THE SHROUD OF MARIN.(Tyler Cassity's Fernwood)

How much rest do the dead require? Late this spring, two experts were discussing burial theory over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Mill Valley, California. The elder man, Ron Hast, had just visited Fernwood, a new "green" cemetery on the edge of town owned by the younger man, his friend and protege Tyler Cassity. Hast is an avuncular fixture in the funeral industry. In his earlier days in Los Angeles, in the sixties and seventies, he invented the Casket Airtray, which enables corpses to fly home in style, and he ran a service that provided mortuaries with embalmers and pallbearers, men known for their navy-blue suits and perfect manners and prepossessing youth. When Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable died, Hast's men helped compose them for their final closeups. Now in semiretirement, at sixty-six, Hast edits and publishes the magazines Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor.

In 2003, Hast had urged Cassity to buy Fernwood, a run-down thirty-two-acre cemetery and mortuary in the heart of Marin County. Cassity, who shows promise of having an even bigger effect on the American way of death than his mentor, did just that, and then spent one and a half million dollars transforming the property. At Fernwood, the dead would go into the ground unembalmed and in shrouds or wooden coffins rather than in the standard metal caskets packed inside concrete burial vaults. A simple rock, at most, would serve as a headstone, and grave sites would be planted with native grasses or oak trees that would be fertilized by the bodies below. In theory, the land would be indistinguishable from the forest that adjoins it, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Fernwood was not the first green burial facility in America--three others have opened in recent years--but it was intended to be the most ambitious, at once the prototype for a simple and virtuous method of burial that would force the fifteen-billion-dollar-a-year funeral industry to change its ways and a test of the revolutionary notion that cemeteries could conserve land. If Fernwood succeeded, Cassity hoped that environmental groups would buy large tracts of "buffer" land in conjunction with cemeterians like him, whose revenues from green burials on a portion of the property could be used to protect the rest.

Fernwood's grand reopening isn't until November, but dozens of people--from as far away as Oregon--have reserved "pre-need" plots, and the bodies or ashes of fifty-seven people are already in the ground. However, Hast had his doubts. When he dropped by the Fernwood office this spring, he was alarmed to see a mixed-breed dog named Owen slopping water out of a bowl, funeral directors kidding around, and one employee wearing what he termed "a hippie skirt."

At the Japanese restaurant, Hast told Cassity that Fernwood was so laid back that he couldn't, in good conscience, recommend it to his friends. As Cassity began to bridle, Hast made a placatory gesture and hurried on. (He and Cassity once had a heated argument about hearses--Hast insisted on traditional black Cadillacs; Cassity leased a black Volvo S.U.V. and silver and blue Priuses--and didn't speak for months.) "Now you just listen, for once," Hast said to Cassity. "In Australia last week, they started burying people in pastureland. They're buried vertically, in a crouch."

"We'd talked about that--" Cassity began.

"Yes, yes," Hast interrupted. "The funeral directors I've mentioned it to all feel that the end of life is peaceful, which requires this"--he laid his chopsticks flat--"not that." He popped them upright. "But crouching is something else entirely."