A tree is planted as their only marker. Relatives depart with a map showing the precise location of the grave and the knowledge their loved one's last gift to this world is to help generate a forest. Cremation accounted for 74 per cent of all funerals in B.C. last year, the highest rate in North America, says Mary Freeman, registrar of funerals and cemeteries. California and Florida are close runners-up. In Britain, cremation is under attack because more than 400,000 barely used wooden caskets go up in smoke with their occupants each year.
Environmentalists say that wastes trees and pollutes the atmosphere.
Burial locks the carbon underground and doesn't add to the greenhouse effect. While greens on this side of the Atlantic also lament the loss of trees, crematoriums are subject to emission controls and the issue of air pollution is not on anyone's radar screen, says Beatrice Olivastri, CEO for Friends of the Earth in Canada. Olivastri says green funerals are to be welcomed for shifting the focus to the hereafter and the relationship with the Earth and away from what she calls the death business. The green goodbye received a major boost from the 1997 woodland burial of the princess of Wales, which was not strictly environmentally friendly because of a lead-lined casket. This summer, the remains of Diana's step-grandmother, romance novelist Dame Barbara Cartland, were placed in a cardboard coffin and buried in the garden of her country home.