Resources and Information Supporting Green Burial in North America
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.
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.
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.
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker Magazine
This week in the magazine, Tad Friend writes about the California cemeterian who is trying to redefine the idea of last rites. Here, with Amy Davidson, he talks about green burials, graveyard tourism, and the future of funerals.
The nascent field of “green funerals” scored a publicity coup with last week’s episode of HBO’s “Six Feet Under.”
On the show, the main character Nate Fisher, is buried in the green style, which theorizes that upon death our bodies should be returned to earth in a way that benefits - rather than degrades - the ecosystem.
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.
Dying is easy, the death-care industry is hard.
That’s the grim news from the International Cemetery and Funeral Association, a trade group representing some 6,500 cemeteries, funeral homes and crematories, that gathered here recently. For four days, about 500 conventioneers somberly listened to the gospel delivered by a host of prophets: Prepare for the future or perish, so to speak.
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.