Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust
A natural burial allows your death to help create a sacred and protected green space, full of native plants and trees, songbirds and butterflies, and healthy habitat for animals, where your friends and family will come to remember you and enjoy your legacy of greenspace.

Our bodies, returned to the soil, through decomposition, will help create new life. The nutrients help to feed the commemorative native trees or shrubs, which in turn create a new forest or parkland. Nature lovers can rest in nature and know that in their death, they have helped to create an ecological oasis.

The environmental benefit
Every year tens of millions of funeral and burial dollars are going up in polluting smoke or in the ground in rare wood caskets that could be invested in creating glorious new forests. Low impact natural burials reduce energy and resource consumption, are less toxic, conserve water, and include local sustainable materials.

The Association’s motivation is to reduce the impact of conventional death care practices they can include embalming, expensive hard wood caskets as well as burial in vaults, ornate headstones or cremation, all with a steep environmental cost.

Embalming delays decomposition by displacing blood with formaldehyde that preserves the body. Toxic chemicals can be harmful both to the embalmer and in the ground where it is interred.

Cemeteries often use cement vaults to prevent caskets shifting in the ground as they settle in densely packed cemeteries. Headstones can be massive stones such as marble from Italy, but there are many low impact, alternative ways to mark where a body is buried. One of the Association’s goals is to facilitate land conservation by having natural cemeteries with income to support the maintenance and protection of remaining green spaces.

Finally, cremation is responsible for the release of emissions including greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide as well as mercury and other heavy metals.

While we do not say that any type of disposition is wrong, we hope that everyone will consider the environmental impact of their final resting place while they are still alive and able to make that choice.

Natural Burial:
Caring for the Environment in Death as in Life–and Leaving a Legacy of Land Preservation »