Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Community Cemetery

[carol braford (braford]

David B.,

What state are you in?  Green burials are evidently not legal in many
states.

I request that people respond to the list, not just to you personally.  The
purpose of this list is to have discussions, not to read summaries of
responses.  

We recently buried my sister in a green cemetery, which is something she
requested.  We found that there were only half a dozen of them in the US so
far, so we caravanned over a dozen people hundreds of miles.  The happy
coincidence was that the closest one to Columbus, Ohio, was near Ithaca, NY,
so several people stayed at Ecovillage of Ithaca, thanks to Liz Walker's
quick and wonderful response.  

I think this is a natural kind of thing for cohousing communities to do, and
I think it would raise the desirability of communities for many people.  It
was an amazing experience to walk through a meadow of wild flowers to bury
my sister at Green Springs, http://www.naturalburial.org, and I think people
would really appreciate not having to travel to find one of the few
cemeteries that do this.  

Carol
St. Louis 
Metro Cohousing at Culver Way
www.CulverWayCohousing.com 
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Message: 7
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 21:22:58 -0800 (PST)
From: Kibuyu <kibuyu [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: [C-L]_ Community Cemetery
To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Message-ID: <20061030052258.57585.qmail [at] web51403.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

In our community, we?re considering designating a
small part of our large open wilderness space as a
cemetery for ?green burials?  i.e. where members could
be buried in simple biodegradable coffins and without
permanent markers.  Two cutting-edge concepts there -
DIY burials without middlemen, and outside of a
cemetery, yet it appears that both are legal in our
state. 

Within our community, opinion is divided. Proponents
argue that this procedure has been the norm for most
of the world since the dawn of mankind; death is the
natural end of life and we should return our remains
to the land where we live, without consuming yet more
costly resources in our passing. Opponents say uh-oh,
even if this is legal, it will have to be disclosed
when houses are sold, and what will this do to our
property values? Will it put off prospective buyers?

Now, prospective cohousing buyers are not your average
J Doe, they are people like you and me with a fair
amount of education and tolerance and receptivity to
unconventional ideas. So I?d like to ask you this
question: 

If you were about to buy a house in a new community,
and you learned that someone had a) died in that house
and b) been buried nearby, would that affect your
decision or your perceived value of the house?

I searched your archive but could only find one short
1995 thread on the subject. Has anyone out there
first-hand experience of burying neighbors in
community land, or of trying to do so?

Feel free to reply directly to me if you don?t want to
clutter the listserve with responses, then I will
later post a single summary of feedback received, for
general interest.

Thanks, and happy Halloween! ? David B







 
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