Bill Goddard, left, will be speaking about the green burial alternatives offered at Green Acres Cemetery. (Missourian file photo)

What: Bill Goddard of Green Acres Cemetery

When: Tuesday, Sept. 18 at 7:30

Where: MU Hillel, 1107 University Avenue

Cost: Free

Be green, even in death. Bill Goddard of Green Acres Cemetery will be speaking about environmentally friendly burial methods on Tuesday night. The presentation will be followed by a question-answer session, light refreshments and the opportunity to borrow books on the subject.

Goddard is the owner of the only exclusively green cemetery in mid-Missouri and works to provide affordable, ecologically responsible burial options such as prohibiting embalming, grave liners and non-biodegradable caskets. We interviewed him for our “5 Things About Resting in Biodegradable Peace,” published this week in Vox, and there was so much more to the topic than what would fit on the page. Did you know that embalming didn’t become common practice until the Civil War because they wanted a way to transport bodies from where they died back to where they lived for burial? We didn’t either, and that’s just scratching the surface of the knowledge Goddard has on the topic.

The event is sponsored by the Sierra Club Osage Group, whose chair, Jan Dye, say she became aware of greener burial practices after she attended two different traditional funerals and decided that “the normal American funeral” wasn’t for her. “It seems kind of morbid and macabre to me, and I just decided I want to be buried in the ground without any of the trappings,” she says.

Dye hopes the event will give people a better sense of the options available to them when it comes to internment. “When you’re making these arrangements you’re at your most vulnerable, you’re grieving anyway, and then you have to make all of these decisions,” she says. It’s important for people to ”realize that they have a choice. They don’t have to go the traditional route of they don’t want to.”