BROOKSHIRE, TEXAS — Denise Manos stood under the hot Texas sun, staring at the 68-acre prairie springing to life ahead of her. She’d come here, to the newly opened Blazing Star Sanctuary in Brookshire, Texas, “to face the unfaceable,” she said. Her eyes scanned the flat, grassy expanse where conservationists are revitalizing the soil so it can become home once again to the tallgrass prairie that once covered 20 million acres of Texas land. Someday, Manos decided, she will call this soil home, too – or at least, her body will.
After touring the sanctuary on this hot June morning, Manos made the ultimate final decision: She will purchase a plot in the sanctuary’s newly opened conservation cemetery, joining a growing number of Americans choosing “green” burials – funerals that eschew embalming and seek simple, biodegradable coffins or burial shrouds, in low-density cemeteries often marked with flat grave markers rather than headstones.
Talking about death can be scary and offputting; as a result, fewer than one in five Americans pre-arrange their funerals, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. But Manos, 67, has become accustomed to staring her fears in the face, since her 2009 metastatic breast cancer diagnosis…