Resources and Information Supporting Green Burial in North America
By Bangor Daily News
ORRINGTON - Fourteen pristine acres along the Penobscot River could become perpetually green. An Auburn-based organization told town planners last week it wants to create a “green” cemetery — possibly the first in New England — off the Mill Creek Road.
By Marcela Rojas, The Ithaca Journal
NEWFIELD, N.Y. -A short drive southwest of Ithaca, past the timeworn silos and one of the state’s last remaining covered bridges, sits Irish Hill Road, a winding dirt byway that stretches to a place where nature meets eternity.
By William Kates, Associated Press
NEWFIELD, N.Y. — It sits on the eastern fringe of New York’s Finger Lakes region and is bounded on three sides by 8,000 acres of protected forests: the perfectly natural place to spend an eternity. The 93-acre Greensprings Natural Cemetery is the first of its kind in New York and one of just a handful in the United States, where interest in “green” burial is just taking root.
By Darise Jean-Baptiste, The Ithaca Journal
NEWFIELD - For almost a month, BOCES welding students Shayne Jackson and Travis Darling have dedicated afew hours of their school days to create the “pallbearer’s friend” - an aluminum cart with wheels and handles that will allow six people to easily transport caskets to gravesites.
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?”
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.
Eco-friendly funerals break new ground
By Francesca Lyman, MSNBC.com
For some, there’s nothing more ghastly than the idea of having their mortal remains embalmed, sealed in a metal and plastic casket and buried in a cement vault. They’d prefer to be buried “au naturel.” So some companies are thinking outside of the box and offering Earth-friendly burials amid the earth, trees and sea.