Print version of The NBCG Second Edition is NOW AVAILABLE

Yes, The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide Second Edition is available in print. Thanks to the vagaries of doing business during a pandemic this took much longer than hoped, but there’s now a good supply of newly printed books waiting to go out to you.

When I embarked on the project that became my original The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide seven years ago I saw it as a way to help people in the Northeast where I live find a green burial cemetery to bury their dead. It morphed out of a general book about green burial, a subject which fascinated me ever since I stumbled on the term while researching plastics recycling. The amount of time needed to track down, contact, and get details of cemeteries for that book convinced me to assemble my findings into a guide. The project went from a slim digital guide for 24 cemeteries to today’s second edition, 407 pages and covering over 160 cemeteries with indepth reporting and details, and lots of photographs that help give a feel for how individual these places are.

I received numerous requests for a print edition, and once produced, I remembered what it’s like to be able to thumb through a guide rather than laboriously do it digitally. It’s also something I can keep in the car (though I have to remember to do so). The printed second edition is available only for the complete guide. Four second edition regional guides, Northeast, South, Midwest and West, are available only in digital. All guides have an introduction to green burial, interactive tables of contents, revised maps and lists of funeral homes that work with green burial customers. For those who like both the ease of digital and the feel of print, I offer a bundle version. All digital edition purchases include free updates until September 2022 to help keep you current on the expanding world of green burial. All versions of the guide are available for purchase at greenburialnaturally.org.

Enjoy!

Green burial may be even more important during the pandemic

The Green Burial Council has added a page to its website about green burial during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though one of the main tenets of green burial, that family and friends have the opportunity to be intimately involved, has sadly been curtailed by the need to social distance, the process of green burial can still go on.

Just like maintaining social distance in the grocery store or pharmacy helps protect the frontline store workers, stipulating a green burial which doesn’t require morticians to handle bodies for embalming can help protect funeral workers, who are also on the frontlines.

According to the council’s website:

"The CDC states that decedents with COVID-19 may be buried or cremated according to the family's preference."                                                                             National Funeral Directors Association
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"There is currently no known risk associated with being in the same room at a funeral or visitation service with the body of someone who died of COVID-19."                 Centers for Disease Control  

As always, if you are in need of services check with your chosen green burial cemetery about its policies.

Be safe and we will come out of this together.

See the Green Burial Council website for more information:

https://www.greenburialcouncil.org/green_burial_and_covid-19.html

A new hybrid cemetery in New Jersey.

Rosemont Cemetery all photos by Tom Bailey

Does one more hybrid cemetery mean much? I’ve visited more hybrids than either natural or conservation, and for the same reason that they are good for the green burial movement: they are relatively easy to set up and there are more of them: of the 142 cemeteries listed in The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide, 86 are hybrids.

Hybrids aren’t as “sexy” as conservation burial grounds, but when done well and cared for they offer people green afterdeath options do alot to change the conversation if people are willing to look at them with an open mind and not an all-or-none approach.

Rosemont Cemetery, a non-profit historic burial ground with graves dating from 1729, is in central New Jersey not far from the Delaware River, where the rolling land is still farmed and quaint river towns compete with farm-market towns to charm visitors. We drove down on a grey drizzly Friday, stopping for lunch in Stockton, where a bridge over the river connects Pennsylvania to New Jersey. The town was very quiet, in pre-weekend mode, but we found a pizza place that opened on Fridays for lunch and fueled up alongside a handful of locals before heading out on winding roads (probably better navigated by horse and buggy and farm equipment) to find Rosemont.

In spite of its fancy name, Rosemont Memorial Garden and Natural Burial Area is really just a grassy corner of the cemetery, beyond the conventional graves.

It’s bordered in back by a brambled creek and a the edge of the cemetery’s undeveloped land, which gives a long view to neighboring farm buildings. Since its opening only a few bodies have been buried around the central garden and rocks.

But after the time spent on the river, and the very nature of this area of my home state, so different from my suburban region, I realize that place is an important part of green burial. You’re not being buried in an anonymous mahogany box in an anonymous conventional cemetery, you are buried in a natural landscape. To those for whom this rolling farmland near the Delaware River evokes a visceral response, like me and the Maine coast, there would be a deep physical meaning in being buried in it, in becoming part of the earth here.

2019 is an update year for The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide

Hoffner family at Steelmantown Cemetery photo by Tom Bailey

I’m standing over my father’s grave at Steelmantown Cemetery with my brother and my father’s grandchildren. We’re smiling. Should we be? This is a place of death. It’s also a place of natural burial, where new graves soon blend in with the forest floor (can you tell what is new ground cover here?) and the bodies they hold become part of the web of life. We’re probably stepping on leaves that contain my father’s molecules.

Yuck? No. Good.

Green burial is also about bringing family and friends into a closer circle of intimacy with dead loved ones. We have a complex relationship with death that can be unravelled and simplified if we wish.

The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide is a project I began in 2015, continued with publication in early 2017, and added to with a print edition later that year. I’ve made updates to the digital editions and now in 2019 with more cemeteries offering green burial and burial numbers at existing grounds continuing to rise, I’ve begun an arduous update process.

If you want to learn more about natural burial there’s no better way than through the cemeteries that offer it. The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide is a good place to start.

DEEPDEAD project: Finding traces of human presence in caves, soils and landscapes

"Humans are ruining the Earth from beyond the grave: Scientists warn decomposing corpses are altering the chemistry of soil." *

So reads the title of an article that came out in late April and spread quickly across the international news. It summarized the findings of Ladislav Smejda just released at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2017 from the DEEPDEAD Project that said chemical traces of human bodies can be detected in soil hundreds or even thousands of years after being deposited. This goes for bodies left on the surface, bodies buried, and those cremated and scattered in scattering gardens. The article's title is sensational to get people to read it, but the concerns are real.

In this space I have elaborated on the problems of burying biodegradable urns filled with ashes because the concentrated ashes appear to poison the surrounding soil, rendering it unfit for planting. What Smejda is saying is that human remains in general contain concentrations of chemicals otherwise considered nutrients that may overwhelm the soil. In other words, natural burial can be too much of a good thing, even as it does so much to reduce or eliminate other environmental downsides of conventional burial.

I wrote to Smejda today hoping he can shed light on what this might mean for green burial. Decomposing animal bodies also contain concentrated nutrients, but animal bodies are not accumulated in cemeteries (except for pets) and are often broken up by scavengers. With land use already an issue for many people, breaking our burial grounds up into ever smaller spaces wouldn't make much sense.

Smejda's presentation certainly didn't negate the goals of green burial. Our afterdeath choices will affect the environment for a very long time. "It's a message to us to consider our present day and future practices and behavior so we potentially direct our impact on the environment in the right way." 

* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4448314/How-humans-ruining-Earth-grave.html#ixzz4hLr8f03m