Kelly writes engagingly on this exceedingly timely topic: how funerary rites are affected by the burgeoning environmental movement. Through conversations with people in the field, she explains what a green burial is and how specific aspects of traditional funerals, from embalming to caskets, liners, and vaults conflict with its ecological ideals. But more than just technical aspects and logistics, including regulations, Kelly also tackles the complexities of cultural perspectives on death and the desire for guidance pertaining to alternative funerary practices even beyond cremation. She weighs in with personal experiences and frustrations over the challenge to honor tradition when no one knows what the new tradition should be, providing a welcome balance for her coverage of more practical topics. Changing how we care for the dead, she notes, means 'restoring our relationship to the land.' Interestingly, some things about today’s choices are not so modern after all, but in fact return to practices that were once understood as the right things to do. A useful and highly readable title that serves a valuable purpose in our complicated times.

Booklist

In her new book Greening Death, author Suzanne Kelly explores the myths that drive many of our standard, environmentally damaging burial practices. Kelly unpacks the funeral industry's environmentally destructive and alienating methods and gives voice to a growing movement seeking to reckon with decay and restore lost knowledge to the living. Detailing how embalming and encasing the dead in caskets and then in grave-lining vaults have little to do with limiting health risks or ensuring adequate sanitation, Kelly argues that these practices are not only destructive to the environment, but worse, they dishonor the necessity of dissolution, while reinforcing human beings' separation from nature. But this is changing. A movement to green death is gathering momentum, and Kelly is one of its most ardent allies.

Truthout

Greening Death is a noble book, reminding us of the simple, often heartfelt rites of centuries past.

RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy, and the Humanities

Readers of Omegaunderstand the importance of hands-on activity in walking through the grief process and Kelly does a fine job of paving a way for that to begin during the chaos of early grief.

Omega - Journal of Death and Dying

Far more than an exploration of green burials, Greening Death is an elegant and important exploration of how we can begin to give back to the earth.

Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame

The first book to get under the covers of an increasingly important environmental/ social/ consumer movement. Suzanne Kelly not only tells thought provoking stories of those working to make green burial a viable option, she connects their efforts to some of the greatest eco-thought leaders of the past century. By far the most engaging examination of the our culture's growing desire to integrate death and life.

Joe Sehee, founder of Green Burial Council