Not everyone wants rotting hippie corpses in their neighborhood — unfortunately for an aspiring moonbat mortician.

MACON, Ga. — Elizabeth Collins, a gardener, birdwatcher and a self-described "renaissance woman," wanted to start a "natural" cemetery where bodies would be buried without embalming, coffins or vaults.

She and a partner bought a plot of land here and wrote a business plan that identified pagans, "old hippies," penny pinchers, environmentalists and Muslims — who traditionally bury the dead without caskets — as their target market. There would be room for 7,500 customers. Dead pets would be welcome, too.

The idea didn't sit well with the living.

Many residents in this socially conservative rural patch of central Georgia worried the cemetery would contaminate their water supply. Some also objected in principle to unconventional burial practices.

So on Nov. 4, the Macon-Bibb County commissioners killed the cemetery plan by voting in a new ordinance that requires a "leak-proof casket or vault" for burials.

Nonetheless, greenwashing continues to spread in the funeral industry. Joe Sehee, director of the Green Burial Council, crows about the popularity of "environmentally friendly cemeteries":

I get a lot of calls from people thinking it's a groovy alternative to opening a bed-and-breakfast.

The objective for some is to milk moonbats.

Passages International makes a $1,600 woven willow casket, which looks like an oversized picnic hamper. It also sells a $300 cremation urn made of "Himalayan rock salt" that "will dissolve within four hours when placed in water."

Other pioneers in environmentally correct alternative funeral services are simply nuts.

One green-funeral enthusiast, George Russell, has founded a religion called "Ethician" centered on the practice, and says he's buried nine bodies in his Texas cemetery since 2003, including his mother wrapped in a blanket. He's now raising money to build a "tower of silence" — an elevated platform where bodies would be left to decompose in the open with vultures hastening the process, as is done in the Zoroastrian faith. Mr. Russell recently invited a Zoroastrian priest from Mumbai to survey the Texas site. He says the priest found the local vulture population suitable for the task.

Not even the dead are safe from the indignities of moonbattery.

On a tip from V the K. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.