Sarah Wambold
Sarah Wambold is a licensed funeral director and writer in Austin, TX. She has worked in the funeral industry for over a decade, as both a funeral director and as a caretaker for a natural burial cemetery.
Working in the conventional funeral industry for several years, Sarah felt limited by what she could offer families who desired a more natural approach to death care. Her own concern for the environment and interest in land conservation drew her towards the natural burial movement, a form of death care that is environmentally-focused and intentionally chosen as a way to grieve through care for the earth.
Since then, Sarah has sought to develop and expand natural burial spaces in order to make it more widely available. At Campo de Estrellas, Sarah is proud to serve the surrounding rural communities in East Texas while restoring degraded farmland to a protected, flourishing ecosystem.
Sarah’s writing and expertise on natural burial has appeared in The Texas Observer, the BBC, The Order of the Good Death, and elsewhere.
Michael Ybarra
An Austin native, Michael co-founded Ybarra PLLC in New York City in 2010 with fellow associates from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, one the country’s premier law firms. Outside the office, he is a Trustee of St. Stephen’s Episcopal School and an Economic Prosperity Commissioner for the City of Austin.
Michael has a longstanding interest in international law and human rights, and continues to work on consultations to the United Nations and its constituent organizations. In 2009-2010, he was a Simpson Thacher & Bartlett Fellow in the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, where he focused on strengthening the efficacy of the International Criminal Court and justice mechanisms for serious crimes in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. While still in law school, Michael traveled to West Africa to work with the Office of the Principal Defender at the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Outside of his practice, Michael is committed to educating students of business and the law, most recently at the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business. Past and future teaching appointments include Texas State University, Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg in Mosbach, Germany, and the International Law Institute’s African Centre for Legal Excellence in Kampala, Uganda.
Cindy Ybarra
Cindy Ybarra is a retired public health nurse, gardener and founder of Wild Hare Abbey, an urban, multi-generational co-living project. For as long as she can remember, she has been an advocate of caring for the environment, having won in grade school, for two years running, the first prize for her essays on soil conservation. She is involved in a reforestation and rewilding project at her family’s farm. There is no more room for trees at Wild Hare Abbey due to her vigorous efforts at that location.