Nearer My Sod to Thee

When it came time to bury his dad, Billy Campbell wanted a plain pine box -- no frills, no satin lining, no filigree. But the only wood casket at his local mortuary was a varnished beauty of Spanish oak that would have been suitable for the leader of a small republic. The funeral director pointed out it was the same model used by Dan Blocker -- Hoss, of the old "Bonanza" television series -- but to Campbell that was cold comfort.

An environmental activist and a small-town South Carolina physician, Campbell is a big believer in simplicity. To him, "dust to dust" does not include formaldehyde injections, fancy monuments or marble-finished burial vaults guaranteed to protect the deceased from dirt and moisture for a century or more. He had hoped his furniture-dealer father could simply become part of the earth instead of being gussied up as if to attend "the great sales meeting in the sky," he said.

Eighteen years later, Billy Campbell is at the vanguard of the tiny but growing "green burial" movement in the U.S. He is also the inspiration for a Los Angeles cemetery entrepreneur who is planning a nature-friendly burial ground that will be a haven for hikers as well as a home for those who have taken their final step.

The entrepreneur, Tyler Cassity, is the head of Forever Enterprises, which runs Hollywood Forever Memorial Park, the resting place for such film legends as Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power. His company owns seven other cemeteries, as well as a unit that does video biographies of the deceased for display in cemetery kiosks.

Cassity has purchased a suburban San Francisco cemetery with 20 pristine, wooded acres that will remain just that, even after graves are dug amid the trees. There will be no emerald-green lawn with row after lock-step row of white monuments. New arrivals will not be embalmed. Some could be planted sans casket.

In a multiple use never envisioned by the U.S. Forest Service, hikers will meander down woodsy trails as the less fortunate come to the end of theirs. With the deal just recently concluded, Cassity plans to open his green-burial ground next year.

Such cemeteries could give the dead a way of making a statement from the grave. Cassity sees them as prototypes for larger natural cemeteries in Southern California, where land preserved for the dead could be protected from suburban sprawl.