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!

IT'S LIVE! The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide Second Edition has published

When I decided last August to publish a second edition of The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide I knew it would involve tons of work but I really expected to have it ready before now. In some ways the pandemic helped me focus on chores that needed doing before publication but it also created an underlying anxiety that we all may feel scattering our thoughts and our focus.

But it is here now. Expanded with 30 new cemeteries (a couple dozen more out there decided they were too small to want the attention or were impossible to contact) and updated information on the existing cemeteries. I’ve added more photos, many from the cemeteries themselves, and redesigned maps and tinkered with the layout. You’ll find that state maps now list their cemeteries and the complete guide has a table of contents for the whole book.

As before, The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide Second Edition is available for purchase on my website, www.greenburialnaturally.org as a complete guide and in four regions, Northeast, South, Midwest and West in digital (PDF) format. A print version of the complete guide is on order, and if you visit the purchase page you can send me an email requesting notification of its arrival. I will once again offer a digital/print bundle.

Thanks, and I hope to hear your thoughts on the second edition.

Should natural burial grave markers be subject to standards?

Grave at Ramsey Creek Preserve  photos by Tom Bailey

Humans probably have marked the graves of their dead for as long as they've lived in social groups, but the rise of massive cemetery headstones occurred only in the last couple centuries in America. It's easy to evoke an image of a modern cemetery with just a few strokes; green grass and upright stones or elaborate statues carved from stone and engraved and you know what it is.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to memorialize a loved one or to be memorialized yourself. Thomas Jefferson left explicit instructions for creating his tombstone, including engraving three accomplishments "because by these," he explained, "as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered."

Town of Rhinebeck Cemetery Natural Burial Ground

We don't use polished granite or marble headstones in memory of people in green or natural burial grounds. It's not that rock isn't green, though one could argue that engraving uses energy. It's that we're creating a new landscape--meadow or forest usually--not something that looks like a cemetery, though that word means simply a piece of ground where burials are made, and we imbue it with our own concept of what it should look like. We are recycling ourselves back into nature and becoming a part of it.

According to the Green Burial Council which sets standards and certifies cemeteries, "Natural and conservation cemeteries must develop a plan for limiting the types, sizes, and visibility of memorial markers/features to preserve or restore naturalistic vistas in the cemetery landscape." 

Yet I was disturbed on recent tours of green burial cemeteries along the East Coast by the proliferation of large stones with elaborate engravings.

Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park

All the cemeteries I visited and those in The Natural Burial Cemetery Guide put constraints on the kind of marker that's allowed on graves. Individual grave markers are usually limited to local stone that fits the landscape, must lay flat, not be polished or machine cut to shape. A few cemeteries impose size limits; Narrow Ridge Natural Burial Preserve in Washburn, Tennessee calls for grave markers of modest size, and at Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park in Austin, Texas markers must be less than 2 feet across. At Kokosing Nature Preserve in Gambier, Ohio graves are distinguished by unobtrusive markers. What struck me was how visible even a grave marker that fits the parameters can be.

Duck Run Natural Cemetery--stone path marks cremation sites

Is this a problem? Isn't stone natural, especially if it was dug up in the cemetery anyway? A hundred years from now when a natural burial cemetery has become a forest will it detract if someone walking through the forest sees gravestones? Won't it in fact be kind of neat?

Green Hills Cemetery

People sometimes perceive antipathy among green burial cemeteries to memorials. I think it's important to let people mark graves. Yet after visiting cemetery after cemetery, the size and number of objects began to worry me. Often I got caught up in bending over stones to see what they said and realized at the end that I hardly noticed the landscape that was being so lovingly created. Is the instinct to mark our passing through this world becoming mixed up with a human instinct towards grandiosity? Not everywhere, and not everyone, but natural burial actually doesn't look natural. In 20 years or so when there's nothing left of a body underground, what's the point of a personalized stone if the meadow or forest is the true memorial?

Kateri Meadow Natural Burial Preserve--no stone, just different flowers mark a grave.

One solution cemeteries have come up with is to prohibit markers on individual graves and go for group memorials. This is especially relevant where a burial ground is attempting to create a new landscape and prohibiting human traffic is part of the strategy for getting plants going or preserving the look of the place; this is often seen with meadows.

Oak Hill Cemetery in Crawfordsville, Indiana doesn't permit individual grave markers and has erected a memorial wall with spaces for families to record the names of their dead and locate their graves in the section.

Cemeteries may designate such areas as "non-visitation," and anyone burying there is aware of the limitations. The Preserve at All Saints in Waterford, Michigan has both visitation and non-visitation sections, and non-visitation burials may be inscribed on a stone memorial wall. Maryrest Cemetery in Mahwah, New Jersey, doesn't allow individual's graves in the Saint Francis of Assisi natural section to be marked but their names are inscribed on scattered boulders.

Steelmantown Cemetery

There's something to be said for uniformity, like Catholic cemeteries which limit the size of headstones in their conventional cemeteries as a way to indicate that all are equal in death. Truly small stones big enough to list the name and dates of the dead would allow for memorialization but not make the oh-so-human statement of "Here I am!"

St. Michael's Meadow. At Calvary Cemetery natural graves are part of the meadow landscape, with conventional sections in the distance.