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Bodies are placed into the ground in simple pine or cardboard phentermine prescription line that will quickly decompose, and some people choose to be buried in nothing more than a white cotton shroud or a beloved family quilt. There are no vaults. Grave markers consist of small, flat stones natural to the area. And the money spent on the plot about $2,000 at the South Carolina cemetery helps fund a land trust that will forever keep the area pristine as well as replant native trees and vegetation around the grave site. "Through this kind of burial, people have a real opportunity to be part of the healing of the land," said Campbell's wife, Kimberley, who oversees much of the day to day operation of Ramsey Creek Preserve, the burial grounds the couple started in Westminster, S.C. "In the U.S., so often we think of nature as a place of recreation. But this concept is a way to connect people to the land through tradition and ritual, and there are few traditions and rituals more important to us as those that surround death." Taking off quickly Indeed, "green" cemeteries have taken off quickly in the decade since Campbell's cemetery opened. In recent years, similar ones have opened in California, Florida, Texas, New York, Washington and Maine. Three more are in the works, in Maine, New Mexico and Georgia. And in response to growing demand, many traditional cemeteries throughout the country are considering devoting portions of their land to burials where remains are not embalmed and vaults are not used. John Bucci, a Wisconsin funeral director who serves southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, said he is beginning to see the green burial trend creep into the Midwest. A prominent Milwaukee cemetery recently converted a significant portion of its acreage to a green cemetery and has returned the land to its original wooded condition. Bucci has yet to find a cemetery in Illinois that has gone so far but says he hopes that some will begin to respond to the growing demand. "What happened 30 years ago with the rise in cremation could eventually happen with green burials," said Joe Sehee, executive director of the Green Burial Council. "People like the idea of their burial being part of a national conservation strategy.... They want their last act to be meaningful, something that heals the land and the soul and connects them to something bigger and longer lasting than a coffin or an insurance policy." Funeral directors cite problems But green burials also have downsides, mainstream funeral directors contend. They say that makeup application, often used to make the deceased look better after long illnesses, is difficult without embalming. They worry that doing viewings quickly usually within 24 to 48 hours to beat any decomposition is sometimes too fast for grieving families. They say that digging graves in some parts of the country can be next to impossible for weeks on end in winter, but that unembalmed bodies should not be kept unburied for that long. And they assert that embalming cuts down on the risk, however small, of disease transmission from buried corpses. "Embalming is the technical side of what we do," said funeral director Bucci. "For many of us it's been very hard to hear from the green movement that they believe there is not only no value but actual harm in what we do." Proponents of green burial counter all that. They say most cultures view their dead quickly and without trauma with no embalming. They say the simple burials often are healing for families because they can dig the graves by hand, build the phentermine prescription line with locally found wood and lower the body into the ground themselves. Greensprings, a green cemetery in upstate New York, has a ground warmer that can be used to soften frozen earth for digging in the winter. And advocates say that only in the rarest of circumstances would disease transmission be a concern. "A lot of the public is completely confused about what is or isn't allowed when it comes to burial," said Mark Harris, the author of "Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial." "They believe embalming is required, when in fact that is almost never the case in any state in the nation. Look at Jewish burials, for example: They do not embalm, and that's absolutely legal everywhere." Environmentalists have long been critical of the funeral industry in the U.S. Cemeteries often are on ground cleared of trees for a new forest of marble headstones. Critics, including Harris and the Green Burial Council, say that nearly a million gallons of toxic embalming fluid is buried in cemetery ground every year, a potential risk to groundwater supplies. They further charge that enough metal goes into the production of phentermine prescription line and burial vaults each year to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge and that enough concrete is used on vaults to build a two lane road from New York to Detroit. Return to old ways So proponents of green burials advocate burying the nation's dead the way people were buried for centuries, until the 1900s when embalming became popular in the U.S. and Canada. (In virtually no other part of the world is embalming with formaldehyde used as frequently as it is in North America.) They urge embracing the decomposition of the body and what it gives back to the environment rather than fighting the inevitable. ... phentermine prescription line