The woodland burial plot that creates a beautiful final resting place in nature,
healing broken hearts and broken landscapes.
The funeral industry is renown for unfair pricing and treatment of customers during emotionally vulnerable moments. This is wrong and Return To Nature strives to lead the way towards a more positive industry for all.
Funerals are a stressful event for those who are left behind. A Return To Nature burial offers the loved ones of the deceased a chance to grieve in a calming, positive setting.
Geometric rows of headstones, human-managed landscaping, brass handles and mahogany veneer - the act of dying today could hardly be more out of harmony with our natural world. Our conservation burial plots create a better world than the one we inherited.
Like gravity wells, economic prosperity has pooled in our cities, leaving those who live in the countryside marginalised. We strive to level the playing field somewhat and to champion job creation for rural people.
With a large enough group signed up we can purchase land in Scotland to be restored into a beautiful and wild forest.
We need you! By signing up, you will be notified when we begin taking pre-orders or launch a crowd-funder for this land.
Read more about being an eco-visionary.
Return To Nature is a planet-over-profit burial company that offers rewilding burials which ecologically restore land and use nature to support the mental wellbeing when dealing with mortality and grief.
We offer rewilding burials that are the most sustainable end-of-life arrangement for our planet. They adhere to natural burial practices and rewild the land where patrons will be laid to rest in a beautiful and biodiverse landscape. As part of the rewilding burial we plant trees, rewild the land, and host the burial ceremony.
A Return To Nature rewilding burial prioritises positive impact. We aim to maximise the amount of ecologically degraded land per burial that will be rewilded into a beautiful landscape. We aim to offer potentially up to one acre per person in the wilds of Scotland. This might change slightly as we acquire land, but provides us with an ambitious target to aim for. Return To Nature also prioritises the support of mental wellbeing through connecting with the restoration of nature.
A woodland burial, also referred to as a green burial or conservation burial, offers right to burial on a typical graveyard-sized plot per person. This land is either already a woodland or the burial authority plants one tree per person. In a tradeoff for the smaller positive impact, these burial grounds are located closer to urban areas which makes them quicker to get to.
Rewilding burials and woodland burials both have an important role to play. Not everyone might be willing to travel more than 20 minutes to get to the burial ground. However, we are confident that there is a large number of nature-loving and outdoorsy people who will be intrepid enough to opt for a rewilding burial in the wilds of Scotland!
A rewilding woodland burial, or simply a rewilding burial, is a burial that rewilds ecologically degraded land for the benefit of future generations, wildlife species and the health of our planet.
Our burials adhere to natural burial practices that leave no trace and do not inhibit decomposition. For this reason, all materials used are biodegradable, and embalming fluids and chemical preservatives are not allowed.
As soon as you like! You do not need to leave a rewilding burial to be posthumously enacted through your will. We encourage those who embrace the concept of a rewilding burial to kick-start the process of ecological restoration as soon as possible. In this way, they will be capturing carbon sooner and creating an even wilder and more beautiful landscape for their eventual passing.
We are currently exploring the options of offering patrons the chance to take part in the ecological restoration of their rewilding burial plot themselves. We believe there is a powerful role that the healing of our planet can play for our mental wellbeing in the face of our own mortality. If you like the idea of taking part in the ecological restoration of your own plot, please get in touch and let us know.
We are in the process of designing the rewilding burial ceremony, but we already have some guiding principles for what it will eventually look like. The focus of the ceremony will be to offer flexibility for the family to create a unique celebration of the life of the deceased, while supporting the mental wellbeing of the loved ones left behind by the dearly departed. We therefore aim to create time and space for the bereaved to enjoy the natural landscape that the deceased has helped to restore.
If you are considering a rewilding burial, do get in touch and let us know what you think a perfect rewilding burial ceremony would involve.
Return To Nature rewilding burials will adhere to Natural Burial Code of Conduct defined by The Natural Death Centre. In short, this will involve:
You certainly can! Indeed, we encourage the use of biodegradable shrouds instead of coffins or caskets to reduce environmental impact as much as possible.
Yes, ashes from a cremation can be interred as part of a rewilding burial.
This may be particularly suitable in situations where the deceased has already been cremated and the family are looking for a suitable send-off that will have a positive impact on our planet. We are well aware of the fact that many families wish to offset the carbon impact of a cremation, which is easily achieved with a Return To Nature rewilding burial.
If you would like to know more, then read our article about how cremated ashes work with a rewilding burial.
A Return To Nature rewilding burial captures carbon, restores damaged ecosystems on a grand scale, and promotes biodiversity (particularly rare and threatened species, such as red squirrels, capercailles, and twinflower).
Current estimates of carbon capture per rewilding burial are approximately 3.1 tonnes of CO2 per year on average over the next 100 years. In relatable terms, this is the equivalent of capturing one third of your lifetime’s carbon emissions.
If you would like to know more, then read our article on why a Return To Nature rewilding burial is possibly the most positive for our planet.
Yes, we offer two different payment methods: upfront or monthly payments. Since we encourage patrons to kick-start the ecological restoration and carbon capture of their rewilding burial site as soon as possible, the monthly payment will plan hopefully make this more accessible.
Our rewilding approach aims to minimally intervene in the ecosystem in order to tip the balance in favour of nature healing itself. Nature knows how to take care of itself!
We will erect fences to suppress grazing pressure, plant trees where there is no suitable seed bank and remove non-native invasive species. Over time, as rewilding science and best practice evolves, we will update our methods to achieve the healthiest and most resilient ecosystem. This might involve the reintroduction of locally extinct species, as just one example of the latest thinking on rewilding.
We aim to minimise human impact on the landscape as much as possible in order to create a fully functioning ecosystem. For this reason, we are exploring alternative methods of marking burial sites. Current marker considerations are:
What type of burial marker would you prefer? Feel free to get in touch and let us know.
To allow us to offer large areas of land per burial at an affordable price, Return To Nature is looking at land that will likely be an hour to two or three from major urban areas.
There is a tradeoff between increased land price due to proximity to urban centres and the positive impact that rewilding a larger area of land can have. Which would you prefer?