Everybody needs a niche and Elizabeth Fournier has one. She’s America’s friendly, neighborhood mortician. She also has a color. Green. As in, Elizabeth Fournier is America’s green mortician, writing books and spreading the word that funerals and burials need not be expensive, anti-environmental affairs. She recently published her third book, The Green Burial Guidebook: Everything You Need to Plan an Affordable, Environmentally Friendly Burial. And it is exactly that, an easy-to-follow plan for ecologically friendly burials, whether carried out by your local mortician or at home.
ELIZABETH FOURNIER podcast excerpt: "For people who have always recycled and brought their cans back to the store for money and who worry about cloth bags, they have a choice which is a little bit more equal to them when they die. Think about all of the resources that we get buried with and that get put in the ground. Think about all the metal caskets we put in the ground annually. We could be rebuilding a Golden Gate Bridge every year!"This may not be everybody’s favorite topic, but it is thought-provoking; I know it’s got me thinking about what instructions I will leave behind. I am also curious to talk to Elizabeth about pushing green burials at a time when the Trump Administration is treating the environment as Public Enemy No. 2 – second only to the news media. This is Elizabeth’s second visit to Mr. Media. She was last here in 2009 to talk about her first book "All Men Are Cremated Equal: My 77 Blind Dates." One of those dates may have panned out; she has since married and has a daughter. And she also wrote a second book, "The Green Reaper: Memoirs of an Eco-Mortician."
