Photo by John Pereles
Greenwood Cemetery
The cost of dying in America, with its expectations of elaborate caskets and embalming, is counted not only in funeral bills. The panoply surrounding funerals can also have an environmental impact from burying toxins and non-biodegradables along with the deceased. In the 20th century the funeral industry erected roadblocks to that ancient idea of dust to dust—the body returning to the Earth. This century has seen a pushback in the form of “green burials.”
The appropriately named Greenwood Cemetery (2615 W. Cleveland Ave.) was the first Wisconsin burial ground certified by the national Green Burial Council (albeit not the first to offer green options) and remains the state’s only Jewish cemetery so certified. Green burials can assume many forms to conserve natural resources and shrink the carbon footprint. At Greenwood it takes the form of burial in the Prairie Green section of the cemetery.
“We used to call this the ‘Back 40,’” says John Pereles, president of Greenwood’s board of directors. We are walking together through the park-like setting adorned with cenotaphs and other monuments dating from the late 1800s. Until a few years ago, when members of the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis asked the cemetery to consider introducing green options, Prairie Green was an unkept, overgrown and unused patch of ground at the rear of Greenwood’s property. Working with Marek Landscaping, Greenwood replanted the acreage with wildflowers and prairie grass. The gravesites are overgrown after burial with natural vegetation.
How then to find the grave of your loved one as years go by? Greenwood keeps the GPS coordinates of each burial site, allowing you to hike through the tall grass to the exact location. Or you can just visit the “naming boulder,” a large stone surface at the edge of Prairie Green engraved with the names, dates and epitaphs of everyone buried in Prairie Green. It’s a convenient place to set a stone in honor of the dead.
“There is no burial vault and the casket has to be biodegradable,” Pereles says, explaining Greenwood’s green burial specifications. “There can be no metal and no embalming fluid. What you’re buried in must be biodegradable and goes back to the Earth.”
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Many of the expenses of “traditional” American burials remain, but the cost of etching names and dates on the community naming boulder is less than laying an individual headstone and a green coffin is just plain wood. The larger benefit of going green is the thought of doing something, however small, to restore the soundness of our environment.
