Sun Jul 20, 02025, 5:30PM UTC
Regina Harrison and Michelle Hogle Acciavatti
What is Green Burial?
What is the long-term future for burial practices? Come hear about sustainable alternatives to traditional burial and cremation. There is a small but growing movement away from toxic embalming, caskets built for forever, and even fossil fuel-intensive cremation. Methods like earth composting, water composting, and mycelial (mushroom) caskets are becoming part of the conversation. Join us as Long Now Boston explores ways we can positively affect the world we live in for future generations.
“A tasty snack for the earth!” is how Long Now Boston’s guest speaker Michelle Hogle Acciavatti refers to our bodies after death—an image at odds with the nutrient-depleted alkaline powder of cremains (cremated remains). Michelle is a trained neuroscientist and thanatologist (death specialist) who advocates for feeding our juicy bodies back to the planet that fed us throughout life. At Long Now Boston’s “What is Green Burial?” program July 20, Michelle, along with Regina Harrison, director of sales at historic Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, addressed everything you’ve ever wondered about green, or natural, burial but were afraid to ask.
Regina Harrison is Director of Sales at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge/Watertown, Massachusetts, where she has worked in various roles for over 15 years, starting in administration and gradually becoming involved in cemetery services and sales. She and her team meet with families, couples, and individuals to match people with the burial options that are right for them, whether they are planning ahead or facing an immediate need for burial space. Many people start their end of life planning with a visit to a cemetery, so these meetings often involve providing education about end of life issues in general. As a result, general death education has become part of the mission of the sales team under Regina’s management. Regina also serves on the board of the New England Cemetery Association, which is dedicated to supporting the work of regional cemeteries through collaboration and shared knowledge, and is a member of the Cremation Association of North America’s Magazine Advisory Board.
With an undergraduate degree (University of Chicago) and a master’s degree (McGill University) in social anthropology, Regina sees her cemetery work in the context of overall cultural beliefs about death and how to take care of and commemorate the dead. As a bird watcher and gardener, she is glad to be involved in end of life matters at a time when environmental impacts and sustainability have become a part of how we think about our deaths, and to be at a cemetery like Mount Auburn where sustainability is a part of our mission.
Regina Harrison
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Michelle Hogle Acciavatti (she/her/they), M.Sci., is a natural deathcare worker and the founder of Vermont Forest Cemetery the first natural burial ground in Vermont. She is a licensed funeral director, death doula, pregnancy loss guide, home funeral guide, end of life specialist and natural burial educator. In 2016 after 3 years of serving in the hospice system, she created Green Mountain Funeral Alternatives to help people preparing for the end of life, designing funeral services, caring for their own dead, and exploring natural burial options.
Michelle has trained as a mortician, an advance care planner, an end of life doula, a home funeral guide, a natural burial advocate & educator, a writer, a neuroscientist, and an ethicist. She is a founding member of The Collective for Radical Death Studies. She has practiced death work with people of all ages, including death during pregnancy. Her work has found her in settings as varied as the forest, Boston Children’s Hospital, the State House, and people’s own living rooms as well as the traditional funeral home. She loves being outdoors, ideally in the sun, usually by water, often with a cup of tea, and almost always with a book.
Michelle Hogle Acciavatti
Speakers
“A tasty snack for the earth!” is how Long Now Boston’s guest speaker Michelle Hogle Acciavatti refers to our bodies after death—an image at odds with the nutrient-depleted alkaline powder of cremains (cremated remains). Michelle is a trained neuroscientist and thanatologist (death specialist) who advocates for feeding our juicy bodies back to the planet that fed us throughout life. At Long Now Boston’s “What is Green Burial?” program July 20, Michelle, along with Regina Harrison, director of sales at historic Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Watertown, addressed everything you’ve ever wondered about green, or natural, burial but were afraid to ask.
After a short video about Michelle’s Vermont Forest Cemetery, which she created as the state’s first green/natural cemetery, Michelle “dug in” to the “ick factor.” In scientific terms, she explained how, unlike traditional burial that often seeks to delay decomposition with durable caskets and embalming agents, green burial removes barriers to decomposition, returning nutrients to the environment as quickly and cleanly as possible. That means using the body’s own gut biome to start the decomposition. It also means burying the body shallowly enough to be metabolized by mycorrhizae (the fungal networks that enable communication of nutrients to trees and plants).
Regina outlined the history of body disposition in the United States, where until the Civil War natural burial was typical. However, with dead soldiers needing to be transported long distances back to their families, the preservation technique of embalming became commonplace, and President Lincoln’s funeral train and fancy coffin kindled interest in ornate, durable “forever” caskets. In recent years cheap tombstones from India and China have come with high fossil fuel price tags. Regina said now, increasingly sustainable-minded customers are opting for local stone, numerical plaques, or even geolocated digital markers.
The Population Reference Bureau surmises that over seven percent of humans who have ever lived are alive today. That’s around 632 billion pounds of human bodies! Over 60% of Americans choose cremation, which, Michelle explained, is relatively cheap and space-efficient, but sends the ecosystem’s nutritious “tasty snack” up the chimney, creating negative externalities like fossil fuel consumption, CO2, chemical impurities, and heat.
The speakers answered questions ranging from whether animals can smell green burials and try to dig at them, to the celebrity fad of mushroom shrouds (they can introduce non-native fungi that then throw off the native fungi balance), to the timelines for decomposition, to natural organic reduction (NOR, a.k.a. accelerated human composting), and alkaline hydrolysis (water composting), to the regulatory frameworks, to relative costs, both in money and environmental toll.
The biggest takeaway was that, in the Long Now spirit of being better ancestors, what we do with our corpses will have a significant effect on the planet we leave behind. With informed planning, the decision can be active and meaningful, rather than merely an administrative afterthought.