Grave Matters chronicles the experiences of American 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.

Mark Harris is a former environmental columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. His articles and essays have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, E/The Environmental Magazine, Reader's Digest, and Hope. He lives with his family in Pennsylvania. Visit his website at www.gravematters.us.

PrefaceOn a blustery late afternoon near the end of May, I joined a band of hikers that trekked a mowed path snaking through the grounds of the Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve. Our rough trail took in a large swath of this hundred-acre burial site in the heart of New York's Finger Lakes region, leading us into wetland and meadows, and, as we ventured off trail, into a large, wooded tract that borders the four thousand-acre Arnot Forest. It was there, under a canopy of maples, ash, and beech that we came upon fragile-looking wild geraniums and tiny, seven-pointed starflowers, saw the delicate purple gaywing rising resolutely from the forest floor.Emerging from the woods on our return to the keeper's cottage, red-winged blackbirds gliding in the distance, we climbed the meadow hillside that constitutes Greensprings's main burial ground, each grave site staked with a fluttering red flag. No body had yet been buried at the time of our visit; Greensprings's dedication was planned for the following day. But walking the cemetery grounds that afternoon, experiencing up close this thriving ecosystem of the Southern Tier, I couldn't help but believe that many people will seek their final rest here. One doesn't need to be an outdoors enthusiast to feel the powerful pull of the Greensprings promise: a return to bucolic, bountiful countryside in as simple and natural a way as possible. Per cemetery policy, no vaults or embalming will be allowed. Caskets must be basic and made from readily biodegradable materials. Fieldstones may mark the grave site, but native trees and shrubs are welcome as well. The idea is to allow the body to rejoin the elements, to use what remains of a life to regenerate new life, to return dust to dust.It's a concept hugely at odds with modern burial -- and it's catching on. Greensprings is one of some dozen woodland burial grounds that have sprung up in this country since a family physician named Billy Campbell opened South Carolina's Ramsey Creek Preserve to burial in the fall of 1998. A score of others are in the planning stages.Natural cemeteries like Greensprings are literally regreening the deathscape in America. But as I discovered when I journeyed into the growing, green burial underground that's beginning to surface in this country, it's just one of many strategies we're embracing in search of more meaningful, more fitting, and, ultimately, more natural alternatives to the generic send-off proffered by the local funeral home. And if my research and travels of the last two years are any indication, it's doing nothing less than rewriting -- and, in the process, re-righting -- the American Way of Death.I turned up a host of alternatives in my search. I found families who had their loved ones' ashes added to fireworks that blasted out colorful displays, still others who had ashes pressed into diamonds that looked like the real thing. Given an interest in environmental issues, I was most attracted to -- and thus chose to focus on -- what has become known as natural burial. Like "organic" or "green" or any of the variants on ecofriendly, "natural" defies easy definition. In this new burial movement, a few characteristics stand out. For one, natural burials tend to consume significantly fewer resources than standard funerals, going light on the goods and services that fill out the General Price List the local mortician is required to hand anyone who knocks at his door. Caskets, when used at all, are of plain, wood make; embalming is almost always avoided. As a consequence, these funeral costs tally into the hundreds and low -- not many -- thousands of dollars. Families generally also take a more active role in the conduct of the funeral.In the end, these families choose natural burial because it achieves the very end our modern funeral industry labors to prevent at literally all costs: to allow, and even invite, the decay of one's physical body --