‘Green’ burials are helping restore Texas land. Not everyone digs the trend.

BROOKSHIRE, TEXAS — Denise Manos stood under the hot Texas sun, staring at the 68-acre prairie springing to life ahead of her. She’d come here, to the newly opened Blazing Star Sanctuary in Brookshire, Texas, “to face the unfaceable,” she said. Her eyes scanned the flat, grassy expanse where conservationists are revitalizing the soil so it can become home once again to the tallgrass prairie that once covered 20 million acres of Texas land. Someday, Manos decided, she will call this soil home, too – or at least, her body will. 

After touring the sanctuary on this hot June morning, Manos made the ultimate final decision: She will purchase a plot in the sanctuary’s newly opened conservation cemetery, joining a growing number of Americans choosing “green” burials – funerals that eschew embalming and seek simple, biodegradable coffins or burial shrouds, in low-density cemeteries often marked with flat grave markers rather than headstones.

Talking about death can be scary and offputting; as a result, fewer than one in five Americans pre-arrange their funerals, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. But Manos, 67, has become accustomed to staring her fears in the face, since her 2009 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis. 

“What’s it going to do? Scare you? It can’t scare you any more than cancer,” she told Straight Arrow News. “Hurt you? You can’t hurt me any more. You might as well face up to it.”

Why are people interested in green burials?

The concept of green funerals is both new and old. While there has been a recent surge of interest in green burials, many of the world’s major religions have long held characteristics of these funerals, like the lack of embalming, as central tenets. 

A 2024 survey conducted by the NFDA found that 68% of Americans have an interest in exploring green funerals, up from 56% four years earlier. The top reasons: Environmental concerns, followed by cost. But Kimberley Campbell, who in 1998 launched the nation’s first conservation cemetery with her husband, said she has seen one reason rise above all the others for more than 25 years. 

“A lot of people say how they don’t go back to cemeteries to visit,” Campbell told SAN. “They seem very sterile spaces, just places to house the dead and they don’t seem to serve many other functions in the community.”

Conservation cemeteries like Campbell’s 78-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve in South Carolina, and Nature’s Burial in Texas, represent a particular subset of green cemeteries that combine green burials with habitat restoration and land conservation. By definition, Campbell said, these cemeteries offer the same kinds of locations people seek out for a hike or walk in the woods. 

“We get people who come because they love the idea of being buried in nature. It’s a peaceful, spiritual place for them,” Campbell said. “They like the idea that after they are dead, it’s sort of a living legacy that people can come and learn about plants and just experience peace and calm.” 

Campbell and her husband hosted one burial in their first year of operation. Since then, hundreds more have bought plots, though the preserve retains its commitment to the Conservation Burial Alliance’s recommended limit of no more than 300 burials per acre, about 75% lower than the density common in traditional cemeteries.

What are the concerns about green burials?

Not everyone is a fan of the idea. 

In 2020, Peter and Annica Quakenbush purchased 20 acres of forest in Brooks Township, Michigan, a small town of about 3,700 residents an hour north of Grand Rapids. Their dream from the outset was to create a space where families could bury their loved ones in a quiet setting, and return to walk footpaths weaving between trees. At the time they bought the property, Brooks Township had no laws preventing the Quakenbushes from opening a green cemetery like the one they envisioned. 

“I had checked the ordinances of the township to see if a cemetery would be possible,” Peter Quakenbush told SAN. “And as they were written at that time, cemeteries were mentioned once.”

According to the ordinances, cemeteries were allowed, as long as they fit the area they were zoned for — in this case, low-density residential — and had a special use permit. 

“I was like, OK, cool. We could have a cemetery as long as they give us the permission — you know, jump through some hoops,” Quakenbush said.

So he started jumping.

Soon, neighbors came forward with concerns about how a cemetery could affect the water table and traffic patterns.

NIMBYism, said Quakenbush.

“One of the first things we did was we went to the district health department, because they are the ones in charge of surveying the land and giving you the permit of whether or not this site is appropriate for a cemetery,” he told SAN. “And so they had a guy come out, dug a couple of holes, and they established that we were above the water table.”

But the pushback persisted. In 2023, the town adopted a new ordinance that declared “Cemeteries are expressly prohibited and banned within Brooks Township.” The prohibition, according to the ordinance, “is essential for the health, safety and welfare of Brooks Township property owners, residents and visitors.”

The Quakenbushes sued — and won. Still, the battle continued. Earlier this year, Brooks Township adopted a new ordinance: Rather than banning cemeteries, the town stipulates a detailed set of criteria a prospective cemetery must meet. 

“They no longer outright ban all cemeteries, but if you look at it, they have excluded us in every way possible, essentially,” Quakenbush told SAN. “We have 20 acres, but according to the new ordinances, you have to have at least 40 acres. We’re 1,000 feet from a river, now you’ve got to be at least 2,000 feet from a river. That type of thing.” 

SAN repeatedly reached out to Brooks Township Supervisor Cory Nelson and the town’s zoning official Joseph Selzer for comment on this story; neither official responded.

Is it OK to bury someone without embalming them first?

Jimmy Olson, who owns Olson Funeral Home & Cremation Services in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, isn’t surprised by the kerfuffle. An expert in natural burials, he has seen what he calls “the ick factor” turn into misconceptions about the funeral industry for years. 

One big trigger, he told SAN, is the fact that green burials forego embalming. First introduced to Americans around the Civil War, embalming has become so ingrained in U.S. culture that skipping that step has taken on a certain taboo. 

“The first day of embalming class, the first thing they teach you is the three reasons for embalming,” Olson said. “It is to sanitize, and for appearance’s sake. And lastly, the side effect is preservation, but we don’t count on preservation.”

While embalming has become synonymous with preserving a person’s body — a hope for permanence after death — the results are very temporary. 

“We want them to look good for three or four days so we can have a funeral. That’s the only reason for embalming,” Olson said. “If we were to open someone up a few years from now, there’s not going to be anything left except carbon, calcium and phosphate, which are the bones.”

Green burials require skipping embalming to limit the formaldehyde being added to the earth’s soil. 

“Do we want to put formaldehyde in our earth where our drinking water ultimately comes from?” asked Bethany Foshée, cemetery manager at Nature’s Burial in Texas. “No. But there’s nothing harmful in a human body. We are dust to dust.”

And Foshée hopes that dust can help regenerate a critical habitat lost to time.

Do green burials have environmental impact?

The Coastal Prairie region spanning from Brownsville, Texas, to southwest Louisiana once held 20 million acres of tallgrass prairie. These days, it’s among the nation’s most endangered ecosystems, with only 1% still home to the prairies. That’s an especially big drop in flood-prone coastal Texas, where a 2015 Harris County Flood Control study found that one acre of native prairie has the water-holding capacity to mitigate 3.5 inches of rainfall during a 100-year flood event.

The Coastal Prairie Conservancy, which manages Nature’s Burial, is focused on restoring tallgrass prairies. To date, the organization has conserved more than 33,000 acres of Texas land. 

The conservation cemetery in Brookshire will help this cause, Foshée told SAN as she toed along a sea of grass bouncing back to life. She pointed to a wetland a few dozen yards from the sites of the cemetery’s first burials, tucked into the ground just months ago. 

“You can’t really see the water,” she said, nodding to a rippling sinew of plants. 

“That’s because it’s covered with this really interesting Jurassic plant that’s a very early vascular plant,” she said, gazing at a mass of green leaves with the texture of pine needles. “What’s cool was when we restored this wetland, that plant came back to life. That plant was waiting on us to put the wetland back where it was.”

Then came the animals that had been waiting for the plants. 

“The second we started doing prairie and wetland restoration, all of these birds that have had reduced populations because they’re losing their habitats — they all showed up,” Foshée said. “They’re like, ‘We found you!’”

She pointed to a black-necked stilt, and ticked off others that regularly appear: great egrets; mottled ducks; little blue herons; great blue herons; whistling ducks; killdeer; greater yellowlegs; and a meadow lark she noted singing in the distance. 

As she works with troops of volunteers to reintroduce more plants throughout the sanctuary’s planned 1,700 natural burial plots – each sized at 8 by 13.5 feet, a little more than three times as large as the typical American plot size –  she anticipates more birds will return as well.

A return to the earth

Manos listened intently as Foshée led her through the cemetery, noting places where cover crop will be turned back into its native grass in just a few months’ time when the soil is ready. 

She listened to those singing meadow larks. 

She knows that when the time comes for her to rest in her most permanent place, she will no longer be able to hear the larks’ sing-song warble. 

But still. 

“It’s just amazing, and wonderful,” she said. “Returning yourself back to the earth, and not disturbing our ecosystem in any way. I just think it’s beautiful.”