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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.
Billy, who was born and raised in Westminster, is the town's only doctor.
The Campbells live there with their 12-year-old daughter, Raven. The family has two dogs and four cats.
Among the many books in their house are dozens Billy bought on visits to the Clemson University bookstore, 18 miles away, when Kimberly worked there. Kimberly, now 42, said it took the young physician three years to get up the nerve to ask her for a date.
Kimberly, a native of England, does most of the day-to-day business of Memorial Ecosystems, a small company that also intends to have memorial preserves in other parts of the country. Work is under way, for example, for a preserve in San Diego.
Their Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster is not only a model for what they are trying
to accomplish but also a deeply personal place for the Campbells.
The first grave, which Billy dug by hand, contains the remains of a girl named Hope, the still-born daughter of friends of the Campbells.
The girl's brother goes there
to play in the creek, and he sees deer, turkey and other wildlife. "He has fun there," Kimberly Campbell said. "It is not a horrible place filled with bad memories."
The final resting place of the 10 people interred there bears
no tombstones, no neatly trimmed grass. Graves are discernible by the mulch put on top of the disturbed ground, or by a rock or other natural object placed there by family members.
Grave sites can be easily found, but the place looks much more like a park than a cemetery.
The Campbells think there is room for 1,500 grave sites on the 32 acres. That is far less than the usual density of cemeteries, which put 800 to 2,000 graves per acre, Kimberly Campbell said.
Density ceases to be a land-preservation issue, however, if the environment is maintained in its natural state.
Most of the people buried at the Ramsey Creek Preserve were wrapped in a shroud and lowered into the earth. A pine casket is acceptable; so is a cardboard box. The container must be biodegradable.
Embalmed bodies are not allowed because the chemicals would harm the ecosystem.
Cremated remains are allowed.
"We think cremation is the second-best thing for the environment," Billy Campbell said, "but it does involve fossil fuels. And all your nutrients get burned up rather than being recycled to help plants and trees and that sort of thing."
The people buried at Ramsey Creek Preserve have decided to quickly return to nature at a place set aside for perpetual protection. Like the 17th-century Quakers who asked that their bodies be buried in their flower gardens, they wanted to blend back into beauty.
And their grave sites are pleasant to visit.
This summer, a wedding will be held at Ramsey Creek Preserve. The bride wants the ceremony conducted in the beautiful natural setting where her grandmother is buried.
"I'm probably the only physician in the country who has written a guide to interment management," Campbell said.
The title: "Grave Concerns."
Like his wife, he has a sense
of humor that helps hold an audience.
The Campbells frequently take their green-burial-land-preservation idea on the road. I heard them 10 days ago in a suburb of Charleston when they spoke to environmental writers. They talked more about the philosophical foundation of their company than they did about the company itself.
The Campbells say they don't care if people steal their company's ideas; in fact, they want them to.
"We would really like to be known as the Platinum Card, as the people who do it and do it really well," Kimberly Campbell said during a subsequent telephone interview. "But we don't want to become a monopoly. If people can do it and do it right, then that's more land that can be saved."
"Some of the earliest cities were based around cemeteries. They were places for sacred things to happen," Billy Campbell said.
Meanwhile, during the 1800s, cemeteries in the United States and Europe were park-like places with a diversity of plants and animals.
Not until the 20th century did social customs associated with burial began traveling down the wrong path, in the opinion of the well-read Billy Campbell. That is when the funeral industry and local zoning boards and city and town councils began putting "memorial parks" off to themselves.
Now, most cemeteries have neatly arranged grave sites in a sea of well-tended green grass. There isn't much natural diversity.
"We now have zoned death away in big death parks, and they're pretty one-dimensional. Most of them are not very pleasant places to hang around," he said.
"A lot of people buried at our preserve are Southern Baptists," Kimberly Campbell said. "They are not a bunch of granola-heads like people might expect."
Some people choose a "green" burial simply because it will cost their family less than half the $7,500 or more that a traditional funeral costs, Kimberly said.
Others make that choice for themselves because they cannot stand the thought of being buried in a closed container.
Others, including hunters, make the choice because they feel a closeness with wild places.
Of course, not everyone in the funeral industry is rushing to embrace the Campbells' approach. But they do hear from funeral directors and others in the industry who say they want to work for Memorial Ecosystems if the company ever gets
to a point it can hire them.
"We are a small company with big ideas. We're just getting started," Billy Campbell said.
Part of the challenge is to help people understand that there are alternative ways of burial that not only are within the law but also reflect many long-held traditions in world history.
Billy Campbell grew up roaming the woods and running the rivers of upstate South Carolina, the southern Appalachians and coastal estuaries. During the summers of his early 20s, he would return home and work as a river guide piloting a raft on the dangerous Chauga River.
When he was a medical intern in Savannah, Campbell wrote
the first guide to canoeing the coastal rivers of Georgia. Later, in his 30s, he founded South Carolina Forest Watch, an environmental group that not only monitored the timber industry but also filed lawsuits.
Memorial Ecosystems "is one more tool to help save landscapes," he said.
Preserving nature is important to Campbell, who spends his workdays looking after the health of his patients; there is a seamlessness to his life, a deep current of caring.
The funeral business in the United States is "an $18 billion-a-year industry," he said. "If we could get 10 percent of the market share, we could provide more money for saving wild areas than the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands combined."
When I telephoned yesterday morning, Billy Campbell was with a patient. This morning, he is in Seattle addressing the annual convention of the Society for Ecological Restoration.
If you'd like more information on the Campbells' Memorial Ecosystems, visit www.memorialecosystems.com on the Web.