In an era characterized by the depletion of our planet’s resources, green burial offers a compelling alternative to conventional funeral practices. Inspired by the age-old concept of returning to the Earth, this environmentally conscious approach aims to minimize harm and embrace the regenerative cycle of life. John Christian Phifer is at the forefront of this movement. His commitment to ecological preservation has paved the way for a more mindful approach to end-of-life rituals. As the executive director of Larkspur Conservation, Phifer advocates for the integration of sustainable practices in the funeral industry, blending his extensive expertise as a licensed funeral director and embalmer with a profound understanding of the emotional and spiritual aspects of death and dying.

By promoting green burial practices and advocating for personalized, holistic end-of-life experiences, Phifer empowers individuals and communities to cultivate a deeper connection with nature and create lasting legacies that honor both the departed and the Earth. In this article, we delve into the transformative work of John Christian Phifer and explore the profound impact of his efforts to usher in a more sustainable and mindful approach to our final farewell.

Following is an edited transcript of a presentation by John Christian Phifer.

I’m kind of a storyteller, and I want to tell you a few stories today.

I grew up on a farm in Western Tennessee. I was a child of Mother Nature, and I was commonly found burying grasshoppers. I would wrap the grasshopper in a leaf and create a little grave. I told my parents in seventh grade that I thought I wanted to be a mortician. 

My granddad died right after high school, and it really pulled my attention back to those roots of being a child, growing up on a farm in the country surrounded by nature, where I was so connected to the cycles of life. Nature was where I first learned of death.

Fast forward, and I had spent 15 years in the conventional funeral industry. I evolved into managing a large funeral home in Nashville. There was a cemetery there, and we did all kinds of funerals — big fancy ones and little bitty ones too. But I got to a point where I knew there had to be more that I could do.

So in 2012, I made a leap of faith. I wanted to find a more mindful funeral care option in our area and beyond. That option became Larkspur Conservation. Larkspur is Tennessee’s nature preserve for natural burial. It’s a protected conservation space that’s also a living memorial to those that we love. As a nonprofit organization, we steward and care for 800 acres in Tennessee. This is my 25^th year caring for the dead. That doesn’t count the grasshoppers. I find myself going back to those roots and asking myself what Mother Nature would do.

There’s nothing more fundamental than Earth itself. We and the Earth are the same: an amalgamation of that which came before. To stand in an open grave within a nature preserve, surrounded by nature, is to stand at a doorway between worlds: the world of what is and the world of what once was. It is to remember our connection to each of these worlds and to help one another as we move in and around and between them.

We have a problem, particularly in the West. We don’t want to acknowledge both of these worlds. We don’t want to acknowledge the world of the dead, even though it’s all around us. We push it to the side because it’s icky, it’s scary. We’ve been taught not to talk about it at the dinner table. That makes it harder for us all when death does come, and it will. People, families, generally will end up spending much more than they intended to on things that they didn’t actually want, and they end up using products that harm the environment.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. occupies 1.9 billion acres of land. How are we using it? Or how are we forsaking it as people? How can we save more land and use it as a tool to curb climate change?

We use our land for cattle grazing, followed by forestry, and then followed by food production, generally to feed livestock. We lose about 1 million acres per year to urban sprawl. 

Every year, conventional burials in the United States use about 4.3 million gallons of embalming fluid. Embalming fluid is a formaldehyde-based chemical that, when it’s mixed in water, is used to treat our bodies to temporarily prohibit decomposition. Any extra goes into the water; it’s flushed into the sewer. For traditional burials, annually we use 20 million board feet of hardwoods, including rainforest woods; 1.6 million tons of concrete; and 64,000 tons of steel. Conventional cemeteries have essentially become landfills.

We can do better. 

Cremation, which is now the most common option in America, requires enough gas to power a car about 550 miles. It also releases carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as mercury from old-fashioned dental fillings.

Researchers at Columbia University have found that cremating a single body is equivalent to the average home’s monthly household energy consumption. If half of us take our earthly home and cremate it, think about the amount of energy that we are using. Cremation may be the fastest and cheapest way to go, but it’s also the most environmentally expensive. Finally, when ashes are improperly spread, the alkaline remains can eat away at plant roots and damage the pH of healthy soils.

By contrast, green or natural burial requires only a biodegradable casket or burial shroud. The grave is dug about 36 inches deep in the living layer of the soil, ideal for aerobic decomposition and returning all of our carbon nutrients to Mother Nature. It’s legal in every state and nearly everywhere around the world.

So I say to you again, we have a problem. Our refusal to acknowledge our part in the world of the dead has left us making decisions that we don’t like and that devastate our world. We need to slow down. We need to look around us and return to the wisdom of Mother Nature and our past.

For the past 25 years, there’s been a growing movement around natural and green burial: a burial using no chemicals, plastics, metals, or concretes. We don’t use embalming fluids. We don’t use vaults in this cemetery, and everything must be compostable.

Let me remind you, this is not a new-fangled idea. This is as old as humans. We’re not reinventing how to care for the dead. We’re using care of the dead to solve a climate issue and be more responsible and more engaged in protecting our environment, not only for ourselves and our communities, but for those generations that are going to come after us.

As a part of this green movement, there are all kinds of new things you can do to mitigate your environmental impact. But you need to remember, trying to create a new product or something that looks fancy with bells and whistles is getting away from the problem. It’s feeding into the problem, I should say. We need to focus not on what we can buy and make, and in the process, we need to slow down.

If we’re going to continue as a species on this planet, we have to find ways to create positive change. We have to do good. We have to find ways to protect the Earth and connect people with it. We have to learn to see death as commonplace and essential to life itself. The more we work to heal our relationship with death, the more we will heal our relationship with the environment.

That’s where conservation burial comes in. Conservation burial is just a fancy natural burial. If natural burial answers the question “What are we putting in the ground?” conservation burial answers the question “How?” Conservation burial takes the idea of natural burial a step further by adding a conservation easement and active land conservation efforts. It incorporates the ethos of stewardship to both land and people. 

A conservation burial ground like Larkspur is a protected nature preserve where people can have a natural burial. It’s a place where kids can play in the woods, a family can have a picnic, people can go birding. These are all things that happen regularly at our nature preserve in Tennessee. All of this is made possible because of individuals and families who choose a more mindful end-of-life option.

We’ve all heard that cemeteries are a waste of space. I say that this is the kind of taking-up-space we want to do. It’s a statement of care and defiance – over my dead body. Over my dead body will you use more of this precious, precious Earth.

Conservation burial is not just a one-time gift to the planet. It’s a carbon sink that continually pulls carbon, as a breathing, living memorial, back into the soil. Talk about a return on investment or something to leave to your grandchildren.

Conservation burial has all the wonderful carbon-mitigating effects of a natural burial, but it does more. It creates shared green space. It can be a connection point for a community and habitat, for the flora and fauna of an ecosystem.

The magic, though, is in the people, rituals. We are all about rituals and creating space for families to come together, and when we do that, we enable these families to have an experience in an open green space that connects them to land in a way that they’ve never experienced before. We encourage people to get close and participate in these rituals. We don’t flip a switch for a casket to magically float into the ground, into a hole that you never see the bottom of. Instead, the person’s body is lowered by hand by the people who love them. They get to fill in the grave by hand with shovels. They do the thing that is hard because it is hard, and because of that, in that natural setting, there is transformation.

I described staring into an open grave as looking into a doorway between worlds. The act of burial is the moment a community comes together, and for a moment, looks through the door. In looking through, they see that humanity is not separate from the natural world after all. We’re simply a part of it, and we will inevitably return to it. There is no other method of caring for our dead that mitigates our carbon footprint, actively conserves and protects green space, and creates a cultural shift in our understanding of the human place in the world the way that conservation burial does.