Just west of the Houston metropolis, the Katy Prairie Preserve hosts more than 300 native bird species. Among the 20,000 acres of Texas grassland, wetland, and working land is an unusual site, called Blazing Star Sanctuary, where local birder Bernice Hotman plans to remain once her life comes to a close. “My choices were the columbarium at my church or Blazing Star,” she says. “I decided I’d rather be with the bobwhite and the Dickcissel music than the organ music.”
The sanctuary is one of a small but growing number of conservation burial grounds across the United States where people can inter their loved ones on properties protected as both a final resting place for humans and permanent habitat for wildlife.
“Whether you’re religious or not, when we have these major life transition moments, people want to mark them and recognize them in a particular way,” says Ragan Sutterfield, an Episcopal priest and founder of Mourning Cloak, a group working to establish the first conservation burial ground in Arkansas. “This provides a very powerful way of seeing our lives return to the Earth while also giving new life.”
Conservation burial practitioners do not chemically embalm bodies or lay them to rest in solid caskets. Rather, in line with the guidelines of the Green Burial Council, they place each body within a biodegradable material, such as a cotton blanket wrap or wooden box. From there, microorganisms decompose bodies directly, which helps nutrients enter the surrounding soil quicker.
Burial fees fund efforts to conserve the land long after a person passes away. At Blazing Star, former farmland has been returned to wetland, while native wildflowers like Gulf vervain and Texas bluebonnets crown burial mounds, and birds including Roseate Spoonbills and Eastern Meadowlarks go about their lives. “Seeing how quickly habitat restoration brings these species back is really exciting,” says Bethany Foshée, Blazing Star’s conservation cemetery manager.
At White Eagle Memorial Preserve, on the 1,300-acre Ekone Ranch in southern Washington State, prescribed burns support new growth of oak and ponderosa pine trees. Family and friends help close graves by hand and decorate them with flat stones and flowers. “It’s so very unique and distinct to the person, and that, to me, just feels like a gift,” says Jodie Buller, White Eagle’s cemetery director.
Many conservation burial grounds welcome the public to visit them as nature preserves and offer community events including bird walks, book clubs, and musical performances, along with remembrance days, when those with loved ones buried there and anyone interested in the sites to come together for memorial programs and time spent outdoors.
Those interested in laying a loved one to rest, or being buried themselves, at a conservation burial ground can visit the Green Burial Council website to find a location near them accepting new interments. Most funeral homes support green burials, and in some states, loved ones may conduct the burials themselves, if they would prefer to do so.
“What conservation burial affords people is a vision and a place where they can be part of that larger ecosphere, in peace and serenity,” says Lee Webster, a co-founder of the Conservation Burial Alliance. That just might be the ultimate celebration of life.
This story originally ran in the Fall 2026 issue as “The Land Remembers.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.
