To help Earth’s future, people are getting buried like it’s 1860

By Tara Bahrampour

Mia Zinn was a member of her middle school ecology club, had planted a reflection garden and had implored public officials to preserve a local woods, and when she became terminally ill, she wanted to become a tree. So, the day after she died, her father, Chris Zinn, visited Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum in Baltimore County, a 45-minute drive from the family’s home in Abingdon, Md. He was drawn to a wooded area that opened up to a wedge of western sky.

“That was the perfect spot,” he said. “It reminded me a lot of an area that we hiked many, many times near here.”

Mia died last month at 17 of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, and became the third person interred at Serenity Ridge. The site is one of a growing number of cemeteries in the United States offering natural, or green, burials in response to demand from the environmentally conscious. Read more »

To help Earth’s future, people are getting buried like it’s 1860
Tagged on: