A small community in Colorado allows open outdoor cremations for anyone in the local area, regardless of religious affiliation.
Founded in 2006, the Crestone End of Life Project grew out of a desire to respond to changing demographics in the area. Open-air cremations were held as early as 1998, but as the community changed, legal and environmental questions arose, and interested parties came together to form the CEOLP. A local temple donated property; the group enclosed it with a privacy fence and built a permanent pyre, holding their first cremation there in January 2008.
This Washington Post article talks about the group and interviews one family who held a recent service.
CEOLP isn’t just about outdoor cremations. Their philosophy includes informed end-of-life choices as well as consumer and family rights and ecological considerations in the funeral process. The green drive in the funeral industry continues to grow, and alternative burial options will always have a place in our society. I suspect organizations like CEOLP will grow and thrive as the normal generational shift occurs in the country in general and the funeral industry specifically.
2 Comments
Hey Bob,
Wow, your knowledge and background of the funeral industry is fascinating! This is an area I’m interested in since learning about how the recession has affected the conventional funeral model. We had a death in the family recently and it was definitely an education.
Do you still have the funeral website running? I clicked a link but didn’t get to it.
And you were a funeral director at one time, right?
I let FuneralNewsCentral lapse, and haven’t gotten around to putting the posts back over here. It was too much effort to run two separate blogs.
I wasn’t a funeral director, but worked as a service provider to the funeral industry for almost seven years, escorting funeral processions. I was probably a little more knowledgeable about the industry than most escort riders, owing to my nosy nature. 🙂