Resources and Information Supporting Green Burial in North America
A hands-on, spiritual facet of the green burial movement takes the funeral director and the funeral home out of the picture
By Bill Strubbe, Common Ground
Home funeral guide Jerrigrace Lyons, director/founder of Final Passages in Sebastopol, was the first to facilitate a green burial at Fernwood.
Green burial lets humans feed the daisies, not just push them up
By Jaye Christensen, Common Ground
Last year 22,500 cemeteries across the United States buried 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid, 104,272 tons of steel, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods and 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete.
Tyler Cassity puts new life back into the business of burial
David Ian Miller, The New York Observer
Tyler Cassity at Fernwood cemetery in Mill Valley. Photo … Tyler Cassity at Fernwood cemetery in Mill Valley. Photo … A green grave site at Fernwood cemetery in Mill Valley. P… Preparing for a green burial at Fernwood cemetery in Mill…
You might not expect a man whose business is death to be upbeat and optimistic, yet Tyler Cassity is anything but somber.
The latest trend in undertaking gives new meaning to the term ‘dust to dust’
By Patricia Leigh Brown, The Sydney Morning Herald
TOMMY Odom’s remains lie on a steep, windswept hill at Fernwood Cemetery, New Jersey, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon. When he died in a traffic accident last year, Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood to move on to greener pastures - literally.
Fernwood Cemetery in Marin County now offers green burials.
By - 30 Minutes Bay Area, CBS-5 (San Francisco)
The green burial movement started in the United Kingdom where there are now about 150 sites. Dr. Billy Campbell founded the US’s first green burial cemetery in Westminster, SC. Opened in 1998, the Ramsey Creek Preserve now has had about 100 burials and sold an additional 50-100 plots. Campbell says that there are about 20 green burial cemeteries in development across the country but only four open for business including his and Fernwood in Marin.
By Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - Tommy Odom’s remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon.
When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures - literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.
The Globe and Mail. Toronto
Travelling to the sweet hereafter doesn’t really require a coffin able to withstand ‘a direct nuclear strike.’ In fact, MARY AMBROSE reports, shunning high-cost funeral options is not only eco-friendly — it’s all the rage
When their mother died recently, Bill and Kirk Fuller didn’t know what kind of funeral to arrange. They had tried to discuss it with her, but Patricia Fuller was elderly and “despite a fair amount of urging,” son Bill says, “she didn’t give directions to us. So we made a decision.”
They buried her at Fernwood, the largest “green” cemetery in the United States.
Reclaiming the realities and rituals of death
By Nancy Rommelmann, LA Times Cover Story
For centuries in America, we tended to our dead. People died at home, and relatives prepared the body, laid it out in the parlor and sat by as callers paid final respects. The body was buried in the family cemetery, if there was one, or on the back 40; pieties were spoken, and life went on until the next person died. Death, if not a welcome visitor, was a familiar one. This changed, incrementally, during the Civil War, when others were paid to undertake the job of transporting the bodies of soldiers killed far from home; this is when formaldehyde as an embalming agent was first used. But it was only 100 years ago that we began routinely to hand over our dead to the undertakers. Soon the gravely ill as well were deemed too taxing, and moved to hospitals to die. Within decades, what had for millennia been familial responsibilities were appropriated by professionals.
Tommy Randal Odom, a gypsy wanderer in life, has found, in death, a permanent niche in history as the first person to be buried green in California. The body of the Texas native was laid to rest in September in Mill Valley at the first burial preserve on the West Coast.
This summer, the Daphne Fernwood Cemetery in the Marin Headlands began offering burial sites in a wildlife sanctuary and was featured in a story in AARP magazine on a trend in “green cemeteries.” Occidental artist Rebecca Love read the story. Weeks later, when her friend Tommy died in a car accident, she decided green was the way to go.
Known as “Tommy T,” Tommy Odom, 42, was a plumber, landscaper, former U.S. Marine and regular at the Renaissance Faire in Marin, where he painted clay figures. A devout Christian, his favorite sign- off was “Jesus loves you, man.” He was killed Labor Day weekend driving to his home in Occidental.
On Sept. 11, family and friends escorted Tommy’s body, wrapped in white muslin and placed in a pine box, to his grave, which is marked not by a marble slab but a piece of petrified wood and an oak tree.
“Hikers walking by Tommy will see a stone and an oak tree,” said Rebecca, who plans to return regularly for picnics.
Making a burial ground multiuse is what the Fernwood owners had in mind when they dedicated a portion of an existing cemetery as a nature preserve, selling interment rights that protect the land from being developed.
The idea of back-to-nature burial is really “a simple and old concept presented in a new concept,” said Fernwood co-owner Tyler Cassity. Putting bodies in the ground without benefit of cement vault and airtight casket was common 100 years ago in this country. At Fernwood, embalming is not allowed. Grave markers must be natural and caskets biodegradable — just like us.
Cassity, whose funeral hip-ness extends to being a consultant for HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” thinks green burials appeal to those who “want to feel close to the natural world” but think a cemetery is a waste of space. This way they get to be part of nature and save it at the same time. Part of the interment fees are used to maintain the natural landscape.
Fernwood is patterned after a similar burial ground in rural South Carolina. But the idea of an organic repose is a logical part of the natural death movement pioneered by many in Sonoma County.
Tommy Odom’s funeral was arranged by Jerri Lyons, a nationally known death midwife in Sebastopol whose Final Passages organization helps families do home funerals. Tommy’s pine casket was built by Kathleen Broderson, the Forestville designer of A Plain Pine Box, whose works double as linen chests until they go in the ground. Tommy’s artist friend Rebecca, who sculpts death masks, is creating an image of Tommy’s face for his relatives.
A green cemetery is designed to look like a park, and to this end Fernwood will install hiking trails and invite visitors to watch for birds and hold outdoor weddings.
The AARP story on green graveyards prompted thousands of queries from consumers, property owners and funeral directors. Fernwood now has a waiting list of 700 people “who want in,” said Cassity.
The view alone would explain part of the draw. Five men lowered Tommy into his grave, which looks to Mount Tamalpais on one side and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Musician Chris Caswell, in full Scottish dress, played the bagpipe. Someone read the 23rd Psalm and held the wooden cross Tommy kept on his dashboard.
All agreed it was a lovely ending. And beginning.