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.

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.