Green Burial and Climate Hope
Each Friday morning, a small group congregates at a cemetery, work gloves in hand. We form a circle and exchange our greetings. It is a ragtag group—retirees and students, lifelong conservationists, birding enthusiasts, some folks who are actively holding the shapeshifting heaviness of grief, some who are just getting outside on a morning off work. Almost always, there are one or two newcomers—the curious and the newly converted.
As the caretakers of Bluestem Conservation Cemetery in Cedar Grove, North Carolina, the reason for our weekly gathering isn’t a common creed, but a common belief in the care of nature and neighbor. Our rituals vary from week to week, sometimes pulling ever-pernicious invasive species like Tree of Heaven or sweetgum from the woods, sometimes clearing the walking trails or building a new picnic table for the cemetery’s visitors, sometimes digging a grave for a weekend burial service. It is a reverential work, but it is far from somber.
One morning begins with a song from Dave Deming, who has been returning to the cemetery almost weekly since one of his dearest friends was buried there in July of 2022. “Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow! Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground,” he sings, invoking an old bluegrass tune and inspiring the group of us gathered to nod our heads along. This particular Friday, it is the tail end of winter in the Piedmont, so the air is comfortably crisp, but the trees are still bare, the grasses shades of golden brown. The only vibrant hues flashing through the fields and forests are our own hats and windbreakers, and the occasional cardinal or bluebird.
When I tell people that I work at a cemetery, I usually get a few strange looks. People can’t help but think of the manicured lawns, the stone monuments, the somber men in black suits and dress shoes. But Bluestem isn’t your conventional cemetery. Even in the stark winter, it’s impossible not to sense the sacred hum of the land that surrounds us and of the conversation that unfolds with the work. From week to week, as we clean up scrap metal or plant new saplings or attend to a tree that has fallen across a trail, we chat—subjects range from green burial and grief to birdsong and life callings. The place is abuzz with life.
As a conservation burial cemetery—the thirteenth one in the country—Bluestem is a place not only for green burial but also for the restoration of land. Conservation burial cemeteries are legally protected under a conservation easement, so the land can never be developed. Instead, these cemeteries, their partner conservation organizations, their community volunteers, and every person who chooses green burial there takes part in the perpetual stewardship of the land.
The 87 acres Bluestem rests on was once farmland in monoculture crops like corn, soybeans, and tobacco, but now, as the land rests and is carefully tended to, it is being restored to native grasslands and hardwood forest.
Another Bluestem volunteer, Noah Rokoske, an avid bird watcher and naturalist who has been part of the project from the start, goes looking for new species of birds and plant life whenever he is home from college. “When we started, these were cornfields and we’d see like 30 birds,” he says. “Now there are hundreds of birds in these fields. It is changing from an anthropocentric landscape to a biocentric one.”
This is what the modern “green burial movement” is all about—respecting the fullness of ecological life in our human burial practices, recognizing that we are, in fact, part of nature. Really, this movement is but a new instantiation of a very old practice: burying our dead simply, directly in the earth with only non-toxic, biodegradable materials and minimal environmental impact. Many Jewish, Muslim, and indigenous communities have never lost touch with this practice, but many have been largely distanced from the earth in death through mainstream use of embalming, fancy caskets, vaults, and, increasingly, cremation.
As awareness of the ecological crisis and the wastefulness of conventional death care has grown, people are finding in green burial a way of honoring the earth in their death. The National Funeral Directors Association reports that a majority (60%) of people in the U.S. are now interested in “greener” funeral options. Many people of faith have embraced this resurgent movement, recognizing in the disposition option a way to care for creation and to honor a “dust to dust” theology.
In my own spiritual tradition, the Christian tradition, we believe that we are creatures of the soil, designed to both care for and to be sustained by God’s good earth in a covenantal relationship. On a basic level, green burial is a way to honor this relationship, to care for the earth in death as we do in life. And in reciprocation, we receive the care of the earth; the soil gently reclaims our physical bodies and nourishes regrowth, the soft landscapes and birdsong tend to our grieving and offer them refuge. On another level, green burial is a proclamation of resurrection hope, a way of surrendering our bodies to the God of all creation and trusting in the mystery of new life. Life not as it was, but as it is still to become. As a Christian, the choice seems at once simple and profound.
For people across spiritual backgrounds, the choice of green burial is at once simple and profound. From those who visit, or attend presentations, or arrive to make their own burial plans, I hear many versions of the same sentiment: “it just feels right.”
The first time I stepped foot in this conservation cemetery, about two years ago, I was surprised at the striking beauty of the graves, gentle mounds protruding from the landscape, as if attesting to the facts: things are not as they were here, life has been disturbed, the earth’s solid surface broken open and patched together again. The mounds are imperfect and raw, as are the graves that precede them.
Before each burial, we layer the bottom of the grave with leaves and branches. The dark dirt becomes a nest, or as one Bluestem volunteer calls it, a cradle, ready to receive and to hold. Families are then invited to participate in the full, embodied process of returning their loved one to the earth. The motions of the act are physically difficult: carrying the loved one through the fields and trees, lowering the weight of their body into the earth, moving the heavy soil shovelful by shovelful.
When the hole is filled, its domed surface is jagged and rough, a landing place for seeds that the family scatters over its surface. Finally, the mound is tucked under a blanket of pine straw. A marker is placed. Things are not as they were here. Like the surface of the ground, we are changed and reshaped by loss. And there is something right about rituals of burial that attest to the heaviness of that.
Throughout each burial, the trees stand as sturdy witnesses. Pollinators buzz nearby, dutifully continuing their life-giving work. The tall grasses move in the wind. Loved ones gather together. At some cemeteries like Bluestem, a few volunteers stand by to lend a shovel or a tissue box, or a golf cart ride.
Green burial places the dead squarely into the web of life, and it beckons the living to take our proper place in that web, too. Green burial advocate Suzanne Kelly calls this “the greatest potential green burial has to offer”: healing our human relationship with nature, a relationship so clearly broken by the legacies of colonialism, industrialization, and consumerism.
Returning our creaturely bodies to the earth in our deaths affirms an understanding that our lives come from and depend upon the earth. This testimony resonates deeply, it is a long-forgotten truth we are itching to remember, one that just feels right when we do.
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The volunteer community at Bluestem plays a central role in stewarding the land and supporting the green burials that take place there. Co-directors and co-founders Heidi Hannapel and Jeff Masten always envisioned that the cemetery would be a community-based project but never imagined that so many people would jump on board so quickly. In just the first year of operations, over 120 people joined Bluestem’s volunteer community to play a part, drawn in by the overlapping work of green burial and conservation and, very often, finding something more throughout their service.
Some of Bluestem’s volunteers have connections to the cemetery, whether they have their own plots selected or have loved ones buried in the meadows and woodlands. Anne Allison, a Bluestem volunteer and cultural anthropologist at Duke University, told me that this is one of the key things that drew her to conservation burial. “I love the idea that you’d be caring for the land where you or your loved ones are buried. That is just profound,” she said.
Bluestem volunteers, who hail from a variety of religious and non-religious backgrounds, consistently describe the work of tending graves, stewarding land, and supporting burials as “spiritual” or “sacred.” In our social landscape, where many people are retreating from institutional religion, the sanctuaries of nature are increasingly serving as homes for meditation, spiritual reflection, and community building. And coming together there, not only for recreation or fellowship, but with the intention of caring for our human and non-human kin, serves as an antidote to a status quo individualism.
Bluestem volunteer Marie Cefalo, a retired water conservationist, shared with me one Friday morning about why she is drawn to volunteer her time to support grieving families through green burial and tend to the land. “You think about the sacredness of things out here, and you think about your own mortality,” Marie said. “We are all a part of this human experience. Our lives are filled with joy and sorrow and all kinds of complicated experiences, and then we die. It makes you think about how you’re showing up in the world. At the end of the day, none of our accomplishments matter, but it’s how we treat one another.”
Acts of care for one another, the kind of acts we engage in during green burial, slow us down. Caring forces us to be present to the raw edges of life and death that we would rather hide away, perhaps within glossy caskets and cement vaults, manicured lawns, and flat platitudes. Through slowness and presence, connection springs to life like threads of mycelium, growing in the space between us, delivering nutrients from end to end.
The slowness and presence that happens at Bluestem came into my own life at the perfect time, in the midst of a prolonged season of grief related not only to the deaths of several of my loved ones, but also to a long grappling with the climate crisis. As a young person, I have been simultaneously fighting and mourning for a future that may or may not come since the first time I saw the hockey stick curve in a high school environmental science class. After studying, protesting, and working in “climate action” for just a handful of years, I felt burned out and hopeless, heartsick for the losses to come and the losses already stacking up around us—losses borne primarily by the marginalized, losses rippling through the ecosystems and social systems and nervous systems to which we are all connected.
Raw edges of this kind of existential grief are difficult to describe, let alone face. “Climate grief” or “ecological grief” are new and slippery terms. This is an anticipatory form of grief, one focused on the future. And it is often a disenfranchised form of grief, one that is little talked about. Like all grief, people experience it differently. We—especially the young people across the globe who are experiencing it at high rates—are in a race to learn how to hold it well while also moving quickly to effect change.
In her book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety, Dr. Britt Wray suggests that to grieve well in the ecological crisis, we must “recognize the mobilizing power of grief as more central than the finality of death.”
Before encountering this conservation burial ground and the community that surrounds it, I am not sure I truly believed in “the mobilizing power of grief.” I think I believed that grief could be tended to and assuaged, but I don’t think I believed that grief could be metabolized and turned into raw material for new life. But here, I witness a place that holds so much death regenerate with new life every day. I watch old corn fields teem once more with native bluestem grasses and wildflowers. I see strangers show up for each other on their worst days. I see people deep in grief slowly reconnect with the living world around them. And, as I serve on burial crews and support my neighbors and steward the land with my own hands, my body has something to do with my own grief, too.
Slowing down and tending to the hurting people and places in our world are not the norms of our increasingly individualized lives. And yet it is exactly these difficult practices that have the power to nurture life—in the landscapes around us, within us, and in our social networks. In the face of loss, there is something transformative about drawing closer to nature and to our neighbors rather than distancing ourselves. As the unknown future approaches, we need more communities who are willing to be present to the raw edges of loss and, in the face of it, commit to the tender processes of grieving, caring for one another, and stewarding regeneration—whatever that may look like in our different places and contexts.
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One Friday at Bluestem, our little volunteer crew spends the morning visiting graves, making sure soil is settling evenly, removing invasive species, and spreading more native grass and wildflower seed where it is needed. There are now over 80 “residents” at Bluestem, people who have chosen to return their bodies simply to the earth and, in their death, nurture the life of these Piedmont ecosystems.
On this morning, we also dig a new grave in the forest for a young person who we do not know, and it feels appropriate to speak a blessing. After the grave is dug and small cedar branches have been layered in the bottom to create a soft landing place, a few of us stand in a circle and read a John O’Donohue blessing, line by line. May we reverence the village of presence, in the stillness of this silent field, in the stillness of these silent woods, someone reads to close. We add that last line, mindful that we stand among the oaks, the hickories, and the beech trees. Soon, this young one, gone from the world too soon, will rest among the village of these towering trees.
Quoting Ecclesiastes, Norman Wirzba writes that it is those who “are joined with all the living” who have hope. This piece of biblical wisdom sounds a bit like the conservation principle of connectivity, where resilience is enhanced as ecosystems are linked together, or the indigenous certainty that everything is connected. In the fragility of our lives, in our grief, and even in our death, it is the sacred “village of presence” we all lay within that reminds us we are not alone, that maybe our hope for new life is precisely here, within our interconnection and our dependence on one another.
Asking other Bluestem volunteers about what gives them hope in our climate-changed world, I was heartened by each of their answers. “There is just too much beauty around to be nihilistic about it,” said Noah. Long-time volunteer James Gartrell said that it is “the energy that a family puts into remembering and honoring their loved one,” the energy of love and care that “will never be destroyed” that gives him hope. Others spoke with joy about the small acts of care that they can enact within their circles of influence, the mycelia they extend to nourish and be nourished.
Green burial is, of course, only one piece of the long, slow process of righting our relationship with one another and with the rest of creation. We have a long way to go in learning to hold loss and grief well, and to faithfully steward resilience in the face of it. But connecting with nature and my neighbors through slow presence and through the simple tasks of care week after week, I watch the landscapes around and within us regenerate—even here in a cemetery—and that gives me hope.