Forest of Memories

A photographic tour of Ramsey Creek Preserve

By MSN Lifestyles

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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 green funeral.

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By Jonathan, Move Blog

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the friendly union, of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the archenemy of life.

But let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.

-John Muir from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

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By Nancy Jacques, Good Dirt Radio

When it comes to resource efficiency, even in death, we have choices that can affect a sustainable future. Consider the conventional burial, American style, which annually requires some 828,000 gallons of toxic embalming fluid, over a hundred thousand tons of steel and 30 million board feet of lumber.

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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.

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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.

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By Bruce Geiselman, Waste News.com

Billy Campbell is a rural doctor, an environmentalist and something of a pioneer — opening the nation´s first “green cemetery.” Dr. Campbell also jokes that he operates the nation´s only combination doctor´s office and cemetery office. “I´m pretty sure we´re the only one,” he said, laughing.

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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.

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Lori Valigra, National Geographic News

A burial in outer space seems a fitting farewell for James Doohan, the actor who played the beloved engineer “Scotty” on Star Trek. To honor his final wishes, some of Doohan’s ashes will be shot into space this fall, along with a CD of tributes from fans and loved ones.

Celebrities aren’t the only ones considering alternatives to a conventional funeral. More people in the U.S. are rejecting traditional burials as too costly and ecologically unsound. Instead they are chosing environmentally friendly, and often highly personalized, goodbyes.

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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.

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