Portlanders shall rest in green peace

River View Cemetery opens its grounds to the natural option

By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Jul 8, 2010, Updated Jul 16, 2010 (2 Reader comments)

Anyone buying a plot at the River View Cemetery can be buried without a concrete vault, without embalming and without a casket, says Executive Director David Noble.

Jeffrey Basinger / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Long a haven for green living, Portland is becoming a haven for green dying as well.

Southwest Portland’s River View Cemetery, a final resting place for many of the city’s elite, has agreed to allow “natural burial” throughout its grounds. Starting June 24, anyone buying a plot can be buried without a concrete vault, without embalming and, if they choose, without a casket, says David Noble, the cemetery’s executive director.

It’s the most significant step in the nation to advance the use of natural burial, says Cynthia Beal, founder of The Natural Burial Co. in Eugene, which sells biodegradable caskets and offers consulting services.

Other cemeteries around the country have designated small areas for natural burials, or are creating new green burial grounds in pristine undeveloped areas, Beal says. “River View is saying ‘we can do it cemetery-wide.’ That’s huge. It’s maximizing access to a natural option, immediately.”

With 2.5 million Americans dying each year, she says, it’s unrealistic, and a waste of land and resources, to presume that a good portion of them could or should be buried in newly created cemeteries, especially when there’s surplus land available at existing facilities.

The nonprofit River View Cemetery already offered traditional burial, cremation, and indoor and outdoor mausoleums. “We offer most everything anyone would ever want, not that anyone ever wants to do business with us,” Noble says.

But, this being Portland, more and more people asked if the cemetery could accommodate natural burials as well, says Noble, who has been studying the idea for two to three years.

Natural burials can save from several hundred dollars up to $1,000, he says. They also eliminate the need for concrete and steel vaults, hardwood caskets and formaldehyde and other embalming chemicals.

Cremation cuts revenue

River View sees it as a good environmental and business move. The number of people choosing cremation over burial has grown over the past century, Noble says. In 1973, when he entered the business, 8 percent of people chose cremation; now it’s up to 68 percent in Oregon.

Under current projections, River View has a 400-year supply of burial sites.

Cremation costs about one-fourth or one-fifth the price of a traditional burial, Noble says. However, it’s not so environmentally friendly, requiring a tremendous amount of energy and polluting the air with mercury and other contaminants.

Even though River View is a nonprofit, it needs money from current operations to pay for upkeep of the lawns and monuments of the 60,000 people buried there and the 15,000 whose cremated remains are stored in mausoleums.

River View, which sees natural burials as a wave of the future, adopted a three-pronged strategy, starting by allowing natural burials in any vacant site except for steep slopes. In coming months, it will designate a quarter-acre natural burial section, which could hold 250 plots. That area wouldn’t be mowed like the rest of the cemetery, so there’d be no use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Caskets would be restricted to those made of biodegradable materials. Grave markers might be engraved indigenous rocks, Noble says.

Later, the 350-acre cemetery plans to use some of its 150 undeveloped acres next to Lewis & Clark College as forested burial grounds. That will resemble a scenic open space more than a cemetery. The hilly site, now separated from the main cemetery by gullies, may be the largest undeveloped property in Portland, Noble says.

Sites tell city history

Strolling through River View is like studying a map of Portland. Buried at the grave sites are members of the Couch, Flanders, Glisan, Hoyt, Ladd, Terwilliger, Failing and Corbett families. Six former Oregon governors are buried there. So are business icons Simon Benson, Henry Weinhard and Henry Pittock.

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