Bill Cornell knelt last September by some wingstem wildflowers. He brushed a few leaves off a rough stone from a creek on his former farm. Now his son’s inscription was easier to read: “Caleb ‘Cobra’ Cornell / Fury Tenderness Generosity / 1982-2024.” Nearby was another stone from the creek saying, “One of the good ones.”
After Caleb died from a sudden illness, Bill found a will asking for an increasingly common kind of ceremony called a green burial. Bill held it at Penn Forest Natural Burial Park in Penn Hills, believed to be Pennsylvania’s only exclusively green cemetery.
Bill said that Caleb’s green burial “made everything more real. There wasn’t any pretense of a beautiful casket and candles and all that stuff. His brothers and his closest friends carried his body in a shroud. We filled in the grave by hand. It definitely made it more painful, no doubt about that, but painful in an important way.”
Bill often revisits the grave and reminisces about Caleb, who owned the popular Kelly’s Bar and Lounge in East Liberty and sang with the punk band Wrathcobra. The father said that the son loved nature and would have enjoyed the grave’s setting. “It’s in the woods in a very beautiful place. It’s extremely private. I don’t feel like I’m in a cemetery.”
No one seems to keep count of green burials, but advocates say that the practice seems to be growing. The nation’s first conservation cemetery, owned by a conservation land trust, opened in 1998 in South Carolina. The Green Burial Council arose in 2005. The council’s former president, Lee Webster, is keeping a list of what has grown to include 507 cemeteries in the U.S. and Canada with at least some green options. In Western Pennsylvania, there are green sections at West View Cemetery in Ross, Holy Savior Catholic Cemetery in Richland, Oakwood Cemetery in Sharon and Temple Sinai Memorial Park in Plum.
The premise of a green burial, say advocates of the practice, is to return us to the Earth, replenish it and help it to outlive us. The practice avoids cremation pollution, embalming chemicals and the concrete vaults of conventional burial. Instead, bodies are dressed in biodegradable clothes and carried in natural shrouds, wicker caskets or biodegradable wooden caskets without nails.
Some funeral homes offer green burials, including Kristin Hauman’s Natural Funeral Co. in Forest Hills. Hauman says, “For thousands of years, green burial was the way people were buried.” Then, many Civil War victims were embalmed for long trips home. Over time, coffins of metal, indestructible wood or even glass grew popular.
But some green traditions have endured; Muslims commonly use shrouds and Jews degradable pine coffins without nails.
In 2008, spouses Nancy Chubb and Pete McQuillin formed the nonprofit Green Burial Pittsburgh. Three years later, they and numerous partners opened the for-profit Penn Forest. In 2018, the couple moved into an 1862 farmhouse on the site’s 31 acres. In 2022, Chubb buried McQuillin there. She plans to be buried beside him. “My sense of immortality is being able to feed other organisms,” she says, “and they feed others in the cycle of life.”
Buried in Penn Forest last year was Steve Tonsor, who taught plant biology at the University of Pittsburgh and directed science and research at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He left no instructions, but his daughter, Amalia Kalisz Tonsor, thinks he’d have considered green burial “reciprocity.” She says, “He’d have wanted to give himself back to the Earth that is so generous to us.”
Tonsor’s family often visits his grave, clearing invasives and planting native flowers. Amalia says, “It feels like a special opportunity to care for the land and my dad and carry on his legacy.”
Sean Truby, who owns Oakmont’s Burket-Truby Funeral Home, says that green burials tend to be “very personalized.” Survivors choose and perform many of the rituals themselves, such as making a shroud or a coffin, digging the grave and staging a ceremony, typically at graveside. Caleb Cornell didn’t belong to an organized religion, so, instead of praying for him, the staff of Kelly’s toasted him.
Julee McCamey became Oakwood Cemetery’s first buyer of a green plot because she’s a Christian, she said. “I believe in dust to dust. I didn’t want to be burned. I didn’t want to be pickled. I wanted just to go back to the Earth like we’re supposed to.”
McCamey, now the cemetery’s administrative assistant, says that green burials tend to be less expensive because of their simpler materials. But Jeff Hodes, Penn Forest’s vice president and a former Green Burial Council trustee, says that green plots tend to be a little more expensive because they’re a little bigger and often more widely scattered in natural terrain.
At Penn Forest, a single standard plot is 4 feet by 8 feet and costs $2,800 if bought before death. A corpse’s internment costs $2,200. Cremains can be scattered there, buried loosely or buried in degradable urns.
Its plots lie in partial clearings in woods or a meadow. Its sections are named Ash, Birch and so on. There’s a Jewish section blessed by a rabbi that will eventually be named Juniper. There’s also a remembrance wall where survivors write down memories.
Penn Forest is at 121 Colorado St. and straddles the aptly named Return Road. It has sold more than 1,100 plots and buried more than 400 people. It has two full-time workers, one part timer and several contractors and volunteers.
It holds not only a cemetery, but hiking trails, a garden, four rental hoophouses — unheated greenhouses — and a Returning Home Farm with several animals. The public is welcome dawn to dusk to visit, hike, meditate and pick flowers and herbs. The park also hosts many public events, including picnics, yoga with goats, nature walks, forest bathing and a winter solstice ceremony.
Manager Laura Faessel says, “We’re not only a place for the dead. We’re a place for the living as well.”
