Bluestem in the News

Conservation Groups Permanently Protect First Conservation Cemetery in Central North Carolina, Triangle Land Conservancy Blog, March 2025
Funeral Pricing Transparency May Tip the Scales in Favor of Consumers, North Carolina Health News, July 2024
My Dad's Green Burial, Friends Journal, April 2024
Gifts: Natural Burial is a Conservation Strategy, Saving Land Magazine, Summer 2023
Green Burial and Bluestem Conservation Cemetery, Aging Well Together Radio Show, August 31, 2023 
Caring for Our Bodies After Death, featuring Bluestem Co-founders, Duke Divinity School, April 12, 2023
Death Expo Lifts the Veil on Myth and Mystery by Rose Hoban, North Carolina Health News, October 24, 2022
The Road to Building Bluestem, Green Burial Council 2022 Conference, October 23, 2022 
Back to the Land by Tom Clynes, featuring Heidi Hannapel on green burial for the Environmental Defense Fund, May 2022
A Way for Nature to Rest In Peace by Xander Peters, featuring Heidi Hannapel and Jeff Masten, National Geographic Magazine, April 2022
The Piedmont's First Conservation Cemetery is Rethinking Burial by Zella Hanson, IndyWeek, March 30, 2022
Former Orange County Farmland Will Be the Largest Green Burial Site in North Carolina by Jane K. Callahan, The News & Observer, February 21, 2022
​​Bluestem: A Hike for All Eternity Heidi Hannapel and Jeff Masten describing conservation burial in the Piedmont, podcast interview, January 18, 2022
A Natural Requiem: Bluestem to be Orange County's first devoted green burial site by Dale Edwards, The News of Orange County, news story, January 13, 2022
Heidi Hannapel on Conservation Burial, Lady Farmer, written interview, October 29, 2021
Green Burials and Bluestem Conservation Cemetery, The Good Dirt, podcast interview, October 29, 2021

Read about Bluestem Conservation Cemetery

Read Exchanging Gifts, an article about conservation burial featured in this Summer issue of The Land Trust Alliance's publication Saving Land. Here's an excerpt:

"Within the course of a year, veteran conservationists Heidi Hannapel and Jeff Masten’s parents received terminal diagnoses. They each took leaves of absence from their careers to support their parents’ dying at home. Emerging from these life changing events, they recognized they could apply their conservation experience to building a local, community project that could change the way people approach life, death and burial."

​Read the entire article here

Heidi and Jeff at Bluestem, January 2022

---

Bluestem Stewards: Lionel, Jeff, Walter, Heidi and Katie, March 2025

---

Photo Credits: 
Bluestem Community Burial Crew Training April 2025
Heidi and Jeff, LANDMATTERS