Resources and Information Supporting Green Burial in North America
By: Kelli B. Kavanaugh, metromode
Driving north from the skyscrapers and stadiums of downtown Detroit to Upland Hills Farm, just north of Rochester in Addison Township, is a study in quick transitions: from urban core to suburban sprawl to rolling pastures and forests in just 45 minutes.
By Camille Adair, A Lifelong Practice (Blog)
“One’s death should mean something.”
- Edward Abbey
Joe Sehee is executive director of the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit organization he founded to encourage sustainability in the death care industry and to use the burial process as a means of facilitating ecological restoration and landscape level conservation.
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.
Victoria Times - Colonist
Victoria, the cremation capital of North America, might be the first to have a “green-burial” site.
People have been looking for environmentally friendly options when it comes to death, said Stephen Olson of Royal Oak Burial Park, which is about 18 months away from opening a half-acre site dedicated to so-called green burials.
The latest in green burial.
By Joe Sehee, Slate
Some cultures befriend death as best they can, with burial customs that embrace decay and regeneration. The American way of death has been to stave off decay with formaldehyde, bullet-proof caskets, and concrete burial vaults. But that may be changing.
Focusing on the next generation of environmental leaders;
An interview with Joe Sehee
What is green burial?
Green burial is a way of caring for our dead without the use of toxins or materials that are not biodegradable, which essentially means no formaldehyde (a major ingredient in embalming fluid), no metal caskets and no concrete vaults. It also requires that markers, if used at all, must be living (i.e. trees, wildflowers) or ecologically functional (i.e. boulders, field stones) and appropriate for the surroundings. Green burial is not a new idea. It’s the way much of humanity has handled its end-of-life rituals for several thousand years until the advent of the modern cemetery/funeral industry.
Green-burial movement gets more ambitious
By Gregory Dicum, Grist
“I’d prefer to be put in the ground, under a tree,” says Joe Sehee, contemplating his inevitable demise. “But I don’t want to go in the ground with anything, I just want to be buried in a simple pine box or shroud, and that’s it.”
If Sehee has given his preferences a lot of thought lately, it’s not that he’s planning to shuffle off this mortal coil any more imminently than the rest of us — it’s just that, as executive director of the Green Burial Council, it’s his job.
In search of an earth-friendly burial
By Linda Falkenstein, The Isthmus Daily
You’d expect any place called the Gardens of Eternal Peace Mausoleum to be peaceful. Maybe too peaceful. In the central area of the Y-shaped building, rows of chairs face a large modernist mural of angular praying people. A soft symphonic version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” wafts from invisible speakers. Lining the walls are white marble squares with discreet brass lettering. Behind the marble squares, of course, lie the bodies of the dead.
By Kara Mayer Robinson, North Jersey Record
When Jim Robson of Rochelle Park considers what his body may have to endure when he eventually dies, he’s downright disgusted. “I do not want to be drained and filled with some goop, locked in a metal casket, then tossed into a cement tomb,” he says. “Umm, hello … I am dead. What is the point?”
By Tad Friend, The New YorkerHow much rest do the dead require? Late this spring, two experts were discussing burial theory over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Mill Valley, California. The elder man, Ron Hast, had just visited Fernwood, a new “green” cemetery on the edge of town owned by the younger man, his friend and protege Tyler Cassity. Hast is an avuncular fixture in the funeral industry. In his earlier days in Los Angeles, in the sixties and seventies, he invented the Casket Airtray, which enables corpses to fly home in style, and he ran a service that provided mortuaries with embalmers and pallbearers, men known for their navy-blue suits and perfect manners and prepossessing youth. When Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable died, Hast’s men helped compose them for their final closeups. Now in semiretirement, at sixty-six, Hast edits and publishes the magazines Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor.