www.gravematters.us Open in urlscan Pro
206.188.193.77  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Whatever Happened to ‘Dust to Dust’? You Can Still Find It in Green Burial

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 a dozen such 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, burial vaults 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 and delivers a loved one to the crematory, 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 return.


 





“Here’s a practical, helpful book on a subject you've almost certainly given too
little thought to. I'd always told my friends to carry my body out back in the
woods in a canvas sack--but Mark Harris shows us there may be more creative ways
than that to avoid the clutches of the funeral industry and help the earth at
the same time.”

—Bill McKibben, author,
Deep Economy

Copyright © Mark Harris. All rights reserved.
Site by Christie Jacobsen