Changes coming to The Fens
View from Boylston Street bridge, in the Back Bay Fens.
— Photo by King of Hearts
The Fens
Excerpted from The Boston Guardian
New pathways, drainage systems, and more accessible routes to monuments and memorials are coming to the Back Bay Fens this year through the Pathways Project, introduced by the Boston Parks Department.
Filed in July and reviewed by the Conservation Commission this past month, the project has been years in the making and will build upon the 2023 completion of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s multi-phased, Muddy River Restoration project that focused on flood mitigation and reconstruction and replanting of the banks along the river.
The two-year long project will lead to specific areas and paths to be shut down momentarily from Avenue Louis Pasteur to Boylston Street to install gravel walkways with “ADA-compliant” asphalt, plant new trees, and add infiltration trenches and areas for stormwater drainage.
Charlie Kirk’s campaign to ‘de-woke’ colleges and some deeper history
Charlie Kirk at a college event in 2024.
From The Conversation Web site (not including picture above)
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, at the start of a college campus tour that centered on Kirk discussing politics – and education – with students.
A large part of Kirk’s political activism centered on what education should look like. Amy Lieberman, The Conversation’s education editor, spoke with Daniel Ruggles, a scholar at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., of conservative youth activism, to better understand the beliefs about education that influenced Kirk and the connection he tried to make with young people.
What is most important to understand about Charlie Kirk’s views on education?
Charlie Kirk’s education philosophy was founded upon the idea of not being on the left. One of the problems with that approach is that it’s harder to explain your ideas and values in a positive way instead of just being “anti” left.
Conservatives, well before Kirk’s time, have been trying to reclaim education from liberals whom they view as valuing equity and belonging instead of timeless values of order and traditional values in society. This philosophy overall focuses on reclaiming education from liberals.
There is a lot of alignment with Kirk’s education philosophy and the Make America Great Again movement, but his approach predates Donald Trump’s rise. It is focused on returning to what conservatives call Western and “traditional” values. This means rolling back the clock to an idealized time when men and women had set gender roles in society and life was more harmonious and wholesome. At its best, this education philosophy can be valuable – teaching what society views as virtuous behavior, ethics and tradition – but it can also prioritize tradition and privilege over justice and equity.
This philosophy also has to do with not feeling a need to apologize for one’s identity. A big divide between liberals and conservatives is how they explain disadvantage. Conservatives like Kirk believe they should not have to apologize for their identities, and other people’s identities should not be a reason for special treatment.
This philosophy is not so much about making education more effective as much as it is about not being “woke.”
De-woking the classroom is usually the overall goal. This involves ridding the classroom of what is known as grievance politics – meaning someone believes they have been marginalized because of their identity, race, gender or sexuality.
How far back can you trace this educational philosophy?
The 1960s had an explosion of progressive activism amid the New Left and antiwar movements as young adults realized that they could now demand certain rights. At the same time, there were a lot of young conservatives on campuses who felt fine with the way things were or who were concerned about some of the more radical ideas promoted by the New Left.
Universities became more inclusive in the 1960s, too. Generally, there were not any gender studies programs at American universities until the 1960s and 1970s, nor were there any race and ethnicity programs. Some conservatives pushed back on the emergence of these programs, saying that if there is an African American studies department, they want to see a conservative studies department, too.
After the 1960s, conservative education fights died down. Conservatives still wanted their voices heard on campus, but their merit-only based education philosophy seemed less relevant when left-wing campus protests had declined significantly.
How did Charlie Kirk capitalize on the conservative feelings regarding education?
Kirk founded his political nonprofit, Turning Point USA, in 2012. Kirk didn’t originally support Trump, but he became friends with Donald Trump Jr., and eventually became close with the president. Like Trump, Kirk saw academia as the source of a plethora of problems in American society. His goal was to make college campuses more friendly to conservative students by making conservative ideas like free market economics and traditional gender roles more popular.
There was a lot of foundation laying over time for Kirk’s conservative education philosophy. Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel, as well as the subsequent war in Gaza and Palestinian rights protests in the U.S., offered a moment for conservatives like Kirk to brand progressives at schools as this huge threat.
What was Kirk’s tour focused on accomplishing?
Kirk and others in the conservative youth movement want their followers to have a close relationship with them. This helps conservatives influence government and society, using college campuses to recruit young adults as conservative voters and activists, making the university appear less progressive in the process. Let’s say progressive college kids have Bernie Sanders or Che Guevara posters hanging in their dorm rooms.
Conservatives such as Kirk have built an all-encompassing, alternative world for young conservatives to become involved in, where they have proximity to political and thought leaders, including Kirk. Turning Point has used flashy slogans, signs and bumper stickers to help make conservatism cool on campus.
Kirk’s tour had just begun, but he had planned to make stops at universities in Colorado, Utah, Minnesota, Montana and New Hampshire (at Dartmouth College) and other states. It was important that Kirk himself was in the room with young people, and that they could ask him questions and talk with him. He was considered approachable in a way that most politicians would not be.
Conservatives have used this strategy for a long time. My own research shows how college students would write to conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s and these figures would write back. This kind of proximity between leaders and young supporters isn’t seen on the left. The goal is to cultivate a conservative movement community. Many of those conservative college students later worked for the government. Kirk’s tour was about continuing that kind of direct relationship between conservative leaders and young people.
Conservatives have a pipeline – meaning, let’s say you’re in high school and you discover conservative ideas by watching Charlie Kirk on YouTube. In college, you can go to Turning Point events and meet conservative leaders. After you graduate, you can even get a job with a conservative group through websites like ConservativeJobs.com. The point of the pipeline is to always give young conservatives a next step to becoming more involved in politics. While not everyone follows this pipeline, it helps the conservative movement cultivate new generations of talent. I think Kirk had a lot he was trying to accomplish, including building up a reservoir of young talent through Turning Point.
How is Turning Point distinct from the Republican Party and MAGA?
Turning Point isn’t the same as the Republican Party, but it’s helping to push the party further to the right. Turning Point has alienated other members of the conservative movement in certain ways. In 2018, the conservative youth group Young America’s Foundation accused Turning Point of taking over the conservative youth movement and crowding out other groups.
Turning Point’s total revenue has grown considerably in the last few years, topping US$85 million in 2024 – that matters because money and attention help Turning Point push out other conservative voices.
Kirk and Trump agreed on a lot of policy issues. Kirk used Turning Point to define conservatism on his terms and to defend Trump. Education is the bulk of Turning Point’s work, a continuation of what has historically also been been the most important cultural issue on the right since the 1960s.
Expressing loss
“Are You Staying for Me” (mixed media), by Jamel Robinson, in the group show “Do We Say Goodbye? Grief, Loss, and Mourning,’’ at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts, Sept. 26-Jan. 24
The gallery explains:
“Grief, loss, and mourning are universal experiences and integral to the human condition. Yet in today’s society, grief often remains a taboo, almost unmentionable subject. The ways we express loss, and the extent to which it is socially accepted, can stir unease, discomfort, and apprehension. Whether for those we love, a way of life, a sense of belonging, or an aspect of our identity, how we navigate grief profoundly shapes our physical and mental well-being.
“Working in photography, painting, video, and installation, exhibition artists convey both personal and collective encounters with grief as they interrogate themes of memory, empowerment, transition, and endurance. “Do We Say Goodbye?’’ challenges the finality of loss, inviting us to embrace grief as a shared yet deeply individual journey.’’
Prose beyond purple
“We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec.
“They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—— the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,—-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boy to college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of
Thermopylae and Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of “smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,” yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions and blue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head.
What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,” his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,” and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.”
― Massachussetts Quarterly Review, 1849
“Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows.”
― Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), in The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865
Metallic magic
Kenneth Snelson in 1968 with his “Needle Tower”.
Morrison Gallery, in Kent, Conn., is pleased to announce the representation of the estate of Kenneth Snelson.
The gallery says (slightly edited):
“Snelson (1927-2016) was originally an engineering student, and the forces of tension are fundamental to his sculptures, seemingly defying the laws of physics.
“Snelson was guided toward experimental architect and faculty member Buckminster Fuller by Josef Albers while attending the summer session at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, N.C. During his second summer session he presented an early kinetic model of plywood pieces suspended on over another by nylon tension lines, which Fuller translated into metal and exhibited as his own work.
“In 1964 Snelson was commissioned to create a major aerial piece measuring 30 by 35 feet for the World's Fair in New York. He went on to develop a specialty of airy public outdoor sculptures constructed of stainless steel and aluminum, which illustrate his theories of compression and tension. He held five United States patents, and in 1999 the International Sculpture Center presented him with the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.’’
Beware ‘pure democracy’
An 1833 portrait of Noah Webster by James Herring.
Scrawl on concrete wall with the anarchist “A" symbol in Munich in 2022.
“In democracy…there are commonly tumults and disorders…. Therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.’’
— Noah Webster (1758-1843), Connecticut-based lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer and editor. Think Webster’s Dictionary
Two toxic pleasures
“Smoke Shop, Liquor Store’’ (watercolor), by Sonja Holmberg, at the Guild of Boston Artists’ “New England Regional Exhibition,’’ through Sept.27.
We live like ants
“Colony” (detail) (ink on paper), by Catherine Chalmers, in her current show at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H.
She says:
“We have compared ourselves to ants, in our stories and fables, for thousands of years. As our cities grow larger and humanity becomes a predominantly urban species, we live more and more like ants do. The features of city life—dense urban environments, frequent physical contact, fixed homes used day after day—have countless advantages, but as we have witnessed with the COVID- 19 pandemic, they make it much easier for disease to spread to all members of a society, whether anthropoid or arthropod.’’
Llewellyn King: The agony of statelessness
Stateless children at at the Schauenstein, Germany, displaced-persons camp in about 1946. There were millions of displaced and stateless people in Europe as World War II ended.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have only known one stateless person. You don't get a medal for it or wear a lapel pin.
The stateless are the hapless who live in the shadows, in fear.
They don't know where the next misadventure will come from: It could be deportation, imprisonment or an enslavement of the kind the late Johnny Prokov suffered as a shipboard stowaway for seven years.
His story ended well, but few do.
When I knew Johnny, he was a revered bartender at the National Press Club in Washington. By then, he had American citizenship, was married and lived a normal life.
It hadn't always been that way. He told me that he had come from Dalmatia, when that area was so poor people took their clothes to a specialist who would kill the lice in the seams with a little wooden mallet, which wouldn't damage the cloth.
To escape that extreme poverty, Prokov became a stowaway on a ship.
So began his seven-year odyssey of exploitation and fear of violence. The captains took advantage of the free labor and total servitude of the stowaways.
Eventually, Prokov jumped ship in Mexico. He made his way to the United States, where a life worth living was available.
I don't know the details of how he became a citizen, but he dreamed the American dream — and it came true for him.
An odd legacy of his years at sea was that Prokov had become a brilliant chess player. He would often have as many as a dozen chess games going along the bar in the National Press Club. He always won. He had had time to practice.
The United Nations says there are 4 million stateless people in the world, but that is a massive undercount. Many of those who are stateless are refugees and have no idea if they are entitled to claim citizenship of the countries they are desperate to escape from. Citizenship in Gaza?
Now the Trump administration wants to add to the number of stateless people by denying birthright citizenship to children born of illegal immigrants in the United States.
It wants to deny people — who are in all ways Americans — their constitutional right of citizenship. Their lives will be lived on a lower rung than their friends and contemporaries. They will be denied passports, maybe education, possibly medical care, and the ability to emigrate to any country that otherwise might have received them.
Instead, they will live their lives in the shadows, children of a lesser God, probably destined to have children of their own who might also be deemed noncitizens. They didn't choose the womb that bore them, nor did they sanction the actions of their parents.
The world is awash in refugees fleeing war, crime and violence, and environmental collapse. Those desperate people will seek refuge in countries which can't absorb them and will take strong actions to keep them out, as have the United States and, increasingly, countries in Europe.
There is a point, particularly in Europe, where the culture, including established religion, is threatened by different cultures and clashing religions.
But when it comes to children born in America to mothers who live in America, why mint a new class of stateless people, condemned to a second-class life here, or deport them to some country, such as Rwanda or Uganda, where its own people are already living in abject poverty?
All immigrants can't be accommodated, but the cruelty that now passes for policy is hurtful to those who have worked hard and dared to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
It is bad enough that millions of people are seeking somewhere to live and perchance a better life, due to war or crime or drought or political follies.
To extend the numbers by denying citizenship to the children of parents who live and work here isn't good policy. It is also unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the administration, it will add social instability of haunting proportions.
Children are proud of their native lands. What will the new second class be proud of — the home that denied them?
On X: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.
Nice idea, for someplace
“The MacDonald boys playing golf,’’ attributed to William Mosman, 18th Century, at National Galleries of Scotland.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
To no one’s surprise, the Westerly (R.I) Planning Board, now backed by a state court decision, rejected Winn Properties’ proposal to create a 2,300-unit housing project to replace the well-known 18-hole Winnapaug Country Club; some 30 percent are supposed to fall under that oft-nebulous term “affordable’’.
Of course, most Westerly folks back the idea of affordable housing – somewhere. But the proposed project would be mighty big for the town of about 23,000, which has a lot of rich people, many of them seasonal and most near or along water, as is the golf course. The richest are in the Watch Hill section. And rich people generally don’t want poorer, let alone truly poor, people near them. Further, they pay big piles of property taxes, drawing the affectionate attention of local officials.
One reason that foes presented for opposing the project was fear of pollution into Winnapaug Pond. But most golf courses, for all their verdant beauty, are sources of much pollution from fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
In any event, I wouldn’t be surprised if the golf course eventually becomes a development of McMansions and/or some big resort spa. Maybe with a nine-hole course to aid marketing.
Still looking back
“I Carry It With Me,’’ by Pr0vidence-based Georgia native Becci Davis, in her show “Bloodstone + Home,’’ at Jamestown (R.I.) Arts Center through Nov. 8
— Image courtesy of Jamestown Arts Center
The arts center explains:
“Through a layered and striking ‘collage aesthetic,’ Davis explores her own ancestral history and, she says, documents the contradiction between the natural beauty that her ancestral land bares and the architectural beauty of historic monumental buildings built by the labor of slaves. This exhibition is shown in tandem with ‘Bohemian Ossuary,’ by artist D.S. Kinsel.’’
Chris Powell: Raising Conn. minimum wager is an expression of failure
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Gov. Ned Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo last week announced gleefully that Connecticut's minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 by 3.6%, from $16.35 to $16.94 an hour, being tied by state law to the federal employment cost index. The justifications they offered were not persuasive. Indeed, they were based on false premises.
“Nobody who works full-time should have to live in poverty," the governor said, as if working full-time necessarily has some connection to the monetary value of the work.
All honest work may be honorable, but menial work -- work that can be done by anyone -- is not worth $16.94 an hour if someone can be found to do it for less. The minimum wage is government's idea of what menial work should be worth in an ideal world, an aspiration -- well-meaning in some cases, perhaps, but mostly just government's striking a pose about its own goodness.
The governor's statement about not living in poverty is just liberal blather, especially in Connecticut, as the governor should know well. That $16.94 per hour is $654 a week, even as social-work and economic research groups long have calculated that to live decently in Connecticut a single person needs an income of at least three times as much.
The governor's economic principle about the minimum wage is no more meaningful than everyone else's principle that it shouldn't rain on weekends.
Despite the minimum-wage increase, tens of thousands of people in Connecticut will keep working for pay well above minimum wage while still living in or on the edge of poverty. Part of it will be their own fault, their living beyond their means, and part of it the government's.
Lt. Gov. Bysiewicz did no better. “The minimum wage," she said, “was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work." The lieutenant governor's pay, about $190,000 a year, is 5½ times more than Connecticut's new full-time minimum-wage salary, $34,000. If she ever did the numbers seriously, how fair and livable would minimum wage sound to her?
Bysiewicz added, “This is a fair, gradual increase for workers that ensures that as the economy grows, our minimum wage grows with it -- and that's good for everyone."
Except that the economy really isn't growing much at all. What's growing is mainly inflation, the devaluation of the money that workers earn.
At least Commissioner Bartolomeo approached this point. Raising the minimum wage, she said, “helps protect the most vulnerable earners from inflation and cost increases, and helps keeps wage gaps from widening."
Hardly. Inflation long has been underreported by the federal government, with price criteria frequently revised in the hope that people wouldn't believe the evidence of their own lives, the decline in their standard of living. Most of those voting in the last election seem to have stopped believing official inflation data. And even liberals in Connecticut acknowledge that the wage gap keeps widening.
The minimum wage was never meant to be fully supportive for a single person. It functioned as a standard of entry-level pay for the unskilled, especially teenagers, so people wouldn't be too demoralized by their first jobs and would strive to gain skills and advance.
Today in Connecticut the need for a minimum-wage increase is mainly political -- to camouflage the declining skill level of much of the workforce, the fatherless urban underclass -- the increasing numbers of young people who attend schools without standards and graduate uneducated but who, it is hoped, remain full of self-esteem.
Connecticut has tens of thousands of job openings -- for skilled workers -- in manufacturing, nursing, teaching, and other fields, jobs that pay far above minimum wage, for which enough qualified applicants can't be found.
Raising the minimum wage is actually a proclamation that Connecticut has given up on a skilled workforce, a proclamation that the jobs of the state's future will be at the fast-food window -- until the robots take over.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Bycatching by ocean fishermen may imperil river herring stocks
Alewife species of river herring.
Excerpted and edited from an article by Colleen Cronin in ecoRI News. Picture above is from elsewhere.
“River herring, both the blueback and alewife species found in Rhode Island, are diadromous fish, meaning they spawn in freshwater but live their adult lives in the ocean.
“A foundational species, river herring sit at the bottom of the aquatic food chain, helping to feed larger animals like striped bass and osprey. In past generations, they swam up many New England rivers in the millions, providing a source of food and income for locals; herring are considered an important food in Narragansett culture.
“Efforts to improve their spawning habitat have brought the fish back to environments they haven’t lived in since before the Industrial Revolution. However, experts and stakeholders who spoke with ecoRI News said that what’s happening to river herring when they’re in the ocean has a huge and potentially negative impact on their survival: bycatch.’’
Abstractly granular
“Sylvia (Spring, Rocks, and Daffodils)” (acrylic paint over aquatint, with scraping, printed in dark-gray ink on wove paper) in the show “Altered States: The Etchings of Richard Pousette-Dart,’’ at the New Britain (Conn.)Museum of American Art, through next April 26.
The museum says:
“First-generation Abstract Expressionist artist Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) excelled in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. In 1979, he embarked on an extraordinary foray into printmaking, afforded by the opportunity to work with traditional etching techniques and tools at the Rockland Foundation, near his home and studio in Suffern, New York. By this time, his dense and complex abstract compositions of the 1940s and 1950s had transitioned to all-over fields composed of small gestures and marks, often organized around a central geometric or organic shape.’’
‘Place and displacement’
Work by Mike Howat, in his show “Home, Disassambled,’’ at AVA Gallery and Art Center, Lebanon, N.H., through Sept. 27
The gallery explains that the show “explores the meanings of home, place and displacement. Through his work, Howat uses architectural forms as a framework to delve into both personal and collective narratives. He is particularly interested in how built environments reflect their inhabitants and how buildings become records of those who occupy them.’’
Selling solemnity
President Calvin Coolidge in 1924. He was born in Vermont and became a Massachusetts lawyer and politician, including the governorship.
“I always figured the American public wanted a solemn ass for President, so I went along with them.’’
— Calvin (“Silent Cal”) Coolidge (1872-1933), president (1923-1929)
‘My world’
“North Haven VI’’ (oil on canvas), by Midcoast Maine painter Eric Hopkins, at Portland (Maine) Art Gallery.
He says:
"Seeing the Earth from the sky, from a plane — the boats in the water, the islands {like North Haven} — it was just my life, my world, and I was fascinated by it.”
A culinary abomination
Poseur
The real stuff
“There is a terrible pink mixture (with tomatoes in it and herbs) called Manhattan Clam Chowder, that is only a vegetable soup, and not to be confused with New England Clam Chowder, nor spoken of in the same breath. Tomatoes and clams have no more affinity than ice cream and horseradish".
-From Eleanor Early, in her 1940 book, A New England Sampler
50 years after the war, looking at Vietnamese artists shown in Greenwich
“Fish and the Forest” (oil on canvas), by Dinh Thi Tham Poong, in the show “Vietnam: Tradition Upended,” at Flinn Gallery at Greenwich (Conn.) Library, Sept. 18-Nov. 12.
— Photo Credit: Art Vietnam Gallery
The curators explain:
“In collaboration with Art Vietnam Gallery in Hanoi, this exhibition features nine interdisciplinary artists who work in a variety of mediums and styles. These artists all take time-honored traditions and materials and rework them in a modern context, acknowledging the past while simultaneously breaking away. With 2025 marking exactly half a century since the end of the Vietnam War, and 30 years since the normalization of relations between Vietnam and the U.S., this is an opportune time to acquaint ourselves with the art and culture of a country that has undergone extraordinary change; a country with one of the most interesting and vibrant art scenes in Southeast Asia.’’
Paula Span: When I go, I’ll go biodegradable
Green burial site
(Except for images above, from Kaiser Family Foundation Health News)
Our annual family vacation on Cape Cod included all the familiar summer pleasures: climbing dunes, walking beaches, spotting seals, eating oysters and reading books we had intended to get to all year.
And a little shopping. My grandkid wanted a few small toys. My daughter stocked up on thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles at the game store in Provincetown. I bought a pair of earrings and a couple of paperbacks.
And a gravesite.
It’s near a cluster of oaks, in a cemetery in Wellfleet, on the Cape, where some mossy Civil War-era headstones are so weathered that you can no longer decipher who lies beneath them. The town permits nonresidents to join the locals there, and it welcomes green burials.
Regular summer visitors such as us often share the fantasy of acquiring real estate on the Cape. Admittedly, most probably envision a place to use while they’re still alive, a daydream that remains beyond my means.
Buying a cemetery plot where I can have a green burial, on the other hand, proved to be surprisingly affordable and will allow my body, once no longer in use, to decompose as quickly and as naturally as possible, with minimal environmental damage. Bonus: If my descendants ever care to visit, my grave will be in a beloved place, where my daughter has come nearly every summer of her life.
“Do you see a lot of interest in green burials?” I asked the friendly town cemetery commissioner who was showing me around.
“I don’t think we’ve had a traditional burial in two years,” he said. “It’s all green.”
Nobody can count how many Americans now choose green or natural burials, but Lee Webster, former president of the Green Burial Council, is tracking the growing number of cemeteries in the United States that allow them.
The first, Ramsey Creek Preserve, began its operations in Westminster, S.C., in 1998. By 2016, Webster’s list included 150 cemeteries; now she counts 497. Most, like the one in Wellfleet, are hybrids accommodating both conventional and green burials.
Although a consumer survey conducted by the National Funeral Directors Association found that fewer than 10% of respondents would prefer a green burial (compared with 43% favoring cremation and 24% opting for conventional burial), more than 60% said they would be interested in exploring green and natural alternatives.
“That has to do with the Baby Boomers coming of age and wanting to practice what they’ve preached,” Webster said. “They’re looking for environmental consistency. They’re looking for authenticity and simplicity.”
She added, “If you nursed your babies and you recycle the cardboard in the toilet paper roll, this is going to appeal to you.” (I raise my hand.)
Aside from their environmental concerns, many survey participants attributed their interest in green burial to its lower cost. The median price of a funeral with burial in 2023 was about $10,000, including a vault but not including the cemetery plot or a monument, according to the NFDA.
Although advocates of green burials, such as Webster, decry cremation’s toxic emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, the method now accounts for nearly two-thirds of body disposals in the United States, the association reports. One reason is its median cost of $6,300, without interment or a monument.
Such numbers vary considerably by location. I live in Brooklyn, where real estate is pricey even for the dead, and where Green-Wood Cemetery — a jewel and a National Historic Landmark — charges $21,000 to $30,000 for a plot. Burial in its new, green section is a comparative bargain at $15,000.
About 40 miles outside Nashville, Tenn., though, a green burial at Larkspur Conservation costs $4,000, including the gravesite and just about everything else, except, if the family wants one, a flat, engraved native stone.
Larkspur is one of 15 conservation burial grounds in the nation operating in partnership with land trusts — The Nature Conservancy, in this case — to preserve the space. “It’s what keeps forests from becoming subdivisions,” said John Christian Phifer, Larkspur’s founder.
He listed the common elements of green burials: “No chemical embalming, no steel casket, no concrete vault. Everything that goes in the ground is compostable or biodegradable.” A small industry has evolved to produce artisanal woven caskets, linen shrouds, and other eco-friendly funerary items.
Green funerals often feel different, too. Mourners at Larkspur tend to walk the trail to the burial site wearing denim and hiking boots, not black suits.
“Instead of observing, they’re actively participating,” Phifer said. “We invite them to help lower the body into the grave with ropes, to put a handful or shovelfuls of soil into the grave,” and to mound soil, pine boughs, and flowers atop it afterward. Then, they might toast the departed with champagne or share a potluck picnic.
When Larkspur began operating in 2018, with Phifer as its only employee, 17 bodies were buried on its 161 acres. Last year, a staff of eight handled 80 burials, and the burial ground is acquiring more property.
Other alternatives to conventional burial have emerged, too. The company Earth Funeral has facilities in Nevada, Washington state, and, soon, Maryland, for so-called human composting. In this process, a body is heated with plant material for 30 to 45 days in a high-tech drum, where it all eventually turns into a cubic yard of soil.
That’s 300 pounds, more than most families can use, so local land conservancies receive the rest. The cost: $5,000 to $6,000.
Alkaline hydrolysis, which is legal in almost half of all states, dissolves bodies using chemicals and water, leaving pulverized bone fragments that can be scattered or buried and an effluent that must be disposed of.
Environmentally, when you include standard cremation, “there are ramifications for all three processes that we can avoid by simply putting a body in the soil” and letting microbes and fungi do the rest, Webster said.
Cemetery acreage near major population centers is limited, however, and increasingly expensive. “I don’t think there’s a perfect option, but we can do a hell of a lot better than the traditional methods,” said Tom Harries, founder of Earth Funeral. Debates about comparative greenness will certainly continue.
But green burial made sense to Lynne McFarland and her husband, Newell Anderson, who heard about Larkspur through their Episcopal church in Nashville. “The idea of returning to the earth sounded good to me,” McFarland said.
Her mother, Ruby Fielden, who was 94 when she died, was one of the first people buried at Larkspur in 2018, in an open meadow that attracts butterflies.
Last spring, Anderson, who had Alzheimer’s, died at 90 and was buried a few yards away from Fielden, in a biodegradable willow casket. A dozen family members read prayers and poems, shared stories and sang “Amazing Grace.”
Then they picked up shovels and filled the grave. It was exactly what her outdoorsy husband, a onetime Boy Scout leader, would have wanted, said McFarland, 80, who plans to be buried there, too.
I’m not sure if my survivors will undertake that much physical labor. But my daughter and son-in-law, though probably decades from their own end-of-life decisions, liked the idea of green burial in a place we all cherish.
The prices in what I now think of as my cemetery were low enough — $4,235, to be precise — that I could buy a plot to accommodate myself and seven descendants, if I ever have that many.
I hope this plan, besides minimizing the impact of my death on a fragile landscape, also lessens the familial burden of making hurried arrangements. At 76, I don’t know how my future will unfold. But I know where it will conclude.
Paula Span is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter.