Eco-friendly burials: a means to a green end

Another Life: Bracken is curling on the ditch, autumn creeping through its fronds in a filigree elegance that attends the fern especially well at death. Looking at our crowded acre, almost submerged in trees, it's hard to credit the imminence of so much leaf-fall, the slow sift of biomass back to the earth, the winter's imperceptible disposal of it all. A thousand forms of life dismantle the cells into their molecules, ready for reassembly in the spring.

Never have we been so aware that this is what makes the world go round, that nature generates no waste it can't reuse: only human industry makes things that won't decay. "Recycling" is now a slogan and its repetition reminds us not only that manufactured matter need not always be wasted, that much can usefully be sent through the mills again, but also of Earth's annual engineering of renewal.

Rather than hope for some metaphysical hereafter, many people are cheerfully content to surrender their substance to this Gaian continuity.

Or, as a flier for an upcoming conference in Dublin puts it: "Have you thought of joining the food chain as perfect compost, with your spirit re-emerging in the Dawn Chorus from the throat of a well-fed song bird?" It is possible to trust that conventional burial eventually serves something like this end. That is best imagined in an old village graveyard, where well-spaced, wonky limestone slabs bear a good growth of lichens and mosses under the sycamore trees. In a fast-filling county council plot, with room for neither trees nor birds along its polished aisles, there is little to speak of natural growth. Besides, booking a space here is to succumb to established rituals and styles of interment, none of which may be comfortable to unaligned and do-it-yourself spirits.

Hence "Bury Me Green", Ireland's first "natural burial" conference, to be held in Cultivate - Dublin's Temple Bar centre for alternative living - on October 16th. Its initiator is Judith Hoad, a herbalist and writer who lives on a hillside in Co Donegal. Nearby, her late husband Jerry, a fine painter and a lovely man, lies buried beneath the apple trees they planted together.

Sorting out the practical formalities of his burial, mainly to keep the local health inspector happy, helped to set Judith forth on her current campaign.

More than 200 natural burial grounds already exist in England and Wales, and a few are even owned by local authorities. Common to them all is environmentally-friendly burial (no harmful additives or preservatives) and the absence of monumental markers other than trees or wildflowers. As for ritual or celebration, there's usually a ceremony hall for whatever the deceased prescribed in advance or now feels right to relatives and friends.

Essential, of course, is a biodegradable coffin. The late pope's cypress chest impressed many with its simplicity, a plain wooden box at the heart of a medieval pageant, but it was never going to end up in the ground. Judith Hoad promotes the Ecopod, designed by Hazel Selene, a lightweight shell of cellulose fibre inspired, I feel sure, by the incomparably snug comfort of the broad bean. She also offers highly portable caskets woven to size by Linda Scott from willow-wands nourished by the Co Mayo rain. You could live with these for years as handsome blanket-chests, thus lessening the strangeness of departure.

Who will provide land for the burial groves? Mrs Hoad and her committee hope to tempt farmers looking to diversify their set-aside hectares: a farmer from Britain and an Irish planner are among the conference speakers. Members of the Woodland League and Irish Wildlife Trust will also offer notions. Trevor Sargent, leader of the Green Party, is scheduled to open the conference, braving any bad jokes about votes in graveyards.

Quite where all this leaves my own plans I'm not sure. "You want your ashes to swirl along the strand at Thallabawn," mused Michael Longley in a generous poem, "among clockwork, approachable/ Circumambulatory sanderlings, crab shells,/ Bladderwrack, phosphorescence at spring tide . . . " Well yes, all that, but it's not so environmentally friendly, is it, when you count in the diesel for the hearse to Dublin, the fuel for the fiery furnace and all the smoke? Even those who prefer to keep their molecules within an "eco-friendly biodegradable urn . . . overlaid with moss green, handmade paper" will need to weigh up their impact on the atmosphere.

Bean pod or basket - it's the cheerful, ecological thought that counts.

For conference details, contact 086-8104359 or 0749-736406; e-mail judithlivingearthhoad@hotmail.com