Unfortunately modern cemeteries all too often destroy natural landscapes and chew up valuable open space: creating fertilized and herbicided, environments with dense interments and plastic flowers. A tremendous amount of money goes into expensive “leak-proof” caskets, vaults and mausoleum crypts, and to “perpetual care”.

The average cost of funeral, burial space, casket and vault is now exceeding $5,000, and can go considerably higher.

In our parks, a significant part of the burial space expense goes to purchasing, restoring and maintaining real nature parks. Burials and ashes scatterings occur in these parks, but the interments must be natural, “dust to dust” burials (see related article on natural burials): no toxic embalming fluids, no vaults, and only biodegradable caskets.

Because these are often the very expensive items, the total funeral costs for burial at Memorial Ecosystems parks are much less expensive than current averages.

Because the total number of burials is strictly limited, far fewer interments occur than at usual memorial parks.

In addition, there is a grass-roots reaction to the centralization and skyrocketing costs of burials. Industrial boards which set legislative policies ("laws") are composed of members of the consolidated industry itself, giving these few individuals power to set regulations to A) keep their profits (your costs) as high as they can and B) prevent anyone from challenging "A". Not only are the inmates running the asylum, but they are setting laws for those on the outside!

In our grandfather's era, no such intervention was expected, or even permitted. The deceased was dressed for viewing, usually in the home where the services were also usually held, and then off to burial. Care for the departed remained with those he or she loved in life. This caretaking may also have assisted in grieving as it provided an involving and proactive way to say goodbyes. It has been so for hundreds of thousands of years of human history... except for the last century.

We now have an industrial machine which has by its own admission consolidated in preparation for the huge profits it believes will come with the passing of the baby boomer generation. An industry that has turned death into a sanitized and intellectualized service, rather than a reality as natural as the birth that preceeded it.

Weather these caskets will involve a burial or no, is entirely up to you. Please check your local laws... your local group of funeral directors may have made it illegal to bury your own dead without their embalming, metal caskets, hearses, floral arrangements, service kickbacks, concrete vaults, and all the rest of it that makes for such lucrative trade in death.

- John Bottomley, with the first part of this letter gratefully copied from memorialecosystems.com.