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Eco-friendly cemetery offers 'green burial'

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For most people, planning a funeral means choosing between cremation and a traditional burial.An average funeral costs about $6,000, but now there is a way to save green if you're willing to go green.When you think of a cemetery, usually dozens of rows of marble headstones crowded together lining acres of burial ground comes to mind.However, one Texas cemetery is alive with the remains of people who chose to go green even in death.
"This place is unique and special because it's alive," said George Russell, owner of the Ethician Family Cemetery.On the banks of the Trinity River there are dozens of species of birds, exotic wildlife and 81 acres of land unlike any other in Texathe state's first green cemetery and it is an eco-friendly final resting place where a person is buried without embalming fluid and without a coffin."Green burial is a form of eternal life because we humans are nothing more than recycled material," he said.Russell says that once the corpses are placed in the ground they become fertilizer and become food for the living.
"You have all sorts of micro-organisms and worms and the roots of trees that feed on you," Russell said.Graves are dug by hand — no backhoes, just shovels — and families are encouraged to dig themselves."It makes it such an intimate experience for the family," Russell said.
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3 responses // Eco-friendly cemetery offers 'green burial'

  • This is a great alternative to the big box burials.
    Our family had the task recently when our dear father died at 90.

    He was a progressive guy with a wicked sense of humor. He didn't want us to bother and arranged a cheap cremation at $500.00 and wanted them to put the ashes in the dumpster at the funeral parlor.

    Of course we couldn't do that. We took his ashes to the warm Atlantic Ocean and let him out there because we know that he loved being warm.

    It was the most difficult task we ever had in our lives but we all smile when we think of him swimming around the world in the sparkling seas.
    http://www.classifiedcircles.org/Samspector.htm

    CarolynGillis
  • I have been telling my friends and family for decades that I want my body to be sewn-up in a cheap jute bag and buried atop a hill, and an oak sapling planted above me. This way, my descendants will be able to enjoy the shade of that oak tree and the children able to climb in it, hang swings from it, build a tree house in it. Unfortunately, the law in my neck of the woods forbids the burial of people on private land or out in the countryside - it is either a cemetery or a crematorium for us. On the other hand, embalming is not widespread at all here, so the bodies that are buried in the cemeteries are not full of toxic fluids and therefore do not poison the aquifers.
    Vierotchka
  • This is wonderful. I am quite young but I have always wanted a way to be buried that my body would actually decompose. I don't understand why people get pumped full of all the preservatives and want to be buried in fancy caskets. I think that it is good that people are finally excepting their death and letting their bodies decompose in a "green" way.
    Hunter2323

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