A guidebook for over 125 US cemeteries that offer green burial. Includes introductory material on green burial and photo illustrations. Detailed cemetery entries are color coded and grouped by region and state. 303 pages.

Honor your loved ones and the earth by choosing practical, spiritual, and eco-friendly after-death care Natural, legal, and innovative after-death care options are transforming the paradigm of the existing funeral industry, helping families and communities recover their instinctive capacity to care for a loved one after death and do so in creative and healing ways. Reimagining Death offers stories and guidance for home funeral vigils, advance after-death care directives, green burials, and conscious dying. When we bring art and beauty, meaningful ritual, and joy to ease our loss and sorrow, we are greening the gateway of death and returning home to ourselves, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to the earth.

We once disposed of our dead in earth-friendly ways—no chemicals, biodegradable containers, dust to dust. But over the last 150 years death care has become a toxic, polluting, and alienating industry in the United States. Today, people are slowly waking up to the possibility of more sustainable and less disaffecting death care, reclaiming old practices in new ways, in a new age. Greening Death traces the philosophical and historical backstory to this awakening, captures the passionate on-the-ground work of the Green Burial Movement, and explores the obstacles and other challenges getting in the way of more robust mobilization. As the movement lays claim to greener, simpler, and more cost-efficient practices, something even more promising is being offered up—a tangible way of restoring our relationship to nature.

Funeral expenses in the United States average more than $10,000. And every year conventional funerals bury millions of tons of wood, concrete, and metals, as well as millions of gallons of carcinogenic embalming fluid. There is a better way, and Elizabeth Fournier, affectionately dubbed the "Green Reaper"; walks you through it, step-by-step. She provides comprehensive and compassionate guidance, covering everything from green burial planning and home funeral basics to legal guidelines and outside-the-box options, such as burials at sea. Fournier points the way to green burial practices that consider both the environmental well-being of the planet and the economic well-being of loved ones.

How do we align our end-of-life choices with our values? In a world experiencing a climate crisis and a culture that avoids discussions about death and dying, environmentalist and educator Mallory McDuff takes readers on a journey to discover new, sustainable practices around death and dying.

While the funeral is one of mankind's oldest rituals, funeral practices are not exempt from adaptation and change. Today's families are instinctively seeking more environmentally responsible body care and disposition options, more hands-on participation in the funeral period, regardless of where they live or how much money they have to spend. The self-imposed policies and standard practices espoused by the funeral industry are being challenged on every level and for every reason by every generation, from aging Baby Boomers' quest for equality, affordability, and authenticity, right on down to Millennials' pragmatic, tech savvy entrepreneurial spirit. How are funeral professionals responding to the rapidly growing, persistent demand for green products and services? Will the industry be able to pivot and produce nimbly enough to save the profession from rising any higher on the endangered careers list? What does it mean to be an innovator in the field of green funeral service from the inside? And how can greenwashing be avoided? These writers provide a different glimpse into the world of funeral service than the standard mortuary fare. Many of them have devoted their lives to envisioning a more just, eco-responsible, and honorable way to care for our dead, while others are acting as the canaries in the coal mine, adopting green practices early and parenting them as they develop. All the thought leaders in this collection have one central theme in common: finding ways to honor our commitment to ethical and compassionate funeral practices that nourish the relationships between families and providers, the profession and the public, and human beings and the Earth.

By the time Nate Fisher was laid to rest in a woodland grave sans coffin in the final season of Six Feet Under, Americans all across the country were starting to look outside the box when death came calling. Grave Matters follows families who found in "green" burial a more natural, more economic, and ultimately more meaningful alternative to the tired and toxic send-off on offer at the local funeral parlor. Eschewing chemical embalming and fancy caskets, elaborate and costly funerals, they have embraced a range of natural options, new and old, that are redefining a better American way of death. Environmental journalist Mark Harris examines this new green burial underground, leading you into natural cemeteries and domestic graveyards, taking you aboard boats from which ashes and memorial "reef balls" are cast into the sea. He follows a family that conducts a home funeral, one that delivers a loved one to the crematory, and another that hires a carpenter to build a pine coffin. In the morbidly fascinating tradition of Stiff, Grave Matters details the embalming process and the environmental aftermath of the standard funeral. Harris also traces the history of burial in America, from frontier cemeteries to the billion-dollar business it is today, reporting on real families who opted for more simple, natural returns. For readers who want to follow the examples of these families and, literally, give back from the grave, appendices detail everything you need to know, from exact costs and laws to natural burial providers and their contact information.