John Christian Phifer, executive director of Larkspur Conservation, led the creation of Tennessee’s first conservation burial ground, a nature preserve for natural burial. John Christian is also currently president of the Conservation Burial Alliance. At Larkspur, John Christian utilizes his background as a funeral director, embalmer, end-of-life doula, funeral celebrant, and a home funeral guide to demystify death and create meaningful end-of-life rituals. His work was recently featured on PBS in a documentary film called Bury Me At Taylor Hollow. John Christian holds a deep respect for mother nature and works to educate and empower the public by bridging environmental advocacy and end-of-life care.

What is it like to align our values in our lives with plans for our bodies after we die? After the sudden and tragic deaths of her parents, environmental education professor, Mallory McDuff, decided to explore sustainable options for her own body in her home in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is the author of five books, including Our Last Best Act: Planning for the End of Our Lives to Protect the People and Places We Love. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, and  more.

Lyla Rothschild, program director of the Ernest Becker Foundation, has been preoccupied with the concept of mortality for as long as she can remember. Lyla completed a degree in psychology and worked for five years as a researcher. After discovering the Ernest Becker Foundation and its empirical research on Terror Management Theory (TMT)), she studied TMT for a year and was amazed to find a connection between our fear of death and our tendencies towards group think, prejudice, and discrimination.

Based on the ideas of anthropologist, Ernest Becker, liberator of a Nazi concentration camp, and Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Denial of Death, the Ernest Becker Foundation raises awareness about how denial and fear of death affects individual and societal behavior.

Some 1500 experimental studies indicate how death can affect the way we live, make decisions, form beliefs, create cultures, structure our societies, and interact with each other - especially those who are different from us. Our strategies for coping with our mortality can lead to acts of hate and violence, but also to noble, altruistic striving.

JOIN LYLA to learn more about the fascinating research on fear and denial of death, how it shapes us and our world.