Proposed conservation area would bring you closer to nature — and to the dead

Climb into this section of woods overlooking Nova Scotia's St. Margarets Bay, step past an aging pear tree, through the mud and moss and tangles of exposed spruce roots, and there finally emerges a gentle slope thinly dotted with yellow birch. 

It is to here, or to other small pockets between the trees, that friends and families will one day carry the bodies of their loved ones to bury them in shallow graves, flesh and bone to be consumed by the earth of a thriving forest.

"It's not new, it's going back to the way things were," said Ray Mattholie, who lives in the area.

"For the loved ones coming to visit, it's beautiful, it's a walk in the woods, with the chance to stop where they know their loved one is and to reflect and remember."

That is the vision, at least, of Mattholie and a small group of volunteers who want to turn 11 hectares of land behind St. Paul's Anglican Church in French Village, N.S., into a conservation site with an intriguing side act — it will double as a burial ground.

In short, little cemeteries in the woods.

The push is part of a broader movement that's fairly new in Canada, but more common in other parts of the world, of rethinking typical Western Christian burials from an environmental perspective.

Instead of chemical embalming, steel-lined caskets made of foreign wood and grave markers crafted from imported stone, "green burials" aim to lessen the environmental footprint, with bodies wrapped simply in linen or placed in locally made pine boxes.

But the plan for St. Paul's also reflects a deeper discussion on grief: that cemeteries don't need to be places that people avoid, but can instead be destinations for a day out, where families can bathe in the sunlight twinkling through the leaves, and children can play and explore.

"We tend now to try and hide death," said Louisa Horne, who is from a United Church background and is helping with the volunteer effort at St. Paul's. "But yet it's an important part of our lives."

Natural burial grounds have been part of the landscape in the United Kingdom since at least the 1990s. They are also sprouting up in the United States. One, outside Pittsburgh, has a petting zoo.

Mattholie, who is a member of St. Paul's church and vice-president of the Green Burial Society of Canada, recalls visiting a natural burial site in Wales that was a sheep pasture. Only GPS co-ordinates noted the locations of graves.

In Canada, including in Nova Scotia, a growing number of cemeteries have set aside areas for green burials. Sunrise Park Inter-Faith Cemetery, in Hatchet Lake outside Halifax, is certified through the Green Burial Society of Canada. Two cemeteries run by the Halifax Regional Municipality allow green burials.

But what is planned for the two-kilometre stretch of land behind St. Paul's is something that is still fairly unusual in Canada — burial sites tucked away in the forest.