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Pushing for better burials

Not everyone wants to be buried in a cemetery. Memorial Ecosystems Inc. offers an alternative that helps preserve natural places.

Date published: 4/4/2001

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C.-- During preparations for an Earth Day celebration when Billy Campbell was in junior high school, he heard a science teacher say he wanted
to be buried in a tree planter.

The teacher said it pleased him to think that the nutrients in his bodily remains would nourish the tree.

"I thought that was the neatest thing," Campbell recently told a small group of journalists who write about environmental issues.

Now 45, Campbell is both a family doctor and a pioneer in what is known as the "green burial" movement.

He and his wife, Kimberly, formed Memorial Ecosystems Inc. in 1996. In the fall of 1998, they began burying people in their 32-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve, a hilly, wooded place with a creek dancing through it.

The purpose of their company is
to preserve natural ecosystems while offering people an alternative to burial in a traditional cemetery.

The science teacher's remark heard in adolescence prompted Campbell to think long and hard about creative, nontraditional ways of interment.

He began thinking even more seriously about the issue 15 years ago after helping plan a traditional funeral for his father, the late George Washington Campbell. Afterward, the son thought that perhaps the $5,000 the family had spent on the funeral could have been better used to buy an acre that could have been an eternal memorial to his father.

A third element of Billy Campbell's thinking stemmed from something he learned in a medical anthropology course: the Fore people of the Central Highlands of New Guinea live crowded together, but they set aside "spirit forests"--places teeming with plants and wildlife where they bury their dead.

All through his 30s, Dr. George William Campbell talked about the need for more natural cemeteries. In fact, says his wife, he raised the subject at so many dinner parties that the couple was in danger of not getting invited back anywhere.

She told him to pursue his idea or quit talking about it.

That led the couple to form Memorial Ecosystems.

Memorial Ecosystems is based in Westminster, a town of 3,200 in Oconee County in the northwestern corner of South Carolina.

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Date published: 4/4/2001