"All we are is dust in the wind"

A business designed to dispose of cremains in Montana is triggering opposition from federal officials.  According to Jim Robbins, Roadblock for Spreading of Human Ashes in Wilderness, NY Times, March 30, 2007:

Last wishes notwithstanding, federal officials are opposed to a Montana woman’s plan for a business that would spread the cremated remains of her clients over western Montana’s publicly owned wild mountain peaks and flower-studded meadows.

To Fran Coover, her new business, Ladies in White, seemed a perfect way to blend her interest in the environment and alternatives to the American way of dying. “It’s much less expensive,” Ms. Coover said. “And it is far more environmentally benign.”

For $390 Ms. Coover, a former administrator at a project studying end-of-life care here, along with two other ladies, offered to scatter the ashes of clients and provide a ceremony, a photograph, journal notes and Global Positioning System coordinates of the final resting place. Ten percent of the cost would be donated to groups who work to protect wild lands.

But after Ms. Coover scattered the cremated remains of her first client, she applied to the federal Forest Service, one of Montana’s largest owners of wild land, for a special-use permit to continue her business.

Though some officials told her it was fine to scatter the ashes on public land, she says, officials from Region I of the Forest Service, which covers Montana and Idaho, said it was against national policy and denied a permit.

She took her request to the Bureau of Land Management, the largest of the country’s federal land management agencies. At first the bureau seemed fine with it, she says, until it sent out an e-mail message to stakeholders, or groups with an interest in public lands, and ran into opposition from Indian tribes. * * *

While she appeals the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management decisions, Ms. Coover said, she is negotiating with a private landowner, a rancher, to scatter ashes on his mountain property.