A Tribute to Mary Woodsen

Mary Woodsen

​Mary Woodsen, journalist, conservation burial pioneer, and friend, died November 4, 2025, at age 77. The following is a remembrance of this gentle soul, her contribution to the spread of natural burials, and the founding of Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve near Ithaca NY. 
 
On October 17th, 2001, the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership (WCEP) launched an effort to establish an eastern migratory population (EMP) between Wisconsin and Florida. The whooping cranes, born in captivity, imprinted on a white ultralight and were following it on the inaugural flight to Florida.

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Mary's original scratch pad for coming up with The List

Mary Woodsen, a New York-based science and environmental writer along with her niece were following in Mary’s car. Progress was slow. Thanksgiving week the birds and aircraft were once again grounded by bad weather but within driving distance of Ramsey Creek. Mary contacted Kimberley, explained her situation, saying she was interested in covering “green burial”, and asking if she and her niece could visit. We said of course and she asked if we could suggest a hotel. Instead, we offered our family's rustic century-old cabin for what turned out to be nearly week-long  visit.
 
Mary was kind, soft-spoken, and brilliant. We had hours of conversation about whooping cranes, politics (remember it was 2 months after 9/11)  and, of course, the benefits of conservation burial. Although we were not burying very many people in those days, a 57-year-old Marine veteran had died the day before Thanksgiving and was to be buried a couple of days after. Mary took up the challenge, helping to prepare the grave and participating in the funeral service. I think it is safe to say it was a life-changing experience for her. She became committed to setting up a project near Ithaca, NY, an idea already being pursued by Jennifer Johnson and Susan Thomas since the year prior.
 
We suggested she visit John Wilkerson, the colorful co-owner of the Glendale Nature Preserve in the Florida Panhandle. John heard about Ramsey Creek, had visited in 1999, and went on to establish the second conservation-type green burial project in the country in 2000. We had visited multiple times and assisted John and his wife Barbara in protecting their 350-acre multigenerational family farm.
 
Within several months, Mary had one article published about us in the Utne Reader, and another on John and Glendale in Outside Magazine. The Outside Magazine article (“The Green Reaper”) contained a calculation of the amount of material that contemporary burials consume each year. 
 
Each year in the U.S., 22,500 traditional cemeteries put roughly the following into our soil:

• 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid
• 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods (much tropical, caskets)
• 90,272 tons of steel (caskets)
• 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)
• 14,000 tons of steel (vaults)
• 2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)

 
It was Mary’s research, conducted in a bar with a friend (or so the story goes) that also resulted in a reframing that further fired the imagination:

• On average, a cemetery buries 1,000 gallons of embalming fluid, 97.5 tons of steel, 2,028 tons of concrete, and 56,250 board feet of high-quality tropical hardwood in just one acre of land.
• Each cremation releases between .8 and 5.9 grams of mercury as bodies are burned. This amounts to between 1,000 and 7,800 pounds of mercury released each year in the U.S. 75% goes into the air and the rest settles into the ground and water.
• You could drive about 4,800 miles on the energy equivalent of the energy used to cremate someone – and to the moon and back 85 times from all cremations in one year in the U.S.

 
In 2014, Mary refined the statistics and went on tour explaining how the industry had responded to the backlash from the sudden awareness that our burial practices were potentially wasteful and environmentally damaging. She had discovered that the amount of wood used in any given year had been reduced by a third, from 30 million to 20 million board feet, learning that caskets were simply being made with a thinner shell.
 
Who hasn’t seen these posted on Facebook or quoted, often erroneously, in every major news outlet article in the past few years? The intellectual property theft didn’t seem to bother Mary, but her contribution to the growth of the green burial movement is rarely attributed properly. More than ten years since the last revision, these figures still resonate with a public hungry for this type of consumer data.
 
We stayed in touch with Mary, Jennifer, and Susan for the next few years. One of their earlier backers was a person with a different idea about what a green burial site would look like. His vision was more like a farm, with apple trees and a more manicured setting.
 
In the years when natural/conservation burial was still a thought experiment, it had occurred to me that maybe what we were doing was a kind of trans-substantiation. I considered an option where some might choose to be buried in an area that would grow native muscadines (for wine) and either amaranth or heritage corn cultivars (for bread).
 
I discarded the idea because I decided that it would be complicated and perhaps off-putting for a significant portion of our potential market. I was more concerned that it would take away from our core message, our mission of land protection and ecological restoration. Mary and the others agreed and pushed for the conservation burial model, opening Greensprings in 2006.
 
We did have one dust-up with backers in 2002 when a group from NY came to Westminster to see Ramsey Creek. I was in the medical office seeing patients when one of them came in to tell me a couple of others had remained in the car, fearful of getting out. 
 
Since the late 1990s, South Carolina had faced intense debate over the Confederate battle flag flying at the State House where it had been since the early 1960s, culminating in a 2000 compromise that moved it from the capitol dome to a nearby monument amidst NAACP-led boycotts. Massive protests and large confederate flags flying were a common sight. The flag was removed from the grounds in 2015 after the Emanuel AME Church mass shooting.
 
A teenager and student at the local high school had lost control of his truck, crashed, and died a few days earlier. The young man was very much a part of that culture, and as luck would have it, they had an unofficial memorial parade with a couple of dozen large battle flags flying from vehicles rolling down main street in front of my office. I worked primary care and emergency rooms, and  a common defense mechanism is gallows humor. When our visitor asked if this was a common occurrence, I joked, “Only on every second Tuesday and Saturday.” When he looked aghast, I explained the situation and said I was also uncomfortable, but it was part of where we were. 
 
On return to NY, Mary heard the concern that I myself was possibly a racist. Since one of the topics we had talked about on her visit to Westminster had been the whole “lost cause” phenomenon, the SC flag controversy, and how we were definitely on the side of getting rid of the flag, she defended me, and it blew over.
 
We were very happy to be there for the Greensprings opening in 2006. I loved the large open acreage, surrounded by thousands of acres of protected forest. I found some reasonably interesting plants, including fringed polygala, and realized this was an important grassland. I also knew that grassland birds like bobolinks and meadow larks were in steep decline in the Finger Lakes. Some of that information was from nearby Cornell University, Mary’s own stomping grounds.
 
Mary told me that Greensprings was planning to create large plots to control density, and that the thought by some of the board was to restore forest by everyone getting a tree. I expressed concern and suggested that they seek advice from local scientists before proceeding. They ultimately did just that and decided to maintain the grassland. I also suggested grave clusters so families could be together and not an oversized grid, but I think they kept the large plots.
 
The last time I heard from Mary was few years ago when she called Kimberley and me. She had just read some of my earlier blogs and said, “I didn’t know you could be so funny.” It was the last time we spoke. I credit her for bolstering our confidence by confirming that we were on the right track with science-based conservation burial. And I am deeply grateful to Mary for providing us with “The List”, that powerful and simple tool that has helped people see through their preconceived notions to evaluate their legacy with science, facts, and logic, along with their love of the land and one another.
 
Mary’s legacy has been a gift to us all.

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