WESTMINSTER, S.C. - Dr. Billy Campbell hopes to do for cemeteries what others did for ice cream: take a familiar product, give it a social conscience and sell it to the save-the-planet crowd.
"We want to be the Ben & Jerry's of death," Campbell said the other day, smiling from behind his desk in this blue-collar town of 2,700. He is only half-joking.
Down the road is his prototype, 32 acres of sloping woods that Campbell advertises as the country's first "green" cemetery.
The bodies at Ramsey Creek Preserve are laid to rest beneath clusters of dogwood and oak and across meadows of wildflowers. Nature trails mosey through the trees. Graves are marked, if at all, with geologically correct stones so flat they disappear among the grasses.
Memorial Ecosystems Inc., Campbell's company, forbids embalming fluids, vaults or grave liners - they slow natural decomposition and pollute the earth, he says. Instead, bodies are buried in shrouds or in caskets made of cardboard or nonendangered wood. The watchword is biodegradable.
A cemetery brochure opens with a gentle reminder from the Book of Genesis about ashes and dust. If that doesn't move customers, there are secular quotations from the likes of Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman and Shakespeare. Five percent of the cemetery's gross receipts goes to a nonprofit foundation that fights water pollution.
Campbell, a 46-year-old physician, sees graying baby boomers as the chief market for Ramsey Creek and for franchises he hopes to open across the country. Green cemeteries, he says, are a new frontier for land conservation. They preserve large tracts from development with money from people unlikely to contribute to groups such as the Nature Conservancy but willing to pay a couple grand, he says, to "bury Momma."
And like a certain pair of shaggy-haired men from Vermont, he glimpses another shade of green. "Maybe we can make money," he says, "by convincing yuppies that this is a Zen Buddhist experience."
But there are snags. For one, not many yuppies live in Westminster, a town of mill workers, Confederate flag-flying pickup trucks and storefront "faith worship centers." It sits snugly in the state's northwest corner, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a few miles from where the movie Deliverance was filmed.
The only real tourist draw is a yearly apple festival, though no apples grow in the town.
When Campbell opened the cemetery in September 1998, rumors swept through the streets with the same din as the Southern Crescent trains that rumble past Main Street.
"People really had this idea," Campbell recalls, "that we were throwing bodies into the creek, like this was the Ganges or something."
Public relations weren't helped much when his brother nicknamed the place Buzzard Acres. A woman in town called to complain that rotting bodies would turn the creek into "old dead man soup."
None of this surprises Vera M. Duke, the town's 80-year-old mayor. She plans to meet her maker the old-fashioned way.
"To be quite honest with you," she says, "people in this town go for the old methods. They like to go and sit in the funeral home for two hours, and everybody brings food, and they have a big funeral after the wake.
"I don't believe local people have accepted it as well as people from a distance."
Jackie Smith, a waitress at Waters, a diner, was blunter. "The one who buries people in cardboard boxes? Oh, my God, the man's a lunatic!"
The town's only doctor
Campbell grew up in Westminster. His mother runs a furniture store here. But he went to college in Atlanta and to medical school in Charleston and came back different.
He wears a gold hoop earring, reads The Whole Earth Catalog and plays Grateful Dead CDs in his sputtering two-tone 1956 Chevy. One reason he gets away with it might be that he is Westminster's only doctor.
"In a small town, if you're not going down to the front of a Baptist church and rededicating your life to Christ at least once a month, you're a little different," he says. "It doesn't bug me."
The woodland burial movement, as some call it, has taken off in the United Kingdom. About 140 eco-cemeteries have sprung up since the first opened nearly a decade ago. They range from elegantly landscaped parklands with swipe-card entry systems to farm fields where sheep resume grazing after the hearses leave.
But it has yet to take root in the United States. Land for traditional burials remains plentiful, experts say, and the viewing of embalmed bodies at wakes is a cultural fixture. Advocates for green burials also blame the U.S. funeral home industry, which profits from casket sales and has powerful lobbies in state capitals and Washington.
While some rural families and neopagan groups perform green burials on their land, Ramsey Creek Preserve appears to be the only secular commercial operation marketed to the public at large.
Academics and other experts on U.S. burial rituals say green cemeteries are unlikely to find takers beyond a narrow band of Americans - the kind who belong to environmental groups and buy organic goods in health food stores.
"I don't think Americans are going to change overnight from saying, 'Yes, I want a concrete vault and a copper casket with gasketed lid,' to saying, 'OK, never mind, I just want a refrigerator box,"' says Susan K. Simon, editor of The Funeral Monitor, an independent newsletter based in Monterey, Calif.
"It's probably not any more telling of what's to come than the rise of companies that offer reef burials of cremated remains under the sea or that blast cremated remains into the universe," she said, alluding to a company that rocketed the ashes of LSD-dropping author Timothy Leary into space in 1997.
Gary M. Laderman, professor of American religious history at Emory University, sees a small niche among baby boomers. Their conservationist leanings, he says, are behind a sharp increase in cremation over the past two decades.
"You see a larger percentage of people who want to resist tradition and are interested more in customizing burials to match the ideals of the deceased or their own ideals," says Laderman, whose book Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in 20th-Century America is to be published by Oxford University Press in January.
Campbell started mulling over the idea for his cemetery after his father died in 1985. He spent $5,000 on the burial and was left cold by the funeral director's hard sell and by the caked-on makeup, which gave his father an artificial look.
Ramsey Creek's charge for a complete green funeral and burial is $2,500 to $3,000, about half what the National Funeral Directors Association says is the national average for traditional services. Fourteen people have been buried at Ramsey Creek, and 20 more have bought plots.
Sales have fallen short of expectations, and a collaboration with the Nature Conservancy to start a similar cemetery in San Diego two years ago collapsed after a public backlash. The company is making money, but it won't turn a profit before next year. "A lot of it was naivete on our part," says Kimberley Campbell, who runs Ramsey Creek with her husband. "We thought everybody would absolutely love it - that we'd sell 300 places immediately. But you really have to sell this."
Suzanne Turton, 37, a stay-at-home mother from the nearby town of Seneca, says she chose Ramsey Creek for her stillborn daughter because its natural setting made her feel close to God. Olivia Hope Turton is buried in the woods, above a shallow stretch of the creek that the family calls Hope Shoals.
"We go to Hope Shoals and throw rocks in and love to watch the leaves changing in the season," Turton says. "We thank God for the setting because it really helped in the healing."
Lee Lampe, 77, a retired schoolteacher from Seneca, decided to bury her husband, Ivan, there because it seemed in tune with the way he tended their garden. "He planted things higgledy-piggledy - he never had straight rows," she says. "He liked things left to nature.
"Why should a dead person lie in a very elaborate box that's satin and velvet?"
Sacrificing ideals
Campbell has had to sacrifice some of his ideals to the realities of the market. He has set aside flat terrain for people who didn't want to be buried in the woods. He has abandoned his idea for a pavilion modeled on Stonehenge in favor of a more "culturally accessible" old church he moved to the site.
And though he first wanted no grave markers of any kind, he has since sanctioned the use of native stones. He eventually wants handheld global positioning devices to guide visitors to graves.
"Billy first thought that his market would be college-educated, tree-hugger, fern-sniffers from the cities," says John A. Wilkerson, a farmer in the Florida Panhandle who has sought Campbell's help with a green cemetery Wilkerson plans to open on his farm this year.
"But most of his paying customers are overall-wearing Southern Baptists from local areas who sincerely believe in ashes to ashes and dust to dust."