How can we die in accordance with our environmental values? Does our collective fear of death worsen climate change? How can facing mortality be an important climate action, and how can we plan our death so it can heal the earth?
Join me this week as I talk with environmental educator Mallory McDuff, author of Our Last Best Act, a book on planning our deaths to protect the people and places we love. At the heart of this ostensibly morbid topic, it turns out that planning for a green burial can be a surprisingly delightful, fulfilling, and collective climate action.
Shownotes:
- McDuff’s website
- For Humboldt County listeners, green burial resources at Sacred Grove in Kneeland
- What’s a death doula?
- Recompose and Earth (two options) for human composting
- How do donate your body to a body farm
- Moss and Thistle farm green burial resources
- Funeral Consumers Alliance website
- Green Burial Council website
Transcript:
MCDUFF: In every group I’ve spoken with and every class I’ve taught, it hasn’t been a lack of interest in talking about death, as opposed to a dearth of spaces where people are invited to share their experiences.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I’m Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate-despairing human.
How can we die in accordance with our environmental values? Does our collective fear of death worsen climate change? How can facing mortality be an important climate action? How can we plan our death so it can heal the Earth? Might it be possible that planning our green deaths gives our lives greater meaning, relief, and even joy?
Death can be a difficult conversational topic, for sure. But thinking about how we die and reconciling ourselves to the reality of death are often considered essential ingredients to living a fulfilled and positive life. More and more, people are also talking about how confronting mortality can feel healing and make us happier, kinder, and more compassionate. Some are even arguing it can help address our social, political, and ecological ills.
You may not be aware of the ecological impacts of what happens to our bodies after we die. Each year in the United States, conventional burials require the production and transport of 104,000 tons of steel, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and 1.6 million gallons of the known carcinogen formaldehyde in embalming fluids, and 20 million board feet of hardwood.
The embalming fluids and buried bodies leach into the groundwater, while pesticides used to maintain manicured cemetery lawns can harm wildlife and water quality as well. The bottom line of all of this is that burial grounds often function more like landfills than bucolic resting places.
These are the words and ideas of my guest today, Mallory McDuff, author of a book about green burial: Our Last, Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love. This practical book helps readers face end-of-life planning with climate and community in mind. It’s also very much about the stories of people who live and work in the world of better death practices.
It’s a beautiful handbook that fills a void in the conversations about death by bringing the Earth into the conversation, and it invites us to feel a sense of empowerment and agency over making sure we punctuate our lives on this planet as lovingly as possible, to be in alignment with how we want to live, too.
Mallory McDuff writes and teaches environmental education at Warren Wilson College near the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. In addition to Our Last Best Act, Mallory is the author of Love Your Mother, 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice, a book called Sacred Acts: How Churches Are Working to Protect Earth’s Climate, a book called Natural Saints: How People of Faith Are Working to Save God’s Earth, and coauthor of Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques. Mallory has published more than 50 essays in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Sojourners, and more.
So, are you ready to learn more about how to die in a way that helps rather than hurts the planet? Let’s jump into this book with author, educator, mother, and green burial expert Mallory McDuff.
Welcome to the show, Mallory.
McDuff: Thank you so much.
Ray: Why don’t we start with your story—how you came to think about and want to write your book, Our Last Best Act, which is about green burials on the surface, but it’s about a lot more than that.
MCDUFF:Sure. I didn’t grow up thinking writing about death, dying, and climate justice was going to be the focus of a big part of my life. But it was a really personal connection. My parents’ untimely and tragic deaths happened when they were about my age. I’m 60—well, I turn 60 in a week—and my mom died when she was in her late 50s. She was hit by a teen driver while biking from a yoga class to the community-supported agriculture site, where they volunteered in exchange for their food.
Then my dad, two years later, died in the exact same way on a different street—biking on the side of the road with a reflective vest. After her death, he called us all to our hometown of Fairhope, Alabama, and he basically read to us a two-page document that outlined his wishes for a burial that relied on family and friends, and not as much on a funeral home.
At the time, I thought this was just his way of grieving. So, of course, we said we’d do everything he wanted. But when he ended up dying in a very similar accident, we had to put those plans into place. Without that plan, I don’t think we would have had the momentum and the grounding—and honestly, just that spiritual cohesion of knowing we were honoring his wishes. I can’t describe how much power and agency that provides at a time when, at least personally, I was feeling completely unmoored.
RAY:Yeah. In your book, you quote Ross Gay, who said something like joy has nothing to do with ease; it has to do with the fact that we’re all going to die. You said that’s how your parents felt about death, or at least your dad did.
What is the connection your parents felt between joy and mortality? How does that show up for you now that you’ve been diving into it?
MCDUFF:One thing I talk to my students about is that the conversations my parents—and particularly my dad—had with us about death were very consistent with the conversation he had with us about, “Hey, we’re all going to go chop wood this morning,” or “We’re giving up trash for Lent, the 40 days before Easter.” One of the things we did growing up was try not to generate any trash for 40 days. At the time, I wasn’t in charge of this as a teenager.
As I’ve gotten older, and as I’ve looked at how I can really learn something—not a silver lining of my parents’ deaths, because I really wish they were here to see my daughters, who are now in their 20s—it’s not a silver lining at all. But it’s: how do we create meaning from things that happen in our lives? For me, one of the ways to create meaning was to start to look at my own final wishes.
I had decided on flame cremation, which most of my friends had in their final directives. But I was learning more and more about other choices, and I was finding joy in the search, which is kind of wild. How do you find joy in researching death and dying? The joy came from the same kind of search that propelled my dad into: how could we give up trash for a family of six for 40 days? For him, it was a journey, kind of an adventure.
I think that’s where I’ve learned—talking with so many groups, and now teaching this class for two years—that we can find delight in talking about something that we all share. The delight doesn’t come from looking forward to death, but from realizing that our plans can align our values and our life with our death. That can be a point of congruence for us and for the people who care about us at a time when, for a lot of us, there’s dissonance and confusion and feeling ungrounded. Oddly enough, this place has become, for me, a point of congruence.
RAY:So it’s not joy in the way a toxic positivity culture might interpret it. It’s meaning-making. It’s congruence. It’s relief—an alleviation of dissonance. You use the word “adventure,” and it sounds like your family raised you with this normalization of death in a way that was a gift.
Does that sound right?
MCDUFF:Yeah, it does. Honestly, as a child I had not experienced a lot of deaths of people close to me, but there was this: one day my dad came up from his woodshop and said, “Hey, here’s a prototype of my casket.” It was a little pine box. As a teenager, you’re like, “Okay, fine.”
But it was beautiful. I remember rubbing my hands against the smooth wood he’d sanded. He put it on my mom’s bedside table, and that’s where she kept her jewelry. It wasn’t in my face, but it was a reminder. I share this with my students, too: it’s kind of like when parents talk to a kid about puberty. We hope it’s not one conversation. We wish it could be one, but it’s really this continual revisiting of talking about death and dying.
For me, I realized that in my 30s I thought, “Here are my directives for my body.” At the time it was flame cremation. In my book, it was a search to explore other, more sustainable options, but I realized final wishes are like jeans. You may not be wearing the same pair you wore in high school when you’re 60. You have to constantly revisit what’s available, because the options are changing—daily—in a positive way.
In every state there are more and more options, not just for green burial. My book goes into other options, too, from green burial to aquamation—another form of cremation using water and lye—to human composting, also called natural organic reduction.
I really had no idea these were available until I started researching. At the time I started the book, I thought I knew my topic because I’d written about conservation burial grounds, where the land is protected in perpetuity by conservation easements—legal agreements that protect the land from development in perpetuity. Under that umbrella of green burial, conservation burial is the most sustainable tip, for lack of a better word, in terms of protecting the land. Most conservation burial grounds also prioritize restoration of the land.
I really thought flame cremation and burial were the two options.
RAY:Oh yeah. Totally.
MCDUFF:And there’s so much more.
RAY:I’m so sensitive to the listener who may have turned this off already because they’re thinking, “This is going to be about green burial. I can’t face it.” So let’s tiptoe up to death and ask: why is this something that could even be fun to talk about, rather than morbid or neutral?
You said teaching death, dying, and climate justice has been the most transformative course for you in 25 years as a teacher. You said it has involved not only students but also their families in attempting to reckon with how to align their values for climate and communities in their lives and deaths.
How do you get them to want to do that? How do they take it? With a name like “Death and Dying” in the title, how do you even get them in the room?
MCDUFF:To be honest, I want to be clear that I teach environmental education. I don’t have expertise in the philosophy of death. I teach environmental education and I’ve written a book about sustainable end-of-life wishes. I had no idea how students were going to enter this conversation.
I’ve taught the class two times. At the college level, we’re often evaluated by what students write on those little forms at the end of the semester, and I dread them because your brain remembers the negative comments. But in this class, I just haven’t experienced anything like it. I consider myself someone who invests a lot of time in teaching, and that’s my priority. I’m at a liberal arts college that prioritizes teaching, but it was like the content was the character in this course, not me, not the students.
Most of my students were between 19 and 26. I wondered how they’d engage. And I’ll tell you: people signed up. There was a waitlist. I didn’t start the class with, “Let’s confront our mortality.” I started with markers and paper and said, “Draw your experiences with death.” Everybody had something to draw. Everyone.
These are young people, and they had heavy stories. This year, two people in the class had moms who died when they were teenagers. For others it was a partner, or a good friend. It became personal very quickly, but not in a weird way. It became personal in a way where we respected each other’s stories.
We entered the class like voyagers who all had some experience. Even the kids who hadn’t had someone super close die knew people who had died. What’s been interesting is that in every group I’ve spoken with and every class I’ve taught, it hasn’t been a lack of interest in talking about death as opposed to a dearth of spaces where people are invited to share their experiences.
I talk in a lot of congregations and faith communities. We laugh, and I usually cry a little bit—I get teary-eyed telling these stories and listening to people’s stories. Opening up spaces for people to share has made me realize maybe the problem isn’t as much denial as a lack of space to talk.
RAY: What you’re describing—respecting everybody’s stories and honoring that grief is part of everyone’s reality—gives us this incredible groundwork of compassion. It makes it so much more inviting for everyone to participate in the project of the class. That’s a model for teaching and for group work anywhere.
I do want to poke more at this beast of death denial. You write that the fear and ignorance of death is a recent American cultural phenomenon. What do you mean by that? Is there a uniquely American flavor of this, and why is it recent? Is it part of a story of an American denial of nature as well?
MCDUFF:I think exploring more sustainable options around death and dying is directly related to connecting to the natural world—whatever context you live in. These questions and the availability of options depend on where you live. You can fly your body to Washington State to go to Recompose and get human composting, but that wouldn’t be very sustainable. So where you live matters. But the bottom line is that there’s an expansion of available options everywhere.
On why fear and ignorance of death is recent in American culture: embalming—the injection of chemicals into the body to preserve it—really only started around the Civil War. That was to preserve bodies so they could be shipped north and reunited with families. For most people at the end of the Civil War, the first public figure they saw embalmed was Abraham Lincoln, whose body was transported by train across the country.
A lot of the shift in how we handle death—outsourcing it to funeral homes—started with the Civil War. Embalming is not required in any state. That’s a misconception. Culturally, different groups may practice embalming more than others, and for some cultures the open casket is important, but it’s not legally required anywhere.
Even the idea of a concrete vault—part of conventional burial, where you have essentially a concrete box in the grave—evolved. Earlier it was about keeping the body “sacred” from the elements. What it became was convenience: it kept the ground level for landscapers at cemeteries.
When we buried my parents, there wasn’t a concrete vault. There wasn’t embalming. They had biodegradable containers: in their case, a casket. You can bury a body without a vault. In conservation burial grounds, you mound the soil on top of the grave so when it rains and the ground settles, the grave doesn’t sink.
When we buried my parents, we didn’t even have the term “green burial.” Over the years we’ve added soil on top and thrown in grass seed. We have a picture of the cousins, my siblings, and my kids standing with their shovels from two years ago where we tended the grave—what people have done for generations.
This commodification of death is recent: embalming, concrete vaults, and the industry around it.
One more thing: my dad didn’t want the “green grass” vibe. He wanted the family and friends, not the funeral home. But in his death it was a hit-and-run; the teenager who hit him left the scene. When we found out he had died, we didn’t know where his body was. He wanted a home funeral—meaning his body kept at home—but we didn’t know where he was. It turned out he was at the coroner’s office, and then his body was delivered to the local funeral home.
I had to do a lot of learning and let go of stereotypes about funeral homes. The local funeral home played an important role: they kept his body cool in a refrigerated room. Then we prepared his body for burial and put him in the casket a friend had built. There are funeral homes now collaborating with green burial sites, so it’s not “us versus them.” As a consumer, how can you ask for what you need and not more?
RAY: Your story about your dad raises the question of it not just being about the environmental impact of your body in the land. That’s a big part of your research—how do we reduce the environmental impact of our bodies after we die?
But you also weave in how outsourcing death to funeral homes, commodifying it, and normalizing not bearing witness to it is a kind of privilege. Part of your dad’s wishes were that the family be right there in it—roll up the sleeves.
You have a story where your daughter doesn’t remember much about your dad, but she remembers putting dirt on his grave. It invites people to think the “environmental” part isn’t just the impact of your body, but what happens in community and family: bearing witness together and participating in rituals around the body.
Can you speak to what you discovered in your research about community and family?
MCDUFF: Part of the class I teach is interfacing with people who have devoted their lives to helping families and friends create community in the tragedy—and inevitable reality—of death. Anybody we talk with, that’s their whole approach. Yes, it’s for the land and the environment and the climate, but there are these concurrent gains: grounding with each other and community.
You can’t take that away from someone. In the months after my mom died, my father did not expect to live only two more years. He wanted to ensure we were a part of his death. The idea of having shovels by the gravesite is fairly common in green burial now, but he had witnessed it once—at the burial of one of my mom’s uncles, an Episcopal bishop, buried at Sewanee in Tennessee. He saw the shovels and said, “I want that.”
In hindsight, I watched him go through life noticing things and thinking, “I want that in my death.” With the students, one component of the final exam is writing their own final wishes: a two-page letter, plus completing the paperwork—power of attorney and the legal forms.
What’s most poignant to me is the two-page letter to friends and family where they plan their own funeral. It’s so sweet. I bawl reading them because they articulate their connection not just to ecological communities, but to human communities, all of which are part of nature, in a very personal way: “I want my friend who plays the banjo to play at my gravesite,” or “I want this kind of food.” By sharing that, they build community years—hopefully years—before their deaths.
I’ve thought about requiring them to read it to their families, but that might be pushing the edge of my control-freak capacities. Some do, because they’ve been talking about the class. They’ll say, “I call my mom after every field trip.” I love that. For others, they’re not ready to share it with their parents, and I get that.
Ray: And that might be pushing the edge.
MCDUFF: Some of my students say their grandma is in her 90s and it’s time for her to make plans, but she doesn’t want to. So the young people are pushing. Other times it’s the opposite: a family member is more into it than they are. That’s just the diversity of experiences around anything in a family.
RAY: Something I really got from your book, especially in your description of your father, is that participation and clear instructions aren’t only about the wishes of the person who dies. They’re about healing, meaning-making, and reducing suffering for the people left with grief.
I was struck by how much your father’s clarity helped you and your family get through it—maybe even more than it was about what he wanted.
MCDUFF: Completely. I talk to students about this: it seems like it’s for you, but you’re not going to be around.
When I found out my dad had died and I got back to Alabama, it was a full day trip. We knew we didn’t have much time because he didn’t want to be embalmed, and we weren’t going to keep him refrigerated for a long time. We thought we had about three days, and we didn’t think we could do any of the things on his list. We didn’t know where his body was.
A lot of families are in that situation: someone has wishes, but the situation is different for some reason. We sat together in my parents’ living room, and I said: if we can do one thing on the list—one thing—then we’re good. We decided that one thing was calling his friend to see if he would build the casket. My dad had already talked to him, and the friend said, “Oh yeah, I’ll put it on later.” Once you do one thing, it’s not that hard. We did almost everything on his list except keeping his body at home.
Directives are for the people who have to carry them out. I’ve watched too many families say, “So-and-so died, but they didn’t leave any directives. We have no idea what they would want.” You’re stuck figuring out logistics at a time that is intensely logistics-laden. It’s like planning a wedding—so many details. Having steps laid out is huge. It’s a gift for the people who are there.
The last page of my book is a two-page plan for my daughters. I quote my younger daughter, who was in middle school when the book came out: “Okay, we’re going to do what mom said. But if she’s dead, she’ll never know.” The cool thing about that is she has some agency.
She was also very clear that she didn’t want me donating my body to the body farm at Western Carolina University, where bodies decompose outside for students to study decomposition. You can’t make a plan for something the people responsible for your body won’t be comfortable with. But having a conversation helps you understand what they’d be willing to do, and that can change over time, too.
RAY: This is reminding me that the intensity of emotion during that time can be given scaffolding and structure. What a gift to give your students—having them submit paperwork as part of the final.
MCDUFF: I wish somebody would make me do these things. They also had to create an artistic representation of something that stood out to them from the class. One of my students, Dakota, quilted a shroud for herself. It was so beautiful. She called it a “death Snuggie.” It was so beautiful.
RAY: The funny helps us get closer to something hard. I think the fact that there was a waitlist for your class makes sense now, and also maybe it’s the right time to think about it. Creativity can be more unleashed when you’re not so close to it.
I also want to put a tip out there: you said it’s important to put these instructions in your freezer.
A definition of a green cemetery, for anyone listening: it cares for the dead with minimal environmental impact and also helps conserve natural resources, reduce carbon emissions, protect worker health, and restore habitat. It should use biodegradable burial containers and avoid toxic embalming. Ideally, there’s no vault.
You also parse out nuances between conservation burial, natural burial, green burial, aquamation, alkaline hydrolysis, and human composting. What have you discovered about these different options? What’s a take-home point for listeners—where can they research more?
MCDUFF: Conservation burial grounds check the most boxes: protecting worker health, ecological restoration of the land, and so on.
If you have a cemetery in your region, one key question to ask is: does the cemetery require a vault? You don’t have to embalm. You can buy a cardboard box from Costco and bring it to a funeral home. You’re not required to buy a container from a funeral home.
My dad wanted to be wrapped in my mom’s linen tablecloths, so we did that. Then he wanted to be put in a pine box. As consumers, we have agency to ask cemeteries: do you require vaults?
In my book, I talk about a cemetery on the college campus where I live and work. They required vaults in their contract. Over a year of talking with church elders, the Presbyterian church that owned the plot agreed to change the policy.
I argued that a vault was not congruent with my religious beliefs to care for creation. That was true. It wasn’t my idea—the Presbyterian pastor suggested it. Also, there was precedent: a Muslim student had been buried there without a vault, and Muslim and Jewish traditions do not use vaults and do not embalm.
There are conservation burial sites, green burial sites, and hybrid cemeteries that offer both conventional and green burial.
Aquamation is water cremation. It doesn’t use as many fossil fuels as flame cremation. Aquamation is legal in about half the states, and a lot of funeral homes offer it.
Human composting is legal in 13 states. It’s legal in California, and I think it will be available in 2027. It was recently passed last year. There are other states where legislation is pending. Human composting was developed for places without as much green space for cemeteries.
It can sound crazy, but I would direct listeners to the company Recompose—they have helpful videos explaining it.
There’s also the body farm option, where you can donate your body to study decomposition.
RAY: A few years ago my stepmother died of ALS. When it became clear it would be the end, she asked me to research green options for her body. I wish I’d had your book. What we found was very expensive, and in the end she opted not to do that.
Do you have a comment about expense and accessibility? I know your father’s approach wasn’t expensive.
MCDUFF: As a single mom at a small liberal arts school, cost-cutting is part of my reality. In my research, I was looking at climate, cost, and community—those were the three variables. Cost is a big one.
Words are important. A lot of people say “traditional burial” when they mean embalming and vaults, but traditional burial is people being buried in a churchyard, a backyard cemetery, or a neighborhood cemetery. I encourage the word “conventional burial” for embalming, vaults, and so on.
When you look up the cost of a conventional burial, the average is between $8,000 and $10,000. One of the most popular uses of GoFundMe, besides medical treatment, is financing death. Cost is huge.
In North Carolina, being buried in a conservation burial ground can be significantly cheaper than conventional burial. Flame cremation can be the cheapest option—if you don’t add the other extras, you can do flame cremation here for less than $2,000, depending on where you go. Aquamation is around the same price point.
Some of this is about what parts of death you invite other people into: asking a friend to build a casket, or using a simple shroud. We don’t need elaborate hardwood caskets that we’re just going to bury.
We also have to be careful: if you ask a funeral home about green options, you might be offered something like a wicker basket for $9,000. Meanwhile, a friend of mine, Sarah Laswell, runs Moss and Thistle Farm and weaves willow caskets, encouraging family involvement if there’s time. The person dying can participate in creating an artisanal, beautiful casket. Exploring what’s available matters.
A resource: the Funeral Consumers Alliance has state affiliates in every state and a national organization. They advocate for fairness in the funeral industry. The Green Burial Council is another organization where you can look up green burial sites near you.
RAY: As we come toward the end, I want to return to why this isn’t necessarily a morbid conversation. For me, it’s about agency. Many people feel there’s nothing they can do about the scale of the climate crisis—that overwhelm, the pseudo-inefficacy we talk about on the show.
Your book invites us to think about planning our death—what happens to our body after we die—as an environmental act. Can you unpack that? How is planning what happens to your body after you die a way to confront mortality as an existential or spiritual question? Why is this “our last best act”?
MCDUFF: One death doula I interviewed said: we spend more time preparing for a vacation than preparing for the end of our life. That really stood out to me. Someone is going to come pick up the package that might be dropped off, and what about the plants, and is the house locked up—those kinds of details.
You and I are both in the business of walking into the classroom and convincing students that together—not alone, but together—we can make some impact. That’s a better way to live in the climate crisis than going online for hours, which I do too. It’s better to live in community.
We know that not acting—if we care about the Earth and our community—only makes us feel less empowered, and affects the people around us. This is a way to make a difference. We can conserve land, build community, and support other people in their lives and deaths. That’s about the environment we all share and depend on, and that our students and their families depend on too.
I never knew talking and writing about death and dying would be a way for me to tap into climate emotions, but it has been. I’m not grateful my parents died early, but I’m grateful that this path to converse with others about what we can do became available to me and to the people around me. I’m grateful to get to have this conversation with you.
RAY: Thank you, Mallory. You put all those pieces together beautifully. You’re making me want to teach a class on it, and to do my own research. Finding a way to look forward to that, too, is the opening for joy and meaning-making, as you describe. Thank you for walking us through the impact and implications of your book, and giving people something to hold onto and take action on—something that can help them feel agency in this moment.
MCDUFF: Thank you so much.
RAY: That was my conversation with Mallory McDuff, author of Our Last Best Act, a book about how to die in a way that supports your loved ones as well as the Earth. Show notes can be found at khsu.org. I’m Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
