No casket, no cost: Tennesseans go back to 'natural' burial

Via Leslie 

An east Tennessee burial preserve goes back to the basics by offering a “simpler, more natural” way of burying the dead — no casket, no embalming and no cost.

In 2007, Bill Nickle, the founder of Narrow Ridge Center, a nonprofit organization established to teach sustainability, set aside five acres of land in Washburn for a natural burial preserve.

Five years later, Tennessee established Narrow Ridge as a community cemetery, and it has operated as such ever since. It’s not like most cemeteries out there. It’s a “green” cemetery, which its operators say means people buried there can’t be embalmed or placed in a casket.

“When people died, they had home funerals and buried them within 26-36 hours and in a natural way,” Bill Nickle told WVLT. “There was no embalming. There was no metal casket, no concrete vaults, and that was the way it was.”