The Centre for Natural Burial

Putting aside embalming and tombs Some believe that services at home and simple caskets gradually will change how society deals with death.
By JOHN RICHARDSON, Portland Press Herald
Klara Tammany’s mother didn’t want a typical American funeral. No embalming, no metal casket, not even a funeral home.
When she died after a long illness a couple of years […]

Carrol County Times
Walking through the bucolic countryside of New York’s Finger Lake region offers the hiker a wide variety of trees, wildflowers and native birds, and one of the latest trends in the funeral industry, Greenspring Natural Cemetery Preserve.

By Caroline Cummins, January Magazine
When Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé, The American Way of Death, became a bestseller, readers were shocked, shocked to discover that the funeral industry routinely overcharged and defrauded its grief-stricken clientele. Cremation, instead of embalming and casketing, rapidly became more popular as the cheapest and most environmental funeral option; today, nearly a […]

By Associated Press
A growing number of environmentalists are trying to go “green” even when it comes to death, planning for home funerals with handmade, biodegradable caskets.
Penny Rhodes, 64, of Albany Township, and her family washed and dressed her father’s body after he died and then wrapped him in a family quilt in his bed.
Her brother […]

By Mark Harris, Relentless Media
When the funeral train following Chris Nichols’ plain, pine coffin arrived at his grave site one spring morning three years ago, this is what it saw. A simple cavity dug into the red earth of a southern pine forest, bunches of needles and rose petals strewn into and around the hole. […]

Final Resting Spots Honor Dead, Earth
By Elizabeth Birge, Washington Post - Religion News Service
In life, Lou Tafuri loved to fish in the waters off the New Jersey coast. In death, he sleeps with the fishes. His family couldn’t be happier. Tafuri, who died in 2005, was cremated after donating his body to science. Shortly before […]

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 […]

By Gerry W. Beyer, Wills, Trusts & Estates Blog
Earlier on this blog, I discussed the “green burial” movement.  As a result, I was contacted by Mark Harris the author of a new book entitled Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.
The following is from the press release […]

Green movement progressing to cemeteries
By Karen Nugent TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
Before the mid-1800s, families cared for their dead — holding wakes at home and burying loved ones in simple wooden caskets, often on their own property, where they could visit grave sites whenever the mood struck.
Those practices changed for several reasons, according to Mark Harris, […]

Latest installment in green lifestyle stories urges making one’s final decision earth-friendly.
By Jeff Poor, Business & Media Institute
The media have been all over stories of eccentric families’ toilet paperless lifestyles and their green weddings, but now CNN has pushed the peripheries of ecological awareness to the end of life by making the case for a […]