was more concerned that it would take away from our core message, our mission of land protection and ecological restoration. Mary and the others agreed and pushed for the conservation burial model, opening Greensprings in 2006.
 
We did have one dust-up with backers in 2002 when a group from NY came to Westminster to see Ramsey Creek. I was in the medical office seeing patients when one of them came in to tell me a couple of others had remained in the car, fearful of getting out. 
 
Since the late 1990s, South Carolina had faced intense debate over the Confederate battle flag flying at the State House where it had been since the early 1960s, culminating in a 2000 compromise that moved it from the capitol dome to a nearby monument amidst NAACP-led boycotts. Massive protests and large confederate flags flying were a common sight. The flag was removed from the grounds in 2015 after the Emanuel AME Church mass shooting.
 
A teenager and student at the local high school had lost control of his truck, crashed, and died a few days earlier. The young man was very much a part of that culture, and as luck would have it, they had an unofficial memorial parade with a couple of dozen large battle flags flying from vehicles rolling down main street in front of my office. I worked primary care and emergency rooms, and  a common defense mechanism is gallows humor. When our visitor asked if this was a common occurrence, I joked, “Only on every second Tuesday and Saturday.” When he looked aghast, I explained the situation and said I was also uncomfortable, but it was part of where we were. 
 
On return to NY, Mary heard the concern that I myself was possibly a racist. Since one of the topics we had talked about on her visit to Westminster had been the whole “lost cause” phenomenon, the SC flag controversy, and how we were definitely on the side of getting rid of the flag, she defended me, and it blew over.
 
We were very happy to be there for the Greensprings opening in 2006. I loved the large open acreage, surrounded by thousands of acres of protected forest. I found some reasonably interesting plants, including fringed polygala, and realized this was an important grassland. I also knew that grassland birds like bobolinks and meadow larks were in steep decline in the Finger Lakes. Some of that information was from nearby Cornell University, Mary’s own stomping grounds.
 
Mary told me that Greensprings was planning to create large plots to control density, and that the thought by some of the board was to restore forest by everyone getting a tree. I expressed concern and suggested that they seek advice from local scientists before proceeding. They ultimately did just that and decided to maintain the grassland. I also suggested grave clusters so families could be together and not an oversized grid, but I think they kept the large plots.
 
The last time I heard from Mary was few years ago when she called Kimberley and me. She had just read some of my earlier blogs and said, “I didn’t know you could be so funny.” It was the last time we spoke. I credit her for bolstering our confidence by confirming that we were on the right track with science-based conservation burial. And I am deeply grateful to Mary for providing us with “The List”, that powerful and simple tool that has helped people see through their preconceived notions to evaluate their legacy with science, facts, and logic, along with their love of the land and one another.
 
Mary’s legacy has been a gift to us all.

The New York Times published an article in December of 2022 that discussed the carbon emissions for composting bodies [“If You Want to Give Back to Nature, Give your Body” by Caitlyn Doughty]. The article reported the claim made by the natural organic reduction (NOR) company, Recompose, that they release only 20 Kg of CO2per body. The article said that each composting will save 1 metric ton of CO2 emissions. 
 
Articles like this have put the spotlight on various methods of disposition that are being touted as green burial. Not only are they not green burial (full body earth disposition without impediment), there are some alarming carbon reduction claims—case in point—that require careful examination. Let’s start with the basic question we should be asking: What is the real carbon footprint of central-facility body composting and how does it compare to conservation burial?

While there are lots of variables when looking at all disposition footprints, the bottom line must include the carbon ​footprint not just of the individual body’s disposition, but of the supporting infrastructure and the materials that are required. In land protection terms, conservation burial grounds (CBGs) sustainably protect significant natural landscapes that is open for use by the public, not thousands of square feet of industrial space. They also use no energy for growing, harvesting, warehousing, or transporting materials, nor do they use fossil fuels or other energy resources to engineer the above-ground decomposition, or transport the residual material to a second location. Conservation burials are a one-time event that becomes part of the sustainability picture of the land where they occur. The evidence supports that conservation burials by far have the smallest carbon footprint and are actually significant carbon sinks, but let’s take a measured look at what goes into natural organic reduction so as to evaluate its environmental ethic as compared with conservation burial.
 
One caveat: we are not privy to the specific proprietary formula of natural organic reduction, and there are variations in material ratios depending on type of facility, container, availability, and operator preference. The ensuing discussion is based on general scientific principles and calculations.
 
 
The Chemistry
Unlike conservation burial that sequesters carbon for years and perhaps decades, each industrially composted body produces one cubic yard of material (a minimum of 1250 lbs.) that has a high carbon content. It’s not clear that one can really call the remains “soil” at that point, but claiming it is appeals to consumers eager for something more eco-friendly than vault burial or cremation. For our purposes, we will call it compost.
​
Composting itself releases a fair amount of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), along with other gases. Aerated composting releases relatively little methane (CH4), and smaller amount of nitrous oxide (N2O). Bodies composted in conservation burial graves almost certainly release more methane, which is produced in low oxygen environments, but less N20. Both methane and N2O are stronger greenhouse gasses than CO2. Methane is around 23 times more powerful at greenhouse warming and N2O is almost 300 times stronger than CO2. A good estimate is that aerated composting will release around 1 ton of methane per 100 tons composted, and only 40 pounds of N2O. That is equivalent to 23 tons of CO2 and 6 tons of CO2 respectively in terms of greenhouse gases. 100 composted bodies represent roughly 50 tons of material being composted, and the equivalent of nearly 15 tons of CO2 in non-CO2 greenhouse gasses.
 
However, CH4 (methane) and N2O have much lower residence times in the atmosphere. The effective residence time of CO2 is measured in centuries, while CH4 has an atmospheric residence of only 9-12 years, and N2O of a century or so.
 
Most of the remaining material would presumably be placed on top of the ground and not buried, and most of the carbon in the woodchips, sawdust, and other organic materials would be released back into the atmosphere unless it is put out in very deep deposits, which would potentially harm recovering woodlands, not help them. 
 
Composters in other fields point out that the carbon and nitrogen involved were fixed in recent times, so most of this might be considered greenhouse gas neutral. We certainly consider this to be true with in-ground composting. Most of us are dependent on high carbon-footprint industrial agriculture that includes industrial composting greenhouse gas costs of production and distribution. Conservation burial ‘composting facilities’—meaning the soil—fixes many tons of CO2. Keep in mind that the average human body contains about 14.5 kg of carbon, and oxidation of that much carbon emits over 55 kg of CO2. It’s a common mistake to say that the soil itself will fix; it’s the natural flora based in the soil that fixes CO2.
 
We estimate that the Recompose company must truck in tons of mulching material to its roughly 18,000 square foot home. Additionally, there are likely significant costs to maintaining, heating, and cooling at least part of the large space. Unless they use exclusively electric vehicles that would also have a significant transportation carbon footprint.
 
The carbon cost of harvesting and preparing this material, as well as the fuel costs for transporting it, should be added to the carbon footprint of the burial. For instance, alfalfa, which is used to add nitrogen to speed the process, comes with significant energy costs in production, including the use of nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers.[i] It is also the most water irrigation-dependent livestock crop contributing to the draining of the Colorado River Basin, causing record years of drought in the American West.[ii] Of that, alfalfa consumes more than five times the water as corn silage and well over twice as much as grass hay, the three major cattle feedstocks. Together the three add up to 32% of all the water used or consumed annually in the West. Alfalfa production and transportation alone represent a major environmental risk, and that is just part of the compost makeup.[iii]
 
According to the article, approximately 1250 lbs. of composted material is being driven 175 miles from Seattle to Bell Mountain, Washington for disposal for each person. The carbon cost of transporting the load plus the return of an empty truck must be calculated and added to the carbon price tag. An average pickup truck can hold about 2.5 cubic yards of material, so each trip would probably transport the remains of 2 people, or 2500 lbs., perhaps more if hauled in a trailer. Each gallon of gas burned would create 20 lbs. of CO2, and I calculate that the 350-mile trip would use at least 20 gallons of gas and release 400 lbs. of CO2. This amounts to an estimated 200 kg. of CO2 release.
 
The disposition of the compost will be a growing issue if this is to scale up. For instance, composting 100,000 people per year (a 4% market share of annual deaths in the USA) over a 10-year period would produce enough material to cover 7500 acres 1 inch deep. Let’s take a closer look at the article’s claim that the option reduces CO2 emissions by one metric ton per disposition:
“We are the first to market with natural organic reduction, and we have been operating at capacity since opening our first location in late 2020. We have transformed over 100 bodies into soil and have over 1000 Precompose members. For each person who chooses Recompose, one metric ton of carbon is saved from entering the environment. That means we have already saved the emissions equivalent of 10 million miles driven, 480 homes powered for one year, or 450,000 gallons of gasoline. With your investment, that impact can increase exponentially.”[iv]
 
The article claims that the company has saved the equivalent 450,000 gallons of gas and 10 million miles driven, but that would be by (so far) avoiding only 220,000 lbs. of emissions (1 metric ton= 1000kg=2200 lbs. x 100 actual composted dead= 220,000 lbs.). Each gallon of gasoline yields 20 lbs. of CO2, so in reality, they have so far “saved” the equivalent of 11,000 gallons and (if average mileage is 36) just under 400,000 miles. Those people who have not died should not be counted in “carbon emission reduction so far”.
 
 
Human Composting and Forest Restoration
Taking nutrient rich compost, whatever its source, and dumping it on conservation land does not make it beneficial. In fact, it may easily upset a fragile system or introduce an imbalance of nutrients, achieving precisely the opposition of the goal. It’s important to have thought through the research concerning what we know about forest restoration.
 
Heavily degraded and even destroyed forests do recover naturally, particularly if near remnant forests, but maybe without previous diversity or vigor. Even intentional reforestation efforts can fall short. Elizabeth Pennisi noted that in one study of 176 reforested sites, the average seedling survival was only 44%, but stated that survival jumped to 64% if planted near mature trees.[v]
 
Compost can accelerate recovery of areas such as decommissioned logging roads, camp sites, and logging decks, especially if mechanically worked into the compacted soil. However, an EPA paper, “Compost Use in Forest Land Restoration”, notes that nutrient loading is the worry.[vi] Application rates should be lower in areas dominated by nitrogen-fixing red alder. It also states that, “The recommendations of minimums of 33' from continuously flowing water were made to be consistent with EPA's 40 CFR 503 biosolids regulation”. 
 
Of particular interest in the article is the last photo published captioned, “Saplings planted with soil from human composting will grow to shade a stream on Bells Mountain, Wash., helping restore the salmon habitat on previously logged land.” The compost has been applied to the very edge of the stream which seems to already have decent shade from what appears to be well developed alders. This is in apparent violation of EPA biosolid rules, as well as recommendations of being mindful of possible nitrogen overload when used in conjunction with existing nitrogen-fixing alders. A “before” picture taken in the summer would have been useful, as would a botanical survey. 
 
What about the stimulation of vegetative growth on highly degraded forests damaged by fire, previous agricultural activities, or logging, or all of the above? Beyond improving compacted soils with adsorptive organic material, forest researchers also have entire conferences on the issue of fertilizing young forest stands. NOR additions might stimulate more and faster carbon sequestration in severely degraded/mineralized areas, particularly in compacted situations, coupled with tilling the compost into the dense soil, restoring water retention, and general soil health. This would be, at best, a marginal effect compared to whole cloth forest and prairie restoration and protection, as is the case with conservation burial.
 
I see no evidence that Recompose has or is developing science-based methodologies for where and how they distribute the compost, and I fear they could be inadvertently harming some areas without such an approach. Perhaps they have released the nutrient content of their composted material, and other “life cycle” energy costs, but I could not see it on their web site.
 
 
We Can Do Better: Why Conservation Burial Instead
A human composting costs around $7,000. Recompose has raised close to 10 million dollars, much of which has gone into hard infrastructure. That does not remove CO2 from the atmosphere; in fact, construction and retrofitting inevitably put CO2into the atmosphere. These costs, both financial and environmental, must be assessed equally when making claims about the process as compared with others. The claim that NOR just doesn't add nearly as much as contemporary burial and cremation is disingenuous. This is similar to some cremation advocates claiming that cremation saves land by not “wasting” land for burial.
 
Conservation burial grounds focus on precisely that: saving land for the benefit of human and natural communities, now and well into the future. In rapidly growing areas, this is perhaps even more urgent. The scientific team at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Stewardship Program (CSP) found that human activities are causing the persistent and rapid loss of America’s natural areas. The human footprint in the continental United States grew by more than 24 million acres from 2001 to 2017—equivalent to the loss of roughly a football field worth of natural area every 30 seconds. The South and Midwest experienced the steepest losses of natural area in this period; the footprints of cities, farms, roads, power plants, and other human development in these two regions grew to cover 47 percent and 59 percent of all land area, respectively. If national trends continue, a South Dakota-sized expanse of forests, wetlands, and wild places in the continental United States will disappear by 2050.[vii]
 
We need to protect much more land, and we need a better way of funding land acquisition and protection. Conservation burial is being used to enhance connectivity, restore habitat, and produce a sustainable revenue stream. We need to expand efforts to protect land, especially in rapidly growing areas. 10 million dollars could buy a lot of land. Burial on a fraction of each parcel is a tool in the toolkit to accomplish that and to develop greater community support. Case in point: Texas hill country only has 5% of its land protected.[viii] How might a conservation land buy that allows a portion to be used for renewable full body burial benefit the protection of more land and its inhabitants, both living and dead?
 
From 50,000 feet, conservation burial has a distinct advantage over NOR and other options, given the mission to save and ecologically restore land. Forests and prairies are carbon sinks. How much they absorb is dependent on species, climate, soils, age and other variables. Numbers range from 2.5-40 tons per acre. Timothy J. Fahey, Professor of Ecology in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University estimates a 50-year-old oak forest removes 13.7 metric tons per acre, or 30,000 pounds.[ix]
 
By that estimate, an average, middle-aged 100-acre mixed deciduous forest absorbs more than  1,000 metric tons of CO2 per year (this is site specific and might be more or less, see multiple sources below), or as much CO2 as produced by driving 4 million miles in an average car getting 36 MPG (1000 mt = 2.2 million lbs.; each gallon of gas produces 20 lbs. of CO2, so the equivalent of 110,000 gallons of gas x 36 = 3,960,000 miles). Prairies also store a tremendous amount of carbon because, unlike shallow-rooted lawns, prairie grass root systems can go down 10 feet. This can amount to 10 tons per acre with the resulting carbon sequestration instead of expenditure. 
 
We estimate that Ramsey Creek Preserve here in South Carolina alone sequesters close to 600-700 tons of CO2 per year, and releases very little.[x] Our one 78-acre site annually offsets about six times more carbon than Recompose has “saved” in the past two years. And if you agree with their methodology, we also “saved” additional tons of CO2 through burying people naturally vs. vault burial.
 
Members of the Conservation Burial Alliance are protecting and restoring nearly 2000 acres. If we put the sequestration at less than half of Fahey’s estimate (6 Mt per acre), we are removing 12,000 Mt of carbon each year, or 24 million pounds, and that is not counting the “savings” that Recompose uses to get its 1 Mt per disposition. That is enough to offset driving 43,200,000 miles. That would be more than enough to offset miles driven by staff and families for services, equipment, and visitor centers. And remember, it is the gift that keeps on giving, year in and year out. 
 
Having said this, the main goal of conservation burial has been about preserving and restoring natural landscapes and connecting people to them. Carbon sequestration is a deliberate consideration, but not the only consideration. For example, we would never plant a eucalyptus grove in a piedmont prairie, even if it captured more carbon. We go out of our way to avoid forming adipocere—grave wax—that forms out of decomposed fatty tissue under certain conditions and that can stick around for many decades. (The main components are mostly carbon, with myristic, palmitic, and steric fatty acids.) 
 
But we can do better as far as carbon goes. For natural burial, we need to look at the variables. 

1. Method of excavation. Hand digging would obviously have a smaller footprint than excavation by a diesel-powered backhoe, and if the cemetery purchased the equipment, you need to include the carbon footprint of producing the machine itself. 
2. Method of grave preparation. Removing all roots from the grave could contribute to the carbon footprint, especially if left on the ground, preserving as many live roots as possible is better. We generally line the bottom of the grave with boughs from cedar and mulch for aesthetics and to provide more oxygen to accelerate the decay of the body, and (especially with shroud burials) put vegetation on the top, called blanketing. 
3. The carbon associated with the casket/shroud. Obviously, metal caskets have a much larger footprint than wooden caskets or shrouds. It would be interesting to look at how much energy it takes to harvest trees, mill the wood, and build and transport a wooden casket. Locally sourced wood and locally built caskets would have a lower carbon footprint than buying ones sourced from the other side of the country or from South America where wood for conventional hardwood caskets often comes from. The casket wood or shroud material would temporarily sequester carbon, how long depending on site specific condition. This should be slower than the increased carbon sequestered by plantings.
4. Carbon sequestered by plantings on grave. Peer reviewed literature demonstrates that grasses growing on hidden graves are often “supercharged” by the nutrients in the graves.[xi],[xii] We have seen the same things at Ramsey Creek. We no longer plant big bluestem directly on graves because of this effect; it becomes huge and, presumably, related both to the nutrients and softness of grave soil, the root system is also huge.
5. Transportation costs to bring the body to the facility. Part of this can be mitigated as more facilities open. At first, at Ramsey Creek, we had clients from all over the country, because we were the only option. Electric vehicles can also help.
6. Maintenance. We now use electric weed-eaters on the trails and try to avoid mowing by using fire. Mowing is still a major CO2 issue for us. Burning the meadows does not actually result in net CO2 emissions, and results in greater dominance of the deeply rooted native prairie plants we propagate. 
7. Going off grid with visitor centers and other infrastructure should be a goal for conservation burial sites. 

 
Conservation burial is chiefly defined for what it does (save land) but even more notably for what it does NOT do. It does not use excess natural resources, it does not create greenhouse gas emissions, it does not require multiple phases and personnel and facilities in the supply chain. Our bodies are brought to the burial ground where graves have been minimally dug, usually by hand, the body placed, and the grave closed in a way that allows soils and plants to regrown as efficiently as possible. Anything beyond that is a boutique service that is likely to separate those who have access to it and those who don’t, and who can afford it and those who can’t. By contrast, one of the goals of conservation burial is make these spaces accessible and affordable in an act of environmental justice for the benefit of all human, animal, and plant communities.

If we are to truly change disposition practices for the better environmentally, we need to begin paying closer attention to the work of scientists—forensic taphonomists and anthropologists, soil and agricultural forestry field scientists, hydrologists, carbon experts, and more. And we need to begin taking conservation burial more seriously as a means of sequestering carbon, eliminating wasteful, carbon-depleting steps and, above all, saving land.
 
Choosing to “give back your body” needn’t be this costly in financial or environmental terms. We already have a time-tested, nature-approved way of recycling our nutrients—conservation burial.

Fear of water contamination is as old as human civilization. “Poisoning the well”  goes back  to antiquity as a war tactic to deprive their enemies of water. In the era before we understood the science of infectious disease, the public assumed illnesses like the Black Death were caused by Jews, lepers and witches (insert any marginalized, scapegoated people of choice here) contaminating wells, springs and streams. Nothing like hanging someone with Hansen’s disease to nip a flea-spread plague in the bud.

​As we learned from Covid, the dominance of rational discourse in a time of controversy and doubt is not always guaranteed, and sometimes the loudest and angriest people win, as in W.B. Keats’ cheery words from The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
 
Water is a most precious resource, and when coupled with a cultural aversion to death processes and to science, it’s easy to see why some people make correlations and assumptions that have a lot to do with passionate intensity and little to do with facts. 
 
What follows is what we do know from various studies concerning cemetery plume, how water works, how body decomposition works, and how they all relate to one another. Ramsey Creek Preserve has also served as our personal laboratory for discovery and is proof of the safety of water sources from human burials that eliminate the actual contaminants and polluting materials, such as embalming fluids, polyester fabrics, casket finishes and hardware, and other elements.

​
​A CASE IN POINT
Water contamination fears are not unreasonable, although I will say right out of the gate that such burials do not present a significant public health concern. But in 2008, ‘concerns’ morphed into wild paranoia and speculation that ended in a law banning green burial in Bibb County, Georgia.
 
Elizabeth Collins had lost her son a couple of years earlier, and visited Ramsey Creek with the idea that she would open a project near Macon called the Summerland Natural Cemetery (SNC). Beth got publicity in a local paper where the reporter prominently featured her speculation about the sort of people who might be buried at Summerland. She thought that “tree-huggers, wiccans and other nature lovers” would be predominant. Those of us in conservation burial know that our client families are not all motivated greens nor members of tree-worshiping religious organizations, although they are welcome.
 
Unfortunately, the story was enough to stir up a rural Baptist Church not far from the property, whose members worried about naked pagans roaming the woods. One of the leaders in the church seized on water contamination as a way to stop the project.
 
The speculation about ground water contamination fed on itself with some in the community speculating that the 58-acre burial project could contaminate the entire Florida Aquifer that lies under 100,000 square miles of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. To put it into perspective, 58 acres is less than 1 millionth of 100,000 square miles. The aquifer is anywhere from 100 feet to several thousand feet deep, with an outflow of around 15 billion gallons per day. As a side note, a landfill sits between the church community and the proposed burial site but this hasn’t raised similar concerns.
 
Summerland had originally planned to provide under 2000 burial spaces to be occupied over a span of decades. As the controversy erupted, the owners tried to bargain, lowering the proposed number of burials to under 800. Keep in mind that contemporary cemeteries generally have more than 800 burials per acre, and the Summerland property is 58 acres. This would amount to a mere 14 burials per acre over decades.
 
Farms bury livestock, leaking septic tanks remain a problem in that part of Georgia, and the Ocmulgee River has a high fecal coliform count, but none of that had been noted as potential for water contamination. But the idea of natural burials caused Bibb County to take a stand.
 
The county passed a sweeping law banning green cemeteries, but then went further. It stated that all caskets must be leakproof, something that does not exist. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission forbids morticians from claiming their caskets are leakproof. This law also effectively banned new family cemeteries on private land, a tradition since settlement.
 
This also had the added twist of requiring that a funeral director be hired if the dead had succumbed to any infectious disease. So if granddaddy has cancer, but pneumonia was the final cause of death, the funeral director must be involved. I have yet to see a dead person coughing. I will even go out on a limb and say that if medical authorities release the body, the funeral director should not get veto power (particularly if he/she/they gets paid for the veto). When the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance sent a letter of protest with references to scientific studies, one of the commissioners allegedly said that he didn’t need a study, he would rely on his own “common sense”.
 
COMBATTING THE MYTHS OF TOXIC HUMAN BODIES
Shortly after opening Ramsey Creek, and before burying anyone, we had a piece run in the local paper about Ramsey Creek’s high fecal coliform level, based on a sample run that mostly related to cattle and chicken operations upstream. We urged landowners to keep cattle out of the stream and to be careful with farm roads and spreading animal manure. We got a call from a seemingly sweet older woman a few days later who asked if we were the ones who were calling for cleaning up Ramsey Creek. When I said yes, she screamed at me, “Well, stop what you’re doing! No one wants to drink your dead man soup!”
 
It's clear that the unreasonable—almost superstitious—fear of contamination by dead bodies is not limited to the under-educated in the rural south. The mushroom suit and the mushroom casket both claim to neutralize “toxins” lurking in dead humans. Millions of people saw the mushroom suit TED talk, most of them well-educated and, if you asked them, sophisticated. Google toxins in the human body and you will get dozens of  hits related to de-toxifying your body with various diets and purgatives. The vast majority of people don’t have significant, dangerous levels of toxins in their bodies, and the liver and kidneys are pretty good at detoxifying without fancy diets or expensive supplements, if these work at all. If toxins were as deadly as some think, we would all be dead from them.
 
There are obvious exceptions, like lead. But even there, is it something we need to worry about with burial in a natural landscape? When I was a med student in Charleston, SC, we saw lots of kids with elevated lead levels, mainly from peeling lead paint. It was and is a serious toxin, causing brain damage, among other things. 90-95% of lead in the human body is deposited and sequestered in bone. The average 60-70 year old man might have as much as 200 mg of lead stored in his bones, a number that should decline over time as most of us in that age group were exposed to a lot more lead than kids today. To put this in perspective, a single 12-gage shotgun shell contains about 28 grams of lead, or about as much lead as in 140 older men’s bodies. The lead in the bones of those 140 older men will not be eaten by migrating waterfowl or eagles. The lead will stay in place for a very long time to come. And don’t forget, we still have natural detoxification with burial in the woods with all the mycorrhizae, native fungi, and adsorption by soils.
 
SO WHAT IS THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURAL BURIAL, GROUNDWATER AND HUMAN HEALTH? 
The simple answer is that conservation burial is not going to release a plume of toxic bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, or anything else large enough and dense enough to affect drinking water or wildlife.
 
What do we know about toxins and infectious agents from burials? Quite a bit, actually.
 
In a review article from the Journal of Water and Health (Impact of Cemeteries on Groundwater Contamination by Bacteria and Viruses June, 2015), the authors note that the main issue is the leachate, the liquid purged from a decomposing body. Since we are mostly liquid, after death we produce .4-.6 liters of  fluid per kg of body weight. In English measurement, the average 165 lb. body produces about 10 gallons of this material. 60% of that is water, 30% is various salts and compounds of various metals, and 10% organic substances.  
 
Of the bacteria present in the human body, most accelerate decomposition and are not harmful. Of harmful bacteria and viruses, most cannot live outside the body for very long at all, including cholera, TB, HIV, and hepatitis C. Cholera remains live for less than 4 weeks. Even among those that can survive longer, almost all are gone in 2-3 years (Creely, quoted in Journal of Water and Health 2004).

The basic parameters that determine any possible harmful effects of burial are burial density and frequency, soil type, burial depth, depth of the water table, burial methods, and who drinks the water where.
 
Burial density is much lower in conservation burial grounds. In the old section of Ramsey Creek, we will have only 1500 whole body burials on the entire 33 acres we use for burials, as opposed to contemporary cemeteries that often have over 1000 burials per acre. So far, we have buried some 500-600 people (not counting cremated remains). I estimate that we have to worry about 250-500 gallons of leachate per year on the original 33 acres, or about 7.5-15  gallons per acre. While that might sound like a lot, remember that we also get about 1 million gallons of rain/acre/year, or about 78 million gallons for the entire preserve. The acreage in the watershed is many thousands of acres, or many billions of gallons of rainfall per year.
 
One mitigation technique we use is to line the bottom of the grave with absorptive organic material that wicks the leachate away from the body and sequesters much of it, making it readily available for microbial consumption and molecular mitigation. Some examples of absorptive biomass include dry sawdust, leaves, dried pine-needles, and other native plant foliage.
 
How quickly any remaining viable bacteria could theoretically get down to the ground water would also depend greatly on the type of soil. Clay particles are about 1/1000th the size of sand grains. Not surprisingly, water filters through this type of strata very slowly, giving the bacteria plenty of time to run its course and die before reaching water.
 
WHAT ABOUT HEAVY METALS?
Interestingly, water treatment plants generally use an industrial clay to adsorb some other toxins and metals. The smaller particles have a greater cumulative surface area than larger sand and gravel and are charged, meaning that they bind to many toxins.
 
At Ramsey Creek, we have red clay ultisols that are, in fact, pretty good adsorbers of lead and other heavy metals, depending on pH, temperature and length of exposure. We would expect these soils alone to adsorb up to 100% of lead before it reaches the groundwater far below. (Cadmium and Lead Adsorption Capacities of Nigerian Ultisols, Oluwasola, et. al., Oriental Journal of Chemistry, May 13, 2019).
 
In areas that have limestone, or access to crushed oyster shells, these materials also adsorb heavy metal ions (Adsorption Characteristics of Multi Metal Ions by Red Mud, Zeolite, Limestone and Oyster Shells, Shin, et.al.,Environmental Engineering Research, March 19, 2014). But the bottom line is that the average adult male body’s lead, mostly stored over a lifetime in the bone, is unlikely to get to Ramsey Creek in detectable levels.
 
Unless someone is drinking from a well drilled in the middle of the cemetery, the mere presence of low levels of pathogens in groundwater is irrelevant. The ground water must percolate down to a spring, where the groundwater flows out and into the water source. This process could take years, in which time almost all the bacteria and viruses would be long dead. Some of our burials are 200 feet above and a half mile away from Ramsey Creek.  
 
Several studies have shown that contaminants do not go great distances, as quoted in the JWH article (Review of Human Decomposition Processes in Soil, Dent, et.al., 2004) whose findings revealed “low levels of bacteriological groundwater pollution in a moderate climate condition. Irrespective of the bedrock settings, most of the micro-organisms did not migrate deeper than 3 meters.” And only during prolonged rainy periods did they migrate a distance of more than 100 meters. Interestingly, Dent concluded that dry sands, anaerobic conditions, high temperatures, direct sunlight, and low pH all contributed to lower bacterial survival. So hot, dry, semi-deserts are not great places for bacterial survival. However, most authorities say that sandy and gravely soils close to the water table have a higher rate of bacterial leakage in wet climates.
 
The 100-meter distance has come up repeatedly in the literature. The possibility of clinically meaningful bacterial contamination of wells located more than 100 meters from a conservation burial project is nil.
 
Cobb Bridge Road where Ramsey Creek Preserve is located is on what the locals call “city water” and no one anywhere near us is dependent on well water. Westminster no longer gets its water from Ramsey Creek, it gets it from the Chauga River above the confluence with Ramsey Creek. The creek carries millions—probably billions—of gallons downstream each year.
 
And for the record, we are not producing dead man soup.

As natural burial begins at last to take hold in the US, we must turn our attention to exploring the origins of conservation and our intentions toward developing future spaces with integrity. Not that we have been ignorant to issues of social, racial, and religious justice—in fact, equal access and particular attention to cultural norms have been at the heart of our work at Ramsey Creek Preserve since its inception in 1998.

A recent article called “Whose Green Burial Is It Anyway?”[1] written by Corinne Elicone, and published jointly by the Order of the Good Death and the Collective for Radical Death Studies, charged the conservation and natural burial communities with several failings in the areas of cultural and racial sensitivity. The author’s allegations of racism, antisemitism, ethnocentrism, and various other offences compel me to respond with my knowledge as a student of conservation and restoration ecology, as well as my personal experience as a longtime burial ground owner and steward here in South Carolina.

The Mixed Legacy of Early Conservationists
There is an awful history of early land protection advocates in the USA, and their association with racism and eugenics. Yes, John Muir was a racist, who used an ethnic slur to refer to Black people, and called Native Americans “dirty”.[2]
 
More horrible is the example of Madison Grant (1860-1937). Grant helped found the Save the Redwoods organization, the American Bison Society (to bring back the bison from the edge of extinction), and the New York Zoological Society. He helped push through the establishment of both Glacier and Denali National Parks. 
 
But he also wrote a toxic book called The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which called for putting “undesirable races” in ghettos, forcing sterilizations of others and a dictatorship of the Nordic Race over “inferior races” which would be “humanely” eliminated over time. The German translation of the book was published in 1925, and Hitler wrote Grant to tell him, “Your book is my Bible”. Shamefully, Grant also supported displaying a Congolese Mbuti pygmy, Ota Benga, in the great ape house at the New York Zoo. In addition, he is largely responsible for the restrictive immigration law of 1924, and anti-miscegenation laws of the time. 
 
The treatment of African Americans in funeral practice and the history of segregated cemeteries is yet another stain on our history. Natural burial, based on the premise that more land may be conserved to improve the lives of all of us, provides an opportunity to change course by offering an environmentally-friendly exit to everyone. Cemeterians I know are deeply concerned not only about the running of the cemetery, but about offering social solutions regarding access—including affordability and proximity—for all.
 
What Elicone’s article does not recognize is that those of us who advocate for land protection through burial have long acknowledged the deplorable mistakes of the past by men like Muir, Grant, and many others. While we abhor their racist actions and beliefs, we are determined to build on their true contributions to land conservation and protection. Restoration ecology and conservation biology are sciences, both relatively new and vibrant, that are employed to further goals that benefit everyone. Modern environmentalism is an inclusive social movement, one that is built on the ethics of sound science and social justice.

Cultural Appropriation and Conservation Burial
The assertion that environmentalists use ecological science to take over indigenous land “even now” is false, and decades behind current land conservation practice. Saying that green burial is a “return” to previous traditions is also somehow insulting to those who came before us and could even be construed as an attitude of cultural appropriation in and of itself.
 
For instance, while embalming has been de rigueur in the North for 150 years or more, here in the rural areas at the edge of the Southern Appalachians, we only adopted embalming in living memory. My grandfather never owned a car. They had no electricity until he was in his 40s, nor inside toilets until I was a teenager. They did not have the money to afford a fancy funeral; casket making and burial was done by the men in the church and did not involve embalming. Bodies were buried directly into the ground without a vault. Green burial is definitely not cultural appropriation around here, and there is evidence that it has been an uninterrupted practice in rural areas throughout the country. To assert that bodies buried unembalmed without a vault or steel casket is appropriating Jewish and Muslim burial practices is to forget the history of the human race.
 
But even more disturbing is the assertion that environmentalists still use science as a cudgel against indigenous peoples, as in the statements “To white environmentalists of the 1960s and onward caring for the earth did not offer any gray area. The goal was to establish more protected lands, it did not matter if the land was occupied by Indigenous people…” and “As we see even now, racist views were obfuscated behind numbers and statistics and pitched to white environmentalists as irrefutable science.” “Even now”? 
 
Conflating current conservation burial practice with the racist pseudo-science early environmentalists used while claiming cultural appropriation seems disingenuous at best: “Just like in the early environmental movement, there exists a subtle, yet purposeful inclination to justify the need for Green Burial in the language of science, a supposedly impartial judge of right and wrong. ...but what we fail to rectify when we sell our plots is the deeply personal, existential and relational choices of those who have already discovered this path.”
 
Current publications of the sciences of conservation biology and restoration ecology speak a very different message. The Bears Ears controversy has highlighted the work of scientists to work together. Esselen tribal members have been awarded the stewardship their ancestral land with the support of the Western Rivers Conservancy.[3] Scientific journals like Conservation Biology and Ecological Restoration, which have been preaching the gospel on the need to include indigenous people for at least a couple of decades, is must reading for anyone interested in conservation burial. The evidence is abundant.[4]
 
The father of restoration ecology, Bill Jordan, wrote a book called The Sunflower Forest that spoke of the power of ecological restoration to restore the unity of natural and human communities. He was explicit in his crediting native peoples, especially the Navajo, in shaping his philosophy.
 
I would be remiss in forgetting to mention the deeply offensive assertion that the work of 21st century green burial advocates should also be “erased”. Although they have indeed been mostly “white women of a certain age”, they have been responsible in no small part in opening the eyes of their own cultural subsets, primarily white Christian and unaffiliated communities where the change was most needed. The inference that they should have been more inclusive belies the fact that they had no business crusading beyond their own sphere of influence. Any attempts to subvert the practices of other religions or races would be—and in some documented instances was—rightly rebuffed. It is not accurate or fair to blame the messengers who have demonstrated the courage and devotion to champion an environmental movement when the status quo in their own communities was resistant.

Racism, Antisemitism, and “Unmarked Graves in the Woods”
A major focus of Elicone’s essay is devoted to asking “what if” questions through the minds of stereotypical Jews, African Americans, and persons of other cultural and religious groups, all based on the false assumption that natural burial denies memorialization of any kind. “When monumentation and headstones are so quickly dismissed as antithetical to Green Burial activism, would this not confuse and trouble a Jewish family, who have been practicing Green Burial for generations, and desire a physical monument to their legacy?” she writes, and “We don’t often consider that it might be triggering to a Jewish or Armenian family when we suggest an unmarked grave in the woods.”
 
At Ramsey Creek, there has always been a designated space for observant Jews, including a gate of standing stones, a carved stone bowl for ritual cleansing, and separation from the rest of the projects by trails on all sides. The Jewish section is located on a wooded hilltop, overlooking the Upper Meadow, though that majority of Jewish families have so far chosen the woods instead. “Unmarked graves in the woods” is simply not part of our practice, nor is it done at any of the top conservation burial grounds associated with the Conservation Burial Alliance. The inference that any state-sanctioned cemetery anywhere, green or not, buries bodies in communal shallow graves in the woods to be forgotten is as far from the natural burial ethic as one can get.
 
Since the specter of Jewish concentration camp survivors has been raised by these questions, I will mention that we have buried two, including one that preferred burial in the woods away from everything. Another war veteran, transported from his adopted Boston home, who fought for Israel in 1948 and 1967 is also buried in the Jewish section. 
 
Our experience rejects the concept of monolithic ethnic groups, having observed time and again that what individual people of color, Native Americans, Jewish people, and other ethnic groups believe about burial practice is unpredictable. It is no small measure of white privilege to presume you understand how people of color or Jewish people feel about such issues as “burial in the woods”.
 
Yes, there is a tradition of large and lengthy “homegoings”, funeral observances in some Black communities, particularly Christian ones. Yes, embalming makes prolonged homegoings easier, but some people of color, particularly Muslims, do not embalm. Over the years, people of color buried at Ramsey Creek have indicated many beliefs, including non-religious, Muslim, Christian, and Baha’i.
 
Race and religion are not the only contributing factors to choosing a disposition option. What about white cultural practices—urban/rural, rich/poor, Southern/Northern, Eastern/Western, educated/poorly educated, religious/unaffiliated, and the list goes on? People’s decisions regarding green and conservation burial often are a result of the things they love, and many people of all colors and orientations enjoy walking in the woods, bird-watching, paddling and biking. Those numbers are increasing with the younger generations.[5]
 
The bottom line is that we are not shaming people for making another choice. Yes, I would love to see the majority of people chose conservation burial, but it is a choice, and so is the choice of whether to have a marker. 

Memorialization in Natural Burial Cemeteries
As to memorialization, we very much want people to leave a positive mark—well beyond a “trace”—upon the Earth when they die. To assist families in finding the most resonant way to do that, we offer a variety of gravestones and plantings that are in keeping with our restoration plan, and we make it easy for families to choose appropriate wildflowers from our website and when they visit the Preserve.[6]
 
Many years ago, Kimberley and I expected that people choosing green burial would not want a physical, inert marker. We thought that many would prefer a living marker, like a tree or a colony of rare plants. Even in the days before high speed internet, we thought virtual markers with graveside access to what I called “life history archives” might be a gamechanger.
 
We were wrong. We learned early on that most people—at least in our market—wanted a physical marker, and that failure to provide one could not only be disrespectful of traditionalists, it could seriously interfere with our financial success, critical to protecting and restoring even more land and making those all-important connections between human and natural communities. 
 
Our solution at Ramsey Creek was very site-specific and actually solved an ecological issue we had not yet addressed: restoring the “float” of stones removed by the early white settlers—or their slaves—and placed in piles near the fields or used in construction of chimneys, or other building project. These rocks are important for ant communities that have such  important relationships with plant communities (birdfoot violets, viola pedate, have a strong ant-plant mutualism. The violets’ seeds have a sugary/fatty attachment called an elaiosome  that the ants take to the colony. They later dispose of the remaining seed where they also deposit dead ants and other waste that fertilize the seeds. Float stones are also important for snakes, small rodents, and lizards.
 
These stones can be engraved with names and dates, but we eschew representational art. We even bought the equipment to engrave the stones and trained a worker to do the engraving. We do not allow representational art on stones, and do not allow grave decorations with photos and other memorabilia, potted plants, windmills, elves, fancy birdhouses, concrete frogs, etc. We do not allow “free-lance” grave “cleaning” or the planting of non-native plants. We want a natural aesthetic.
 
But I have talked with some client/providers about the possibility of having a section where more exuberant celebration and memorialization could be allowed as long as it does not degrade the area ecologically. It is not my aesthetic, but if it helps a project remain financially successful, and opens the project up to ethnic groups that desire more decoration or different ways to memorialize, be it rosaries or photos or concrete frogs, that could be considered. On the time scales that matter, these displays are unlikely to endure. 

The Environment—and Science—as the Common Denominator
“When conservation cemetery salespeople from a Christian or nonreligious  background speak to Jewish families who are uneasy about the lack of a grave marker, they must acknowledge the trauma, instead of dismissing it as “not understanding the point” of conservation burial.”
 
But there IS a point to conservation burial, and it is not the same as in other types of cemeteries. All conservation burial is green burial, but not all green burial is conservation burial. Green burial is about how we bury. Conservation burial goes beyond the green burial process and focuses on how to integrate burial with saving and restoring land and, in many cases, providing a multi-dimensional human and ecological space in which to celebrate life.
 
We must rely on science to guide us. We are not “subtle” about using the language of science. We are not “justifying” what we are doing with science. We started with the premise that endangered landscapes like southern prairies are worth saving and restoring, and that some people would find “through my death, a small piece of the planet can be healed and protected” comforting.
 
But protecting, enhancing or recreating a natural landscape is a scientific endeavor. If you are promising to do this in the memory of your clients, it requires you understand the ecology of the area, the habitat in question, and the process and methods to make it happen. We do not need to apologize to anyone or any people for what we offer or the science we use. It is a choice. If that is what they want, we can provide it.

The moral to the story is that perhaps it is best to evaluate the conservation work of others through their lens, and make sure that you have all the facts. We recognize the emotional nature of the work we do, but we hope that our work is motivated by other factors, including the integrity of those who come to this with clear intentions and a full appreciation of science. Above all, we need to recognize that the green burial movement is about preserving the environment for everyone, regardless of race, cultural norms, or other factors. The planet depends on it.

[1] Elicone, Corrine. Whose Green Burial is it Anyway?, Order of the Good Death, November 11, 2020.
[2] Fox, Alex. Sierra Club Grapples with Founder John Muir’s Racism, Smithsonian Magazine, July 24, 2020.
[3] Beever, Jonathan. An Ethical Turn in American Indian Environment Ethics, Environmental Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 2015.
Rademacher, Natalie. These Indigenous Educators are Bringing Western and Native Science Together in the Classroom, Ensia, September 9, 2020.
Wells, Gail. Native American Forestry Combines Traditional Wisdom with Modern Science, Solutions, Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 107-114, November 2011.
Jackson, Amanda. After 250 Years, Native American Tribe Regains Ownership of Big Sur Ancestral Lands, CNN, July 30, 2020.
[4] Renwick, Anna R., et al. Mapping Indigenous Land Management for Threatened Species Conservation, PLOS Biology, March 14, 2017.
Schwartzman, Stephan. Conservation Alliances with Indigenous People of the Amazon, Conservation Biology, June 7, 2005.
[5] Meraji, Shereen Marisol. Outdoor Afro: Busting Stereotypes that Black People Don’t Hike or Camp, National Public Radio, July 12, 2015.
[6] Memorial Ecosystems, Inc.>Memorials and Markers and Burial Planning Guide

​In the section titled And a Couple of Cremation Ideas that Need Work
Or You Could Just Water it Like You Water Other House-Plants, I explored several options for cremated remains disposition that purport to be environmental solutions. Here's part of what I wrote:
 
The developers of the Bios Urn and Bios Incube had this INCREDIBLE idea: they would do away with cemeteries and create forests. The promotional video shows what appears to be a military cemetery with rows of white tombstones, then a flight over a diverse forest. They say they are “the world´s first system designed to help grow the remains of your loved ones into trees.” Well, not exactly.
 
It is another cremated remains/planter but this one comes with an app for your smart phone! No kidding!! The Incube (tree incubator) has an electronic device that monitors soil moisture and automatically waters the tree. How these individual trees restore forests is not a major selling point. More worrisome, the designers obviously spent more time making it look sleek and developing cool electronics than they did on biological sciences.
 
They apparently don’t know that roots will not grow into raw ashes. But what they lack in science, they make up for it with media savvy. Biourns and the Incube have been in/on Forbes, Time, Discovery, CBC, The Daily Mail, Treehugger.com, numerous other online mags, and The Huffington Post ( March 21, 2016, article on greener funeral options. The Biourns and the Urban Death Care Composters received more than three times the ink (and a links) than woodland burial, and the article did not even mention conservation burial).”
 
This section followed a discussion of Bob Jenkin’s Let Your Love Grow cremation amendment and about his in ground research of untreated concentrated ashes.  Bob showed that human ashes are relatively toxic to plant roots given the very high pH and salt concentrations, and included photos from his research.

As we documented,  BiosUrns were NOT the first to create cremation tree-planters; Jose Fernando Vasquez Perez approached us around 2001 with his ideas for cremation tree planters that he came up with while at the Rhode Island School of Design. His company, the Spiritree Forest Company is located in Puerto Rico, predating Bios by a decade and a half. And of course our company’s name is Memorial Ecosystems, founded 20 years before Bios and we have been growing the remains of loved ones into trees (and forests and meadows) for 20 years this year.

The original post included a graphic from Bios’s promotional materials and showed a cross section of an urn, complete with roots robustly growing through the ashes, and a very happy little tree. As we know this is at best misleading.

But last week, I visited the post (to forward it to someone) and noted the scientifically improbable graphic of the happy tree was gone and replaced  by a sad robot.

At the end of my post, this new message from WordPress:
Some content on this page was disabled on March 21, 2018 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Roger Moline. You can learn more about the DMCA here:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/copyright-and-the-dmca/.

Roger Moline is a one of the founders of Bios. DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Congress passed the Act in reaction to how much easier it was to transfer (and monetize) the intellectual property of others with the (new at the time) internet, including movies, books and music. The law specifically exempted “fair use”:

• 17 U.S. Code § 107 – Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
• Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

 
Clearly, the purpose of my blog was not to personally benefit from disaffecting potential Bios clients, but to provide scientific (and aesthetic) criticism of a number of “green” products and practices (along with other issues) and to help educate the public about the increasingly diverse offerings of green burial products and services.

I even contacted Bios with suggestions on how to make the offering more functional (amending the ashes with a buffer like Let Your Love Grow’s product) and make it more acceptable for conservation burial projects like Ramsey Creek (make sure the trees are regionally appropriate and site appropriate—I believe they are now making provisions for that).

​We do not feel we are in competition with Bios, they make stuff. We protect nature and provide a place for some of the burial stuff. The purpose of my post was not to benefit from any loss to Bios, it was urging them to pay more attention to basic science, as much attention as they paid to their slick design and marketing.

But Bios, unfortunately, is one of a growing number of companies that abuse the DMCA to suppress any legitimate criticism of their product. While what they did is not illegal, a growing chorus thinks that filing these types of trivial DMCAs to suppress criticism should be punishable. I think at the very least, Bios has behaved unethically, and I will file for a reversal of the DMCA takedown, as is allowable under the law. Roger Moline should be ashamed of himself.

Here are a couple of good articles on DMCA abuse:
https://www.wired.com/2014/01/internet-companies-care-fair-use/
https://sandbox.spcollege.edu/index.php/2012/09/censorship-is-as-easy-as-d-m-c-a/

Everything is Natural 
Reviewers are treating Chris D. Thomas’s Inheritors of the Earth (PublicAffairs, 2017) kindly, calling it “optimistic.” A 110 year old person buying green bananas is optimistic, Thomas is a Pollyanna of the first water.

In at least one interview, he said he almost didn’t write the book, knowing it could cost him professionally. However, he wrote a paper in 2013 (“The Anthropocene Could Raise Biological Diversity” Nature, 502,7) that puts forth the same arguments. In fact, Richardson and Ricciardi cite this article in their “Misleading Arguments” paper.

Thomas’s book is a virtual tour of the “misleading arguments” paper: Exotic species increase diversity, their negative effects are exaggerated, this is nothing new, and more species is a good thing, period. We are betting on “the losers” and should embrace “the winners”. So yes, invading rats have been responsible for ecological havoc, particularly on islands with ground dwelling birds, but as Thomas says: “Despite their poor reputation, rodents are intelligent, resourceful animals; cute even, with their large eyes and ears, twitching noses and elegant whiskers.”

And plague. He forgot to add plague.

He goes on to say that “The heirs to the world already surround us. However, when we move these really successful types to locations where they did not previously exist, there are casualties.”

So in a million years or so, we will have 20 new species of rats to make up for losing a few species of flightless birds.

He makes the case for throwing in the towel on controlling destructive exotic species: “Like it or not, these biological gains will not go away and more changes will take place in the future. Regarding these changes as unnatural and undesirable is a myopic view of the world. ...We kill successful species to protect unsuccessful ones.”

His passing attack on “naturalness” was not isolated. A criticism of invasive science and native plant advocacy Richardson and Ricciardi did not list is what could be termed tautological reductionism. John Brey, an anti-Darwinian Christian philosopher states: “For if the [scientific] materialist considers the state of the universe at the big bang ‘natural’…then it is difficult to imagine a place where the word ‘natural’ would not apply. Consequently, if everything is natural, then nothing is natural. The term ‘natural’ must differentiate one state for another-otherwise it is employed as a totally meaningless tautology-whereby the materialist speaks profoundly concerning the naturalness of nature.” --Tautological Oxymorons, Brey, 2002

Brey believes that the entire idea of “natural selection” is tautological (no actual difference exists between natural and “artificial” selection) and tries to use the deconstructionist language tools of Jacques Derrida and the earlier work of Wittgenstein to discredit scientific materialism in general , and evolutionary science in particular. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (written in the trenches of WW1), Wittgenstein addresses sense, nonsense, tautology and language: “The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world, everything is as it is and everything happens as it does happen.” 

Wittgenstein is difficult to understand, but this quote means that all statements about the world that are true are tautological (in the sense that Wittgenstein meant it), because “it is what it is” (a statement I had always associated with the Pointy Haired Boss in the comic Dilbert).
 
It is a bit of a surprise to see Thomas-a scientist-make exactly the same argument as Brey against the notion of the “natural”. “...we know, objectively that the human species evolved naturally, so humans must be natural. We are a part of nature. Accepting this, the perspective that ‘humans are making nature less natural’ is the equivalent of saying that’ nature is making nature less natural...Why would we regard these new, human-altered ecosystems as any less natural that the ecological and evolutionary process that are still operating within them? …Nature just happens and the distribution of species change… 

Professor Thomas makes the case that the term “natural” is tautological and meaningless. So following this logic, why should we prefer a springtime old-growth Appalachian cove to an industrial brownfield covered in exotic weeds? He says: “When we perceive nature to be blemished, we attempt to ‘restore’ it to some past state, just as we might try to repair a damaged masterpiece. To do so requires us to weed out those plants and animals we think are in the wrong place.”

Thomas and Brey try to obliterate distinctions between what is relatively free of human influence and what is human dominated. Brey is making a case against the foundations of modern science. He states accurately that “the meaning of a word is derived in every respect from its antithetical contrast with another word...”

But Thomas, presumably a scientific materialist, makes an unsupportable case (whether he meant to or not) that gradations of “natural” are meaningless (this is not reductio ad absurdum; as Brey pointed out: if all is natural, then logically, nothing can be natural, as there is not antithesis-the entire concept is a meaningless tautology), which from an environmental-ethical standpoint is repugnant and nihilistic.

Thomas is playing semantics. He is talking about natural as “what is”, while he surely knows that the word is also used to mean “that which is not intensely affected or intensely used by humans.” We certainly need a word that makes a distinction between a thriving prairie and a cityscape or 100 acres of corn, and I think “natural” works just fine.

Biologists have studied the positive effects of re-introducing wolves to the Yellowstone ecosystem. The system is now more “natural” and diverse related to un-doing human-driven local extinction of the wolves. Just as it is meaningful to study the effects of wolves or beavers on a given system, why is it NOT meaningful to study-and sometimes correct—the effects of the most dominant creature on the planet: humans.

Medical literature also supports the idea that walking in natural areas (vs an intensely urban environment) has positive effects on cognition and depression, among other benefits (for example this 2015 article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4507237/). Despite Thomas’s preposterous mental gymnastics, humans are making the world less “natural”, and it is possible to measure how remaining natural areas benefit our mental and physical health.
 
Thomas also complains that we are wasting precious resources on protecting “loser” endangered species. However as noted by Matthew Holden in “Conservation from the Grave: Human Burials to Fund the Conservation of Threatened Species” (published in Conservation letters http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12421/full), the cost to save all endangered or threatened species in the world is not all that great even compared to the funeral industry:

• “Considering 2.7 million Americans die each year (Xu et al. 2016), potential funeral revenue is roughly $19 billion/year. This is far more than the estimated $3.4-$4.8 billion/year required to protect and manage the habitat of every IUCN threatened species in the world (McCarthy et al. 2012). While a large portion of funeral costs are for ceremonial expenses unrelated to the acquisition and maintenance of the grave site (NFDA General Price List Survey 2015), natural burials eliminate body preservation and use cheaper materials (Harker 2012; Kelly 2012). Conservation burials divert this saved money toward habitat protection and restoration. The average U.S. casket and embalming costs $2,395 and $695, respectively (NFDA General Price List Survey 2015). Therefore, if all Americans who embalmed their remains (45%; NFDA Cremation and Burial Report 2015) purchased a conservation burial instead, U.S. burials could produce $3.8 billion in conservation revenue. While not every threatened species can benefit directly from conservation burials, the hypothetical revenue demonstrates substantial potential for increased biodiversity.”

 
Considering that we also spend 28 billion dollars on pet food annually in this country and that the Gross world product is approaching 80 trillion dollars, maybe it won’t break the bank to spend less than 5 billion annually to save all endangered species (that is 1/16,000ths of the GWP).
 
Thomas says-in defending the rapid changes wrought by exotics and humanized landscapes: “It is as if [restoration ecologists and invasion scientists think] there is an ‘ought to be’ state of the world”.

I am an ontological realist: I think that animals and ecosystems exist independently of our observing them (believe it or not some philosophers differ), and take an ethical/moral position that these plants and animals have a right to exist independent of their meaning for me and other humans. Given that we are entering an era-the Anthropocene-where humans dominate or at least influence habitats planet wide, Aldo Leopold’s words make a lot of sense:

•  “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” 

 and

• “We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”

― Aldo Leopold, Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold
 
Leopold is being a bit mechanistic and teleological in the first quote, and I agree with Stephen S. Gould that ecological communities do not function like well oil machines with every part essential. But I also believe that “novel ecosystems” advocates like Thomas are extraordinarily arrogant in presuming that we are entering a grand new era of biological diversity related to humans dominating the planet. He does not seem to be considering that humans are intensely using more and more of the world’s resources and “ecological spaces”. Where will these new species evolve, particularly the larger ones?

Thomas sets up a straw man, characterizing those of us committed to conserving native species as dewy eyed, ignorant romantics who want to freeze existing ecosystems in amber. This is not true. But in protecting rare species we often have to protect broader habitats that benefit other plants and animals in ways we do not yet understand.

I think we “ought to” make efforts to kill off as few endangered species as we possibly can. We should commit the resources. We might not achieve but we should strive. I do not feel the loss of the last Sumatran rhino (and the end of the line for all wooly rhinos) will be ok as long as we have five new species derived from feral cats millennia hence. Not that I hate domesticated cats. I don’t. Really. OK, I’m not a huge fan of feral cats and I am a dog person….Thomas’s book is worth reading, and I actually agree with him on some things-he notes that (like Florida yew) perhaps a quarter of all species will become climate refugees and would need assisted migration, and seems to be a fan of de-extinction. He remains in his heart a conservationist. While clinging to his denial of the existence of the unnatural, he says: “Humans are natural within the Earth system, and so it follows that anything we do or don’t do, is a perfectly natural consequence of the evolution of a bipedal ape. We can intervene in ways that old-thinking would define as “unnatural”. We can be proactive rather than bowed over with regret that things are no longer as they were.”

He is saying that actively saving species can also be a completely natural thing for humans to do, and he seems to advocate saving areas large enough to save big animals from extinction.

Native Plants Do Not Exist
The award winning British science journalist Fred Pearce’s 2015 The New Wild-Why Invasive Species will be Nature’s Salvation(Beacon Press) makes the case that 1) “native” plants and other organisms do not exist and 2) what we call “invasives” actually increase biological diversity and (as the book cover says) “Will be Nature’s Salvation”. He also makes links between Nazis, eugenicists and native plant advocates, and blames restoration ecologists for dooming the Florida panther. The rest of the book is a re-hash of Thomas’s and other contrarians’ themes. Despite rave reviews from the likes of Stewart Brand, James Lovelock and Kirkus Reviews, Pearce is either a very poor researcher, or he has created a one-sided, cartoonish portrait of main-stream restoration ecology intentionally to sell more books (or both). Full disclosure: I hated this %$#$% book. Don’t buy it unless you are an intellectual masochist like me.
 
His most ridiculous statement is similar to Thomas’s denial that “natural” is even exists: “A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species.” P. 50
Yes and every life form in the universe came from the same 10 to the minus 35th meter space that existed at 0-10 minus 43rdseconds of the Big Bang event, so all life in the universe (now 13.7 billion years afterwards) could be considered native to anyplace in the universe, I guess.
 
Pearce apparently wants to limit his discussion to earth, so in his opinion, any location other than where the first self-replicating organism developed in the primordial ooze is a place life invaded. If all species come from species that migrated from elsewhere, then in Pearce’s opinion, the idea of native species is meaningless.

Degrees of naturalness exist, and are ecologically meaningful; so it is with the concept of native species.

Consider the case of salamanders in the Southern Appalachians. Among the lungless salamanders (plethodontidea), the subfamily pelerpinae originated there more than 70 million years ago. They are still there. Keep in mind that the first primate fossils date to 55 million years ago. Pearce would make the case that calling them “native” is a meaningless distinction, even when comparing salamanders and kudzu.

He loves examples like species-depauperate, newly formed islands and his own United Kingdom (other than land south of the Bristol Channel entirely covered by glacial ice sheets until 18000 years ago) as why invasive species are such a treat wherever they go. As I pointed out in the last post, no one is saying that ANY new species ANYWHERE is a bad thing, only that the scale and speed of these invasions is unprecedented and in many places (like privet in our alluvial communities at Ramsey Creek and at least 3 million other acres in the south) threatens diverse native communities.

He says when people vilify kudzu “ something cultural [is] at work here”: “Kudzu’s incontinent growth, extending roots underground to form new vines on the end, seems to fit an American image of the Deep South as somehow depraved and unruly.”

What? Ok, I live in the “Deep South” and hate kudzu. I don’t think cultural depictions like the movies “Deliverance” or “Sling Blade” are what made kudzu almost universally hated. I agree that is not actually eating the South, and unlike privet and Asian honeysuckle, it is surprisingly easy to control without chemicals-we are close to eradicating it at Ramsey Creek (a good article on the kudzu issue is here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/true-story-kudzu-vine-ate-south-180956325/).
 
He says that the wildlife-teeming plains of Africa are almost an entirely new phenomenon created by rinderpest (a disease that eliminated domestic cattle), and that Amazonia is entirely a by-product of intense human activity.
Of the latter, humans no doubt helped shape Amazonia, and for years this influence-particularly in eastern sections-was grossly underappreciated . However, 3 years BEFORE he published the book, an article appeared in the journal Science (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225375691_Sparse_Pre-Columbian_Human_Habitation_in_Western_Amazonia ) that debunked the idea that all of Amazonia is a human creation. In fact, the vast western regions were probably always sparsely populated . I guess he was too busy writing to keep up with the latest literature-especially that which countered his narrative.
 
Two items make Pearce’s attacks on invasion science, restoration ecology and native plant protection particularly obnoxious: his ill-informed account of the plight of Florida panthers, and his explicit linkage of native-plant advocates to eugenics and the Nazis.

The Florida panther has been in trouble for decades. By the 1970’s the animals were down to 12-20 animals, and while the population rebounded (perhaps 200 exist now), by 1993 they were suffering from severe inbreeding issues: genetic defects that caused atrial septal defects, low sperm quality, immune deficiencies and other problems. A 1990s task force recommended expanding protection and a long term goal of establishing 2-3 meta-populations of 240 animals each. One issue is that the home range of a male panther is normally 200 square miles and the female’s is 75. The task force hoped to see 2-5 animals per 100 square mile (around 64,000 acres). They projected the need of 4800-12000 square miles for EACH meta-population. They also introduced several females from a closely related subspecies from Texas to address the genetic problems.

In Pearce’s retelling, restoration ecology advocates “sacrificed” the Florida panther by insisting on eliminating exotics and restoring natural cover to 6300 acres of former farmland that was surrounded by the Everglades: the so called “Hole in the Doughnut” (HITD) tract. In 1954, farmers began “rock plowing” on the 20,000 acre Long Pine Key,-an area of slightly higher ground -to create around 9000 acres of arable farmland. Farming ceased in 1975, but the area was soon overrun by Brazilian Pepper, an intensely invasive species that is poor habitat for hogs and deer, the main food source for panthers. In 1997, the Park Service began restoration of just under 10 square miles (6300 acres) of the 9000 acres that had once been farmed. About 4100 acres of old farmland had been restored by 2010 (https://www.nps.gov/ever/learn/nature/upload/Hole-in-the-Donut-Fact-Sheet-Aug2017.pdf) . More than 50% of the rock-lands had remained natural and was unaffected by the farming efforts.
 
Pearce says of that 6300 acres: “Fleeing traffic and tourism in the more picturesque parts of the park, the cat…..found the overgrown farms in the Hole-in-the-Donut an ideal refuge. Its numbers began to rise.”

After restoration began, he says: “What about the panthers? Concerned about the possibility that the ecological restoration might result in their extinction, park authorities augmented their stock with some females from Texas.”

After surmising that the resulting cats were “hybrids” he concluded “A subspecies of iconic cat has been sacrificed in order to fill the Hole-in-the-Donut.”

The only problems with this narrative are the timing of the panthers’ decline and interventions to save the panther, and the scale of the project related to known panther habitat requirements.

The plight of the panther goes back to the 1960s and 1970s when the population reached a nadir and entered an unsustainable “genetic bottle neck”. It was listed as endangered in 1967-over 50 years ago, some thirty years before the HITD restoration efforts cranked up.

Farming in the HITD stopped in 1975, but panther rebound is related to setting up large panther reserves after 1981, measures to limit traffic kills,  and improvements in reproductive fitness after introducing 8 non-pregnant females from Texas (see the Panther Recovery plan from the Fish and Wildlife Service here: https://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Panther%20Recovery%20Plan.pdf).
 
The decision to introduce Texas panther genes predates the restoration project’s implementation and is unrelated. And panther population growth increased after the restoration project started. This from the Fish and Wildlife Service:

• “Between 1991 and 1994, biologists convened three workshops to discuss the genetic health of the Florida panther population. Experts in the fields of genetics, conservation biology, captive breeding, and panther biology participated. Scientists concluded that some means of restoring a level of gene flow to the population was critical to improving the genetic health of the panther and its long-term prospect for recovery.
• A genetic restoration plan was implemented in 1995 with the release of eight female pumas from Texas into Florida panther habitat in southern Florida. Texas pumas (P. c. stanleyana) were the closest extant puma population to Florida and the intent of this plan was to mimic the gene flow that historically occurred between these subspecies. Five of the eight Texas pumas produced a total of at least 20 kittens. None of the original eight Texas pumas remain in the wild population today; five died from various causes and the remaining three were removed from the wild and placed in captivity after they produced a sufficient number of offspring. Subsequent analyses have already documented the beneficial impacts of genetic restoration on the genetic health of the population as well as the coinciding increase in panther abundance since 1995.”https://www.fws.gov/refuge/florida_panther/wah/panther.html

 
And if one female panther requires 48,000 acres, and a male more than 100,000 acres, it is hard to imagine that 120 animals were dependent on 6000 acres of deer-poor Brazilian pepper, even given the disproportionate importance of uplands to panthers. The task force hoped to see 2-5 animals per 100 square miles. 6000 acres is about 10 square miles.

Pearce threw out the panther/restoration ecology nonsense in 2 pages that are pretty convincing on a quick read. The book is chocked full of assertions that on closer inspection fall apart. The most noxious is his characterizing native plant advocates as quasi-Nazi, a smear he brings up repeatedly. Rats are not eliminated from the island of South Georgia, they are victims of a “pogrom”. In two different chapters, he brings up the fondness Nazis and eugenics advocates expressed for native plants.

• “Eugenics generated calls for societies to be cleansed of inferior, alien, and unfit humans. Clementsian ecology led to a similar view of alien species. The two theories also had common adherents. Many conservationists in the first half of the twentieth century were prominent proponents of eugenics.” P. 141

Dr Agon: Has he asked for anything special?
Dr. Melik: Yes, this morning for breakfast. He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger milk.
Dr. Agon: [laughs] Oh, yes. Those were charmed substances…That some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
Dr. Orva: Here. You smoke this, and be sure to get the smoke deep down into your lungs.
Miles Monroe: I don’t smoke.
Dr. Orva: It’s tobacco. It’s one of the healthiest things for your body. Now go ahead. You’ll need all the strength you can get.
— From Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”

Ecological restoration is glorified gardening and we need to focus on the new sustainability: one that accepts and embraces exotics. On the far end of the “acceptanistas” are those who think that invasive species-being more tolerant of humans—and are in fact nature’s saviors, hardworking and providing invaluable ecosystems services and the working material for new species to evolve.

Those working to eliminate these invasive non-native species are romantics who have scary similarities to the Nazis and other ethnic cleansers, and do not recognize that, in reality, “native species” do not exist. In fact because humans are a product and part of nature, landscapes dominated by humans and exotic species introduced by humans are completely “natural”. While the last idea might sound like something from a late-night, cannabis-fueled college bull-session (“Hey man, when you think about it , an industrial brownfield is just as “natural” as a coral reef!”), a published conservation scientist recently made this case (ok, not the brownfield point, but more about Dr. Chris Thomas later).

Let me be clear: I love a lot of non-native species. The area around the steward’s house at Ramsey Creek (including the parking lot) has a lot of exotics including ginko, Asian magnolias, dawn redwood, evergreen azaleas and daffodils. When we made this area a part of the Preserve, we did not rip out these plants, although if we were starting with a blank slate we would NOT use them for landscaping. People who see daffodils in the parking lot see this as a license to plant exotic bulbs on graves.

I don’t have trouble with the Queen Ann’s lace in our “natural” meadows at Ramsey Creek. Unlike in other areas of the country, wild carrot seems to behave itself—at least on our poorly drained clay soils. Native wasps (at least at Ramsey Creek) use the flowers and voles eat the roots.

European honey bees have been here for almost 500 years-and while they might have impacts on some of our native pollinators in the wild, at this point it is pretty much a done deal (by the same token, we will not keep domestic honey bees at Ramsey Creek-which could compete with native pollinators).

I realize that with all of the non-native species, we will never be rid of them entirely; many like Queen Ann’s lace are at the very least benign. Others could certainly be beneficial: a recent study out of Duke University shows that an invasive species of Japanese seaweed (Gracilaria vermiculophylla) benefits native species where native “foundation species” on the sea floor have been lost (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/32/8580).
 
I also agree that those species present in 1492 were not always here, and many species had disappeared in the previous 20,000 years or so, especially the megafauna including horses. Horses, (the genus Equus-including zebras, asses, and horses) originated here in North America about 4 million years ago, and the modern horse species (E. caballus) arose here, and crossed to Eurasia maybe 1-2 million years ago. The last Equus in N. America did not die out until 11-13,000 years ago. Some people out west think of wild horses as horrible non-natives but the Equus has been absent only .3% of the years since it evolved here.

Canids evolved in North America and never went extinct here: an animal very much like the coyote was in the southern US over 10 million years ago. The gray wolf was an invasive species in the early Pleistocene, having evolved in Asia from canids that had traveled across the land bridge from North America. In our area, people complain about coyotes (or coy-wolf-dogs since they carry gray wolf and dog genes) being an invasive species. Considering that a coyote-like animal was roaming this area 3 million years before chimpanzees and humans went their separate evolutionary ways, it might be short term thinking to object to wild canids returning. Yes, they occasionally carry off cats and other small pets, but they also provide natural control of deer-especially in areas where hunting pressure is low.

So yes, I get all that. But we spend a lot of time and money at Ramsey Creek controlling non-native invasive species like kudzu, Asian honeysuckle and privet, and we are working hard to restore (or recreate) piedmont grasslands-a once wide-spread habitat now almost extinct. Novel ecosystems advocates might say we are not only wasting our time, we are harming the environment.

To be sure, some critics of native plant advocates have a point. Evolutionary biologist Steven J. Gould held that some proponents misused evolutionary reasoning to make a case for preserving native plants (“An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths, Fallacies and Confusion in the Concept of Native Plants”, Arnoldia (58)1, 1998). His criticism centered on what he described as two fallacies.
 
The Functional Argument Based on Adaptation
Gould says: “If natural selection works for the best forms and most balanced interactions that could possibly exist in any one spot, then the native must be best, for the native has been honed to optimality in the refiner’s fire of Darwinian competition.”
 
But locally evolved natives are not “optimized” as much as they prevail over local competition. In some cases, like relatively small islands where the competition is pretty slack , natives are particularly vulnerable to exotics that evolved under much more competitive conditions. It’s like the old joke with a bear approaching two people, one says “I’m going to run.” The other says “You can’t outrun a bear”, and the first man says “I just have to outrun you.”

The Geographic Argument Based on Appropriate Place 
This argument, as Gould says, is less clearly linked to a Darwinian postulate, but goes like this: “Why would a plant live only in this or that region of 500 square kilometers unless the domain acted as its natural home?” The idea is old, and was advocated by Willam Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology: God made each creature for its proper place.

It is easy to come up with counter-examples. Torreya taxifoliain and Taxus floridana (gopher yew and Florida yew) are both endangered conifers limited to a 10 square kilometer area along the Apalachicola River in the northern Florida panhandle, and both are in decline and facing extinction.
 
Torreya is down to a few hundred stems, most of these not reproducing. Interestingly, the most successful, naturally reproducing grove is outside of Highlands, NC, where botanist Thomas Grant Harbison planted seeds around 1920. This small grove is at 3,300 feet elevation and hundreds of miles north, reinforcing the idea that Torreya is an ice age relict that became “stuck” in Florida as the climate warmed. While some in the native plant / invasive science community oppose the idea of “assisted migration” and “re-wilding” of Torreya and Florida yew, to me it makes sense in a warming climate. Torreya has not become invasive in 100 years in and fossil evidence shows that at least one species of Torreya lived in Georgia and North Carolina as far back as the Cretaceous era (some 70 million years ago or more). We would very much like to plant a few Torreya at Ramsey Creek, if anyone wants to sponsor one for a grave. Gould probably overstates the case for accidents of history and geology, and took a rather dim view of “community ecology”.

Of course some species-like those adapted to serpentine soils rich in metals most plats find downright poisonous-are specially adapted to a specific place, and we are only now beginning to unravel mutualistic and semi-parasitic relationships between plants and between plants and fungi (not to mention how vertebrates and invertebrates play into this). Tree gall communities, for example, are incredibly complex with foundational wasps making the galls, insects that feed on the gall, and parasitic wasps that feed on the original wasp larvae and the larvae of the “gall parasites”, and vertebrates that feed on all of the above.

But Gould was not opposed to protecting native plants, controlling exotic species or protecting natural areas. As he said in the 1998 paper: “A preference for natives does foster humility and does counteract human arrogance-for such preference provides the only sure protection against our profound ignorance of consequences when we import exotics.”

Like Gould’s analysis, much of the criticism of invasion science (the science of invasive species) and restoration ecology is valuable to the young sciences; some criticism is just plain bad science and science journalism: full of straw-men, ad hominem attacks and the occasional redutio ad Hitlerum (in on-line arguments this is known as Godwin’s Law).

For those who want to skip more specific examples and long, geeky exploration of these ideas (that will be part 2), invasion scientists David Richardson and Anthony Ricciardi did us a service in publishing “Misleading Criticisms of Invasion Science: A Field Guide” ( Diversity and Distribution, (2013) 19, 1461-1467). Their short paper outlines 6 basic criticisms and 6 rebuttals—and provides almost 3 pages of references.

The (abridged) arguments are :

• Modern, human assisted invasions are nothing new , and equivalent to invasions of the past, like we saw with the gray wolf. The counter argument is that the scale, speed, impact and evolutionary importance of modern invasions are unique.
• Impacts of non-native species on biodiversity and ecosystems are exaggerated. Counter argument: Global data sets clearly implicate invasions as a major and growing cause of population –level and species-level extinctions. Impacts of invasions on plant extinction are frequently masked by the long time lags inherent in plant extinctions.
• Increased species introductions increase biodiversity by adding to regional pools and generating new taxa through hybridization and ultimately local evolution (like Darwin’s finches). Counter argument: Focusing on species richness counts is a misleading approach, since it may take many years for species to decline; it can affect ecosystem function, and hybridization is a major driver of extinction.
• Positive (desirable) impact of non-native species are understated and at least as important as undesirable impacts (as for example Japanese seaweed and European honey bees). Counter argument: Non-native species are far more likely to cause substantial ecological and socio-economic damage. Positive impacts are often transient.
• Invasions science is biased and xenophobic. Counter argument: Xenophobes obsessed with eradicating all non-native organisms operate at the fringe of the conservation movement-as do those who link informed efforts to manage introduced species with xenophobia.
• The biogeographic origin of a species has nothing to do with its impact. The native/non-native dichotomy has no value in science. Counter: Ignoring biogeographic origins as a mediator of impacts ignores the importance of evolutionary context in species interactions. Non-native consumers inflict greater damage on native populations. The more “alien” the established organism is to the recipient community, the greater the likelihood that it will be ecologically disruptive.

 
I think that conservation burial has a role to play with ecological restoration and promoting native species, and I think we all understand that we are not trying to go back to some pure, romantic ideal of pre-Columbian landscapes. But dense thickets of privet crowding out rare native trilliums are something we can try to control. We can get rid of the loblolly pine plantations without pulling up every Queen Anne’s lace plant.

Certainly, some “inactive” cemeteries continue to provide green space and a sense of history. Abandoned pioneer cemeteries in the prairies serve real conservation interests.
​
But old cemeteries that continue to engage actively with a community, that are spaces sacred to the living whom remember the people buried there, these are truly special.

As I grew up, we would marvel at the oldest graves at the Hopewell Methodist Church’s graveyard, where my mother’s family has been buried for generations. The oldest graves there are for people born 200 years ago; many are marked not by polished granite, but by upright stones of dark black hornblendic amphibolite found in the vicinity, the inscriptions no longer legible. My beloved Aunt Marie was buried there only a few weeks ago, and my father’s grave is there among the Pickens family that he married into.

Boston’s 174-acre Mount Auburn, the nation’s first “Rural Cemetery” is some 185 years old. In the 1830’s, it was a tourist attraction almost as popular as Niagara Falls, and remains popular for birdwatchers, runners, and those who are interested in its history and great horticultural collection.

Mt. Auburn was part of the inspiration for Memorial Ecosystems and Ramsey Creek. Rural Cemeteries, created in the undeveloped borders of cities, were a radical departure from church-yard burials, and were thought to be a boon to both mental and physical health.

Mt. Auburn was different from the rural cemeteries in Europe: much wilder, and more forested. Aaron Sachs in his delightful book Arcadian America notes that European Rural Cemeteries such as Pere Lachaise outside of Paris were too formal for the designers and developers of Mount Auburn, the Parisian cemetery having “dense classical grandeur” and was all-together too approving of human progress and dominance over nature.

Dr. Jacob Bigelow, who procured Mt. Auburn’s first 72 acres put it this way in an 1831 speech , “A Discourse on Burying the Dead”, that he gave to the Boston Society for The Promotion of Useful Knowledge (love the name; this is quoted from Sachs, p.31,32):
“The plant which springs from the earth, after attaining its growth and perpetuating its species, falls to the ground, undergoes decomposition, and contributes its remains to the nourishment of plants around it. The myriads of animals which range the woods or inhabit the air, at length die upon the surface of the earth, and if not devoured by other animals, prepare for vegetation the place which receives their remains. Were it not for this law of nature, the soil would soon be exhausted, the earth’s surface would become a barren waste, and the whole race of organized beings, for want of sustenance, would become extinct…..When nature is permitted to take her course, when the dead are committed to the earth under the open sky, to become early and peacefully bended with their original dust [then mourners, too, might become enfolded] in the surrounding harmonies of the creation.”

My one criticism of these Rural Cemeteries is that they did not plan far enough into the future. The founders and designers of Mount Auburn, Bonaventure in Savannah, and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia (among others) intended for the projects to be “not for the poor purpose of gratifying our vanity or pride….but for the teaching of nature’s lessons, which would spur thoughts full of admonition, of instruction, and slowly but surely , of consolation also’” (Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, quoted by Sachs, p.33). 
 
Unfortunately, within 50 years, the Victorians were proudly erecting grandiose monuments, and in some cases (Bonaventure for example) did away with the curvy paths and installed a grid. After 150 years, some were dominated by stone monuments (Laurel Hill has 33,000 monuments on 74 acres). So much for nature teaching lessons.
 
Ecological restoration can take many decades (even centuries) and can require ongoing interactions with the human community-including significant investments of money: high quality restoration is not cheap. Prairies and savannahs (including very rare piedmont prairies) must be burned indefinitely on a regular basis, or the prairie is lost. How to ensure that a community will support decades or centuries of ecological restoration is a serious question for restorationists.

Linking the project with a durable social institution would seem to be one possibility. 22 American churches are over 300 years old (and most states in the east have half a dozen or more churches over 200). Church-forests in Ethiopia have been protecting natural areas for 1500 years, so this is not a crazy proposition (http://blogs.plos.org/yoursay/2011/02/25/church-forest/). The Monastery of the Holy Spirit outside of Atlanta created The Honey Creek Woodlands: http://www.honeycreekwoodlands.com , and another associated monastery—Our Lady of the Holy Cross in Berryville Virginia—has followed suit with Cool Spring Natural Cemetery :(https://www.virginiatrappists.org/cemetery/.
 
Around 40 colleges in the USA are over 200 years old; the University of Wisconsin is almost 170 years old. UW is the birth-place of scientific ecological restoration; it was here in the mid-1930s that Norman Fassett, John Thomson, John Curtis, Aldo Leopold and others began work on an old field to re-create a native prairie, now known as Curtis Prairie (this is a 2008 article celebrating the prairie’s 75th year): http://www.botany.wisc.edu/zedler/images/Leaflet_16.pdf.
 
Very few businesses last 150 years (Germany and especially Japan seem to be the exceptions); only 10 businesses in the USA are over 300 years old, and six of those are family farms.

But cemeteries, even those run as a business and not attached to another institution, have traditionally been long-term proposals, and to me seem to be almost ideal cultural institutions for long-term ecological restoration projects. Part of this has to do with how they can change the way people think about nature (the above quote from Sachs shows that this has been a motivation for creating more natural burial grounds for upwards of 200 years). As much as anything, Conservation Burial is taking the ethos from the rural cemetery movement of 200 years ago, and applying modern conservation science, along with lessons learned from the fate of most rural cemeteries. We are also more attuned to the need for these spaces to be more than graveyards: we want as many weddings and baby blessings as funerals.

A major selling point for Ramsey Creek is that an outside organization holds a conservation easement, and no matter what happens to us, it will always be managed as a natural area. I worry about the project not being big enough to accommodate burials for hundreds of years-especially since we are limiting density, and have a fair amount of acreage unsuitable for burial, including steep slopes and wetlands. We recently paid off a tract of land that more than doubled the size of the project, but the Ramsey Creek Preserve is still small at just less than 80 acres.
To keep a project meaningful for the local community, it is important that 150 years from now, people are still making connections to the natural space, forged by burials being done at that time. We hope to further expand the acreage, despite having plenty for the next few decades. We and our client families are interested in leaving a legacy.

Apparently, not everyone shares this goal.

In the October 2016 issue of ICCFA Magazine (International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association), Daniel Isard, MSFS gave a tutorial on the valuation of cemeteries (for those who might want to sell). Isard is President of The Foresight Companies, LLC, a Phoenix-based consulting company specializing in mergers, acquisitions and valuations.

In the article, he answers a query from a cemetery owner nearing retirement age who is considering selling the property. It is 100 acres, and was started 60 years ago by his parents. The cemetery has 200 sales per year and does 150 interments. Of the 100 acres, 10 are sold out, 6 acres are plotted, and the remaining 84 acres are undeveloped.

Isard’s calculations, observations and recommendations? He figures the real annual income of the cemetery is around $17,778, and calculates that the Net Present Value of that future income is only $71,000, given a discount rate of 25%. He notes that “anything more than 40-100 years of inventory is a wasting asset”, and recommends the owner (if possible with zoning, other restrictions) keep 14 of the undeveloped acreage and sell the rest.

Solid, seemingly math-based business advice. But I have more than one problem with his analysis, the chief of which is the idea that it is stupid and wasteful to create or sell a cemetery with more than 40-100 years of inventory. This is a radical departure from the idea of cemeteries being trans-generational, and semi-permanent. In an industry that markets the idea of “perpetual care”, and the façade of permanence, the proposal that cemeteries are or should be relatively short-term investments might present marketing issues.

Net Present Value (NPV) calculations are a great way to figure out when and whether to purchase equipment, build a new warehouse or invest in more advertising: generally near future decisions.

Basically, NPV includes a “discount rate”. If a course of action meets an alternative action’s or non-action’s return on investment (in this case, Isard set the bar at 25%), it is as-good or better than alternatives . If the NPV is zero-that is the return-on-investment is exactly 25%-it is a wash. If it is a positive number, then it is a good investment given the employed discount rate, because it does better than the alternative.

The problem is when such calculations extend decades, given the power of exponential growth. In 100 years, even a million dollar’s worth of income that year is worth less than a penny of investment at a discount rate of 25% (http://www.aqua-calc.com/page/discounted-present-value-calculator ). At 10% 1 million dollars 100 years from now is worth around $73.
 
I am not sure that the NPV calculation Isard provided is correct, or that is the term he wanted. The NPV of $17,778 ten years from now is less than $2000 at a 25% discount rate. If you add each year (beginning with $17778 this year) the total for 10 years is $81,249. Still, a pretty small number whether $71,000 or $90,000 considering the size and sales of the operation.

NPV calculations are notoriously flawed when considering natural resources, investment in pollution control and projects with high, trans-generational social benefits, especially those likely to be more valuable in 50 years than now. An excellent article on the issue, originally in the Vanderbilt Law Review can be found here:
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2052&context=facpubs ).
 
A notorious misuse of NPV was in 1985, when then Office of Management and Budget chief (and future failed Supreme Court nominee) Douglas Ginsberg forced the EPA to throw out a proposed ban on asbestos because of a negative NPV economic analysis. Yes, asbestos would cause a lot of cancers, but the long latency period meant that most of the deaths would be decades hence. So while a life saved now might be worth 1 million dollars, by the time the cancers would happen, given the standard discount rate, a life that many years later should be counted as only worth $22,000 at the time the regulations would come into effect.

It seems what Isard is really saying is that investors want their money back in 4 years or so, and a 25% return per year is ballpark. The higher rate is because cemeteries are going out of style, and thus risky. All of the NPV stuff is fancy sounding window dressing. Given the performance of top rated investment funds over the past few years, such a return still seems exorbitant.

I am not sure how the cemetery owner is making it on 18 grand a year, and doubt this is the case. It is an established cemetery (60 years!) and I am sure all of the upfront costs have depreciated decades ago-and contemporary cemetery expenses are “front loaded”. Since most NEW cemeteries can take a decade to become profitable (if ever), all of that risk is gone. What are the demographics in a 50 mile radius of his operation? What is the competition like? Does he take cremated remains? Is his income increasing or decreasing? All of these factors should be considered. Has he considered selling or donating a conservation easement on the undeveloped acreage and creating a conservation burial ground? It could be that his commitment to nature and future generations would considerably boost his existing sales, broadening his demographic appeal.

My advice to that owner is to hold onto the land until he has examined all of his options. Legacy is something a quick buck can never buy, and he could be eating the seed corn of his operation.

But what bothers me the most about the article is the sage advice that cemeteries should not have more than 40-100 years of inventory; this pearl of wisdom seems to be a product of short-term thinking (and a NPV mindset). Cemeteries are not mere “income generating machines” that must meet or exceed income from the latest fad in real-estate development; they have a sacred and social dimension that most cemeterians recognize.

The main rationale for Conservation Burial is that the projects can be trans-generational and personally transformational-and exist long enough (centuries) to restore damaged landscapes: it is impossible to grow an old growth forest in 40 years. Families and communities are connected to these spaces, and to marginalize their value to future generations is a big step in the wrong direction.

Wasting precious land
I get a little tired of reminding people that the whole point of conservation burial is to SAVE and ecologically restore land, while helping to create durable bonds between people and wild landscapes. No, we do not think that burying people standing up would be a better idea, nor would reusing graves, stacking people 3 deep, etc. Please do not suggest it. And yes, there is still a lot of land that needs saving. If anyone is unfamiliar with this point, please see my 14 minute TEDx Greenville talk from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA0VLzOPPA .
 
Economics
First of all, composting facilities are likely to very expensive in and of themselves; a project that could handle a couple of hundred bodies per year is going to be a multi-million dollar proposition. For this idea to make a dent in death care, it will take quite a few of them in every metro area in the country. Metro Atlanta, for example, has around 6.1 million people, and given a death rate of 8.15/1000/year, almost 50,000 people will die there next year. How much would it cost to develop and operate the facilities to take care of 10% of Atlanta’s dead?

Secondly, having spent a lot of time looking into possible conservation burial properties near Nashville, Charleston, Tampa/Orlando, Austin, Chicago and other metro areas, I found that all of these areas have active landscape-level land protection initiatives, either public, private or both.

As far as cost, we found many very attractive and ecologically valuable properties within a 45-60 minute drive time from downtowns that were less than 1 million dollars (without any participation from other entities), and no shortage at all if we moved to 2-3 million dollars for land acquisition.

As far as startup, conservation burial has a few advantages vs. an architecturally attractive, client-friendly composting facility.

With conservation burial, the land is the main “infrastructure” cost, although we recommend getting guest facilities up and running as soon as possible. Long term operations and maintenance costs are a fraction of contemporary cemeteries and would probably cost less to operate than high end composting facility (it should be noted that at least one other entrepreneur is working on lower cost composting venues).

And because conservation burial is about creating a living nature preserve, people are much more likely to do pre-need purchases, improving cash flow.

Conservation burial can also take advantage of buy in by state and regional government programs to protect land (this is not theoretical and helped launch projects in Atlanta and Gainesville, Fla.), or help deflect some of the costs of land that local conservancies wanted to protect anyway (as happened in Ohio). The Atlanta project was also able to use part of the project area for mitigation banking, and was able to harvest a loblolly pine plantation for income and also as a  part of ecological restoration (we are doing the same at Ramsey Creek in our new section).

All things considered, an investment of $2 million to be paid off in 15 years at 5% would be around $16,000 per month, or about 5 sales per month (this could include some of the start-up capital, and actual sales could include both spaces for cremated remains and whole body; obviously long term sales would need to be significantly higher).

As far as hybrids go, unless the green section of a contemporary cemetery is big enough to function as a nature preserve, I believe most people would prefer a conservation burial project: something we have seen in informal polls. Pushing for smaller green burial sections in existing cemeteries would also fragment the market, making start-up and messaging more difficult for projects doing the hard work of landscape level conservation. I will address the issue more thoroughly in a future post.

Now on the actual post.
 
Green Grave Management Technology—Is it a Thing?
A few years ago, I had a meltdown when the Green Burial Council formed a committee to review and revise the standards for green burial. I had written most of the original ones that had to do with actual interments and grounds.

In the originals, I had spoken of techniques and technologies needed to ensure that our burial activities resulted in a net ecological good for the site.

The committee wanted to remove the language and made these comments:
“The committee was not sure how excavation and burial techniques would protect plant diversity. Protection of plants is covered in another standard……What is an example of burial technology? Excavation technology?…..Burial itself disturbs the soil profile and removes vegetation so there aren’t really any areas where burial would not degrade the land.”

Of course, restoration ecology is developing techniques and technologies to restore degraded land (one reason we advise against selecting properties that are sensitive or pristine); wind driven tree tip-ups regularly disturb soil horizons on a similar scale and more intensely than our excavations (which endeavor to leave the soil layers “in order”). 
 
Over the years, we have developed a number of techniques to ensure that our projects have a very positive effect on the local landscape. These techniques MUST be site specific, although many of the basic concepts are general. For example, as the dimensions of a grave increase linearly, the volume of dirt increases exponentially…the more dirt, the more disturbance …so graves should be relatively shallow, and the width and length no more than needed. We avoid areas within our sites that are too sensitive for excavation and graveside services; re-vegetation uses native plants and local genotypes to the extent possible-often regionally rare species (also see final recommendations below).

Graves as Composting Machines
In addition to using good restoration science and conservation biology in site selection, infrastructure development and visitor management, we also worried about returning the nutrients of the body to the living layer. We ultimately came up with two techniques that probably help in this regard: one regarding depth and another involving aeration, promoting roots and mycorrhizza.

I must admit that our efforts have been less than rigorous, and I should thank Lee and her mushroom suit for pushing me to think a little harder about what more we can do and what sort of research is possible and helpful.

Again, this sort of research should be done in various sites. I suspect that we do not have much of an adipocere issue at Ramsey Creek despite our heavy clay soils. Lakes in our part of the world inundated 10s of thousands of acres, and a large number of graves were moved-in many cases, what was actually moved was a layer of dark, organic earth.

What We Have Been Doing Until Now
In the late 90s, when we were contemplating how to make conservation burial as green as possible, we considered items like depth of the graves, maintaining soil horizons, placement in the landscape, and mycorhhiza.

If the idea is for the nutrients of the body to return to the living plant layer, I reasoned that mycorhrizza would play an important role. I saw an article in an ecological restoration journal that emphasized the importance of pioneer tree species in restoring mining sites. These trees, including locusts, would enrich the soil, but their roots would also create macropores for better water and nutrient flow, and would introduce mycorrhiza that are key players in nutrient and water transport for future generations of trees.

When we dug graves (deeper at that point than now), it seemed that it would take quite a while for roots to reach the level of the body, and were concerned that the longer it took the more nutrients might filter downwards. I came up with the idea of burial sticks. Not all that sexy, but free (maybe if I had called them Grave Stix, and sold them for 10 dollars each, it would have made headlines). The idea is to collect downed limbs from the forest floor-ideally those that had been down a couple of years and were beginning to rot. Presumably, these limbs were pretty heavily impregnated with spores from the fruiting bodies of mycorrhiza (mushrooms), and would be likely to decompose faster-providing rapid access to new roots.

Some of the fungi spores would presumably be the same fungi that were already working with the trees and bushes in the forest (although we honestly do not know whether viable spores are there—it could be mostly saprophytic fungi). The sticks are placed vertically at various angles as we cover the grave., in contact with the wooden casket, shroud, etc. We have never tested the proposition, but imagined it would be possible to devise an experiment to test the hypothesis using a test animal, but it made sense and we believe it does help the nutrient flow go in the right direction.

We also hypothesized that in projects that involved abandoned plowed land or mining sites, it would be wise to collect sticks from a variety of locations in the region (and inoculate the roots of grave plantings in a “tea” made with a small amount of duff from a healthy location).

As we started to hand dig more graves, I noticed that while some tree roots extended down very deep, they were rare below 4 feet in our woodland areas. I was aware that some prairie plant roots went considerably deeper. Later I found research showing depth of roots is both species and site specific.

And, as mentioned, a deep, wide and long grave means moving a lot of dirt, which costs more in labor and creates a crush problem (unless the dirt is raised on cement block piers, plywood and tarps). After my first excavation (6 feet deep, 8 feet long and 4 feet wide), I proudly showed Kimberley—who told me it looked “like Verdun in bloody WWI”.

Consequently, we began to dig shallower, narrower and shorter graves. We were also introducing organic material in the form of pine straw and flowers-more for decoration, but the pine straw also was likely to contain fungi spores, bacteria, etc.

As it turns out, macro-pores like the ones we were creating with Burial Stix do have a major ecological role in most forested environments. A US Forest Service white paper from 1971 notes that in Ohio forests, an acre of forest would have some 4,000 dead-root macropores, and that these channels play an important role in water and nutrient transport, new root and importantly for our concerns, aeration.

More recently, In Trees, Crops and Soil Fertility (2003) Grimaldi, et. al. wrote:
“The relatively large macropores resulting from root growth can play an important role in soil aeration and rapid macropore flow of water though the soil. In addition, old root channels are often used by new roots which thereby avoid the mechanical resistance of the soil matrix and may profit from the more favorable chemical environment provided by the root debris.”

So the bottom line is that Grave Stix probably work- by aerating the soil, and promoting new root growth and consequent mycorrhizzal associations to utilize the nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients in the body.

We know from forensic taphonomy research that depth also matters, as does the decorative vegetative matter we placed in the grave. The vegetative matter helps by providing some carbon to balance the high nitrogen during body decay, by providing some extra air-space, by insulating the body in colder conditions, by wicking some of the liquid away from the body and by providing additional organisms to assist in composting the body.

How Can We Improve and Verify Improvements for Green Burial: Recommendations and Some Crazy Ideas of My Own
Depth. At RCP, we go down only about 3-3.5 feet. Since we do not haul any dirt away, the mound provides additional depth at least in the center of the grave. Less depth than that, and we could run into odor issues and animal disturbance. We have never had an issue in the last 18 years, and have wild hogs, coyotes  and the occasional bear passing through the property.

One idea to avoid animal problems would be to include a biodegradable barrier of some sort (particularly for shroud burials) such as netting made from hemp rope, etc. Perhaps some sort of accelerant (see below) could narrow the window when odors could be an issue.
 
Preparing the Grave
We recommend lining the bottom of the grave with pine-straw, old leaves, or other material. This not only softens the appearance, it provides air space under the body/casket. We also leave wooden “chocks” to keep the casket above the actual ground level.

We no longer cut all of the roots from the side of the grave (some guests seem to be freaked out by lots of dangly roots). Larger roots can be unsightly and could interfere with lowering, but medium and small roots can be pinned down with “U” shaped pins readily available from Forestry Suppliers and other on-line providers. During closing, these can be released.

Burial vessels: design, accelerants, oxygen enhancers
In general, caskets should be readily biodegradable, and should not have sealed joints. We now recommend that some sort of vegetative material be inside the casket as well (based on findings in German dis-interments).

Oxygen Enhancement
One idea (certainly not ready for prime time) would be to investigate if certain materials can retain oxygen to help accelerate decomposition, particularly for very obese individuals (prone to adiopocere) and in areas or at times of year when adiopocere is a concern. Carbonized chicken feathers form nanotubes that are being investigated for hydrogen and oxygen storage (https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/june/feather-fibers-fluff-up-hydrogen-storage-capacity.html). This process does require energy input, but might be created using green energy. If we could double or triple the amount of oxygen in a casket, it would probably be enough even in adipocere prone situations. Avoiding adipocere might require only a small amount of carbonized feathers, but it might be that other more pedestrian materials could suffice.

I contacted a professor of materials science at Clemson University to ask whether we might use recycled clothing, mulch or other materials to hold onto oxygen. He never got back to me, even though I admitted in my email that my question might seem bizarre. Maybe he thought someone was playing a prank, or that I was a mass murderer trying to dispose of bodies quickly.

Despite the lack of help from material scientists, medical literature supports the idea that the clothing fabric of those using supplemental oxygen accumulates the gas, and that consequently the risk of fire persists for a good while even after the oxygen is turned off (it is recommended that oxygen be used only in well ventilated areas). It would be interesting to see which materials (organic of course) are best: tightly woven or loose, fuzzy. Intuitively, loose fuzzy seems more likely, but maybe the tight weave has more cotton-fiber/oxygen interface. All would be cut into strips to create a fluffy effect. It might not be a good idea to cover the body in cloth, since this could actually impair gas exchange, but if the material is oxygen charged, who knows.

Dried pine-straw is also known to absorb gasses (and fluids), and as we mentioned above, could be a source for organisms to speed the reduction of the dead.

While not air-tight, the casket could have a port on the side, and near the bottom to “charge” the casket with oxygen from a portable tank (oxygen generators are not terribly expensive), after the lid is closed and immediately prior to burial.

Other Amendments
Apparently lime does not speed decay, and in some cases could slow it: http://archlab.uindy.edu/documents/theses/ThewHAAbstract.pdf.

The addition of some sort of organism mix could be helpful, but it would need a fair amount of research, and could also be site specific. I am pretty sure this will not include wood fungus, not to beat a dead mushroom suit.

Casket Modification
In addition to the “oxygen casket” above, another (and perhaps simpler) way to aerate the casket is to follow the example mentioned in the German paper on adipocere. In that example, caskets that were accidentally perforated by tombstone anchors did not have adipocere.

It would be easy enough to make a casket with several predrilled holes-perhaps 10 cm in diameter, the holes could be covered with decorative paper; burial sticks would perforate them during grave closing.

Shroud Burial
One of the more surprising things in the forensic taphonomy literature was the fact that bodies buried directly into the ground can actually decompose at a slower rate than bodies interred in a casket, probably related to oxygen availability.

We would suggest a couple of modifications including elevation of the shrouded body at least several inches off the bottom of the grave using chocks and a narrow back-board (this can be recycled wood, or even a recycled corrugated cardboard “plank”, with built in piers (this would be cheap to manufacture). Vegetation such as straw or other materials would be under and around this structure, which could also be used to facilitate lowering. We already use the recycled wood/chock method, having tried a disposable lowering sling earlier.

Bulky material such as green pine bows could cover the shrouded body (that is lying in a bed of vegetative material), providing some extra air-space, along with the burial sticks.

An inexpensive cardboard covering engineered to hold off the dirt for a very limited time (dome shaped, maybe providing 25 cm of air space) would also add very little to the cost.

Need for Experiments
I know at least one provider is experimenting with road kills and pigs to test his ideas. One problem for burials is that bodies (animal or human) that have been killed traumatically generally decompose quicker, as open wounds admit oxygen and allow fluid flux. Also, the longer a body has been exposed to the elements (especially in warmer months), the faster subsequent in-grave decomposition. Road killed animals are also generally very lean, and unlikely to get adipocere anyway. So road-kill experiments might not give translatable results.

I think we need more trials, perhaps in concert with universities, particularly in areas and in situations that we can expect adipocere (cold, wet climates, and heavy clay soils, and given obese subjects in particular). One size will not fit all, though. I do not think we can develop a magic potion that ensures prompt recycling everywhere.

Grave Closing Techniques.
Sorry if this is out of order—forgot it until last second. In our heavy clay, we have often “stomped down” the fill on the sides of a casket to avoid identifiable “sink-lines” (the soil over the casket does not sink as much as does soil on the sides). I now believe this to be a mistake, especially with adipocere prone heavy clay soils. The unpacked soil is very likely to host more oxygen, and serve as a sink for purging liquid.

Incorporating grave sticks is probably a good idea in most soils. It is something that client families should be aware of, since it looks a bit bizarre to the uninitiated. We also recommend that the sticks be held in some type of decorative/ceremonial carrier-perhaps a made out of woven rope, rather than creating a disorderly pile of old half-rotten limbs and sticks. While we have always kept layers strictly in order (sub-soil, top soil, “duff”/organic layer), including some organic material (leaves, straw, etc.) while closing the subsoil material to create a “17 layer cake” effect could help with oxygen and with beneficial organisms.

Selecting the right cover vegetation is also important. While some shallow rooted vegetation might be ecologically good, if we want to mobilize nutrients, be important to have some species that could be expected to develop roots down to the level of the body.

OK, Sorry if that was a bit technical. You can take out the toothpicks that are propping your eyes open.