EXPLORE | THE BIG IDEA
For several years Donovan and colleagues have
been planning a conservation cemetery here. Nation-
wide, only about a dozen of these operations exist:
single properties with areas in simultaneous use as
nature preserves, parklands, and environmentally
conscious burial grounds. This would be Texas’s first.
The current conservancy plan includes 50 acres
of space for so-called green burials. No caskets or
concrete liners will be used. The dead won’t be
embalmed, to eliminate synthetic, potentially harm-
ful chemicals. Each body lowered into the ground
will wear only biodegradable clothing and a shroud.
A conservation cemetery takes green burial
grounds one step further. Its landscape protects the
dead as they naturally decompose—and in return,
the dead help protect the land (with the customary
laws that discourage disturbing cemeteries). That’s
the plan for property near the Indiangrass Preserve
site and a conservancy field office, a nondescript
white building on the edge of Waller, a small town
42 miles northwest of Houston.
Beyond Waller, development continues chewing
away at nature as the region echoes the Houston
suburbs’ insatiable growth. Greater Katy grew from
81,000 residents to a sprawling suburb of more than
309,000 between 1990 and 2020, according to the Katy
Area Economic Development Council. It’s a trend
that has barely shown signs of slowing down, forcing
conservationists like Donovan and her colleagues to
get creative in response.
Look to the north from the conservancy’s field
office: That’s a ranch of more than a thousand acres,
which was acquired by developers and soon will be a
residential area. Neighboring landowners already are
creating a municipal utility district, the first step in
the birth of a new subdivision. To the south, a dusty
two-lane highway soon will be four lanes so it can
meet the projected flow of future traffic.
“It really feels like a race,” Donovan says of the
effort to conserve land. “Can we protect the land
before someone comes in, subdivides it, and builds
hundreds of thousands of homes on it?”THE CONSERVATION CEMETERY idea came to the Katy
Prairie Conservancy folks from the Kate Braestrup
memoir Here If You Need Me. Donovan remembers
Braestrup writing of a missing person’s remains found
in the forest. The body gradually decomposed, and
a nearby shrub sprouted into a tree, intertwining
with the remains.
The sense of peace Donovan took from Braestrup’s
description grew within her like the tree through the
skeleton. She buried the thought until her father
died years later, when she found herself reflecting
on the connections between nature and death. The
family honored her father’s wish to be cremated. He
would be stored in a niche in perpetuity. Thousands
of dollars were spent.
“It was smaller than a filing cabinet,” Donovan
says. It didn’t sit right with her—and a growingnumber of individuals seem to feel the same. They’re
rethinking what it means to die and whether there’s
a purpose to be had when it happens. They’re shun-
ning the multibillion-dollar business of managing
death, with hope that their remains will give back
to the earth.
But the concept of a conservation cemetery is not
new. It’s retrofitted for a new era.
In 1825, as farmland evolved into industrial acre-
age, conservationist George Brimmer bought land in
Massachusetts to preserve its valleys and wetlands
from development. Brimmer later partnered with
others to turn the land into a cemetery, effectively
skirting developers’ wandering eyes.
The result was Mount Auburn Cemetery, which
borders Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts.
Today it still resembles the land Brimmer sought to
preserve, albeit with a fleet of gravestones poking out
of the green turf. “I like to think of Mount Auburn
Cemetery as not just the first rural cemetery, but in
fact, it was a form of land conservation,” says Can-
dace Currie, director of Green Burial Massachusetts,
a nonprofit group working to create the state’s first
legally recognized conservation cemetery. “To this
day, people go there to get away from the city.”When a human life’s end raises the
question of what to do with the mortal
remains, are some solutions greener
than others? Parties to the debate give
different answers. Conservation ceme-
tery advocates point to the environ-
mental impact of conventional burials,
in which a person is laid to rest in a cas-
ket, with a concrete liner, underground.
Such interments typically involve head-
stones and other end-of-life products
that may travel thousands of miles,
creating emissions along the way.
Cremation is an alternative but not a
climate-friendly option, experts say:
Similar to how carbon stored in roots is
released when a tree is cut down, car-
bon that makes up part of the human
body is released into the atmosphere
when the remains are incinerated at
1,400 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit
for multiple hours. One cremation
produces on average more than 534
pounds of carbon dioxide, according to
an estimate by cremation technology
manufacturer Matthews Environmen-
tal Solutions. By comparison, the green
burials practiced in conservation cem-
eteries allow root systems to trap the
carbon released from human bodies
during decomposition. —XPEnvironmental
impact at the end16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC