Green Cemetery Investment

Monterey: Courtesy of pdphoto.org

If you want to preserve the land and give back to the earth, here is your recipe. It will take some work on your part but if you are the member of a group make it a group activity. In the end you and your friends get a nice green place to spread your ashes or have your ashes interred if you like.

Step one: Locate a piece of land to preserve. Someone in your group may already have a parcel they want to maintain in a natural state that really can’t be used or developed anyway. Perhaps they see the need for more land to stay wooded to help with the environment. Check zoning laws. You can’t just select some land in a regular subdivision.

Step two: Study all laws regarding cemeteries in your state. Your state representative’s office can help with the details. If all you want to do is spread your ashes or bury them in an urn, the rules will be a lot less strict. There are “for profit” and nonprofit cemeteries. The best to set up would be the nonprofit one. So you will need a nonprofit company to actually own the land. A church would do nicely for this.

Step three: Setup a conservation easement. As explained in Wikipedia, a conservation easement is an encumbrance — sometimes including a transfer of usage rights (easement) — which creates a legally enforceable land preservation agreement between a landowner and a government agency (municipality, county, state, federal) or a qualified land protection organization (often called a "land trust"), for the purposes of conservation.

Step four: Find a land trust to take ownership of the easement. Once again, according to Wikipedia, a land trust is an agreement whereby one party (the trustee) agrees to hold ownership of a piece of real property for the benefit of another party (the beneficiary). Land trusts are used by nonprofit organizations to hold conservation easements, by corporations and investment groups to compile large tracts of land, and by individuals to keep their real estate ownership private, avoid probate and provide several other benefits. See here for books to help out.

Give it a try. I believe this is a much better way to spend your money than investing in those burial plots in a cemetery that never seem to be there when you are ready to use them.