The Centre for Natural Burial

The Daily Journal

East Rochester, N.Y. — When Mary Woodsen of Ithaca dies, she does not want her body filled with chemicals and put into a concrete vault 6 feet under.

“Being buried in a cemetery with a mowed lawn full of rows of gravestones never appealed” to her, Woodsen said. Woodsen is opting for a more “green” and environmentally sound burial when her time comes.

“Just lay me in the ground and plant a tree over me,” said Woodsen.

Woodsen is not alone. While the traditional American burial has been that casket placed into a concrete vault six feet underground, a new burial trend is emerging that provides alternatives to this type of send-off.

Mark Harris, a freelance journalist, recently published a book, “Grave Matters,” which investigates and highlights the trend.

According to Harris, “green” burial can mean many different things, but typically it avoids using chemicals to preserve a body from decomposing and allows the body to return to the earth as naturally as possible.

Woodsen co-founded the only “green” cemetery in New York state just outside of Ithaca last year. The 93-acre Greensprings Natural Cemetery is surrounded by 8,000 acres of woods. Four people are now buried in the cemetery and there are nearly 100 plots reserved.

The cemetery does not allow any embalmed or chemically preserved bodies, traditional caskets or headstones. In fact, without headstones there is no way to tell exactly where each body is from looking at the cemetery, because it’s open space.

In each chapter of the book, Harris investigates these different types of “green” burials. The burials ranged from a cremation in Philadelphia to the scattering of ashes at sea in San Diego to the New Jersey shore where a memorial reef — a mold of cement mixed with ashes of a body — was deployed into the ocean.