by Thom van Dooren, Blanche Verlie and Zoë Sadokierski

This essay was published in The Griffith Review, vol. 92 (2026). You can see the full issue here.

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AS SPECIES DISAPPEAR and climate change accelerates, a small but growing group of activists, artists and writers across the world is embracing mourning as transformative ethical and political work. Their approaches are wide-ranging, from public funerals and vigils for departed species to acts of civil disobedience that take the form of mass ‘die-ins’ representing the extinction crisis. What these disparate efforts share, however, is the goal of dwelling with ecological loss in some way, aiming to cultivate a richer sense of our damaged planet, to take responsibility and perhaps to move forwards in a new frame of mind.

We, the authors of this essay, have become fascinated by this effort to tap into the reservoir of cultural practices associated with death, dying and loss and to adapt and redeploy them in response to a deepening planetary crisis. At the same time, each of us has found ways in our own lives – through creative, community-based and political practices – to explore and express our own sense of grief for what is being lost, while making space for others to do the same. We’ve done this through writing, making, teaching, curating, campaigning and more. As a result, we’ve ended up spending a lot of time thinking about, and ultimately dwelling with, grief.

We’ve reached the conclusion that making room for grief is a challenging proposition. The unravelling of our living planet that’s taking place today – most significantly through the twinned processes of climate change and biodiversity loss – is quite simply terrifying. The lack of meaningful political will to do anything about it only compounds the situation. In this context, to willingly and openly enter a space of grief is to face this fear: to refuse to push it down or look away, and instead to deliberately sit with the awful reality of our current predicament.

But doing so does not mean succumbing to pessimism and passivity. Rather, in our view, making room for grief has the potential to open up new possibilities for transformative change.

A famous author is asked to write a eulogy for the Okjökull glacier, the first of Iceland’s four hundred glaciers that may be lost to the climate crisis. The request does not come from a literary publication but a team of anthropologists and scientists who recognise that marking the tragedy poetically is as important as reporting the data. In 2019, Andri Snær Magnason’s bronze-cast Letter to the Future concludes: ‘This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.’

TO UNDERSTAND THE full significance of grief in a time of planetary crisis, it’s necessary to dispel some of the assumptions we frequently make about it, at least in much of the Western world. Grief and mourning are generally thought to be uninspiring, even depressing, topics. We often avoid people who are in mourning, or we’re awkward and uncomfortable around them. When we ourselves are seized by loss, many of us do what we can to ignore, or push down, those feelings – to avoid making a scene, to soldier on. Most public rites of mourning in Australia, from funerals to Anzac Day commemorations, are solemn occasions in which we briefly come together in a quiet and orderly manner and then go our separate ways.

In light of these behaviours, it’s not surprising that viewing grief as a core part of a transformative, life-affirming politics – both personal and collective – doesn’t intuitively make sense to many of us. But that’s precisely what we’d like to suggest.

That’s not to say grief is not centrally about loss. But, as the team behind the Speaking Grief project has simply put it, ‘Grief is the container that holds all of the emotions felt as a result of loss’; while these emotions may include sadness, anger, fear and guilt, grief might also take the form of relief, hope, gratitude or even joy. This diversity of responses reminds us that grief is also fundamentally about love. When we grieve the death of a friend, it’s only because we’ve loved this person that their absence can touch us in such a deep way. As the philosopher Judith Butler notes, grief shows us we’re relationally constituted: our ties to others ‘compose us’ in important ways, such that when I lose you, I may no longer know who I am or what to do.

In short, grief shows us that we’re profoundly at stake in one another. Perhaps the best way to explain the evolution of grief in humans and some other animals is that it’s ‘the cost of commitment’, in psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes’ words. That is, it emerged in our non-human ancestors alongside the cognitive and emotional capacity to develop close social bonds. Viewed from this perspective, grief is about our place in the world, the relationships that make us who we are, the bits of ourselves that dwell beyond our skin.

As we grieve, we are in an important sense being undone. But also redone. We’re accepting that a part of ourselves – or perhaps just someone or something that mattered profoundly to us – is gone and that we must go on differently. As the philosopher and counsellor Thomas Attig puts it, grief is a process of ‘relearning the world’. If this is true, then far from being an individualising and isolating impulse, grief is a thoroughly relational process: it requires us to redo our notion of ourselves and to make sense of our place in a changing world. This means grief has the potential to be anything but the kind of passive, introspective or even disabling state it’s frequently thought to be. Sure, it often entails those elements of reflection, anguish and struggle, but in coming to terms with loss, in coming to appreciate the gift of what we had or might have had, in learning to move forwards – wounded but alive – we can be brought back to life and the living world in new and richer ways.

A public library meeting room is booked, and for two hours a group of about twenty climate activists works through a ‘climate café’: a psycho-educational workshop led by climate-aware counsellors from Psychology for a Safe Climate. At various times, the participants might be drawing pictures about their feelings, learning about mindful self-compassion or sharing their strategies for managing burnout and compassion fatigue. Participants leave feeling (mostly) calmer and more connected, self-aware. Part of a community.

WHAT DOES ALL this mean in a time of planetary crisis? How are we to make sense of public acts of mourning – but also the private grief of individuals and groups, in the face of the extinction of a local plant or animal species? Or those who grieve for the loss of climatic stability enjoyed by past generations and the diminished possibilities it will likely bring? In short, how do we make sense of grief when the discussion shifts from mourning a dead or dying loved one – usually, but by no means always, a human – into the strange space of what Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R Ellis have called ‘ecological grief’?

Realising the transformative potential of grief in a time of planetary crisis will require us, as a society, to make more room for this often uncomfortable set of emotions in public discourse and practice as well as in our day-to-day lives. Doing so is first and foremost about refusing the various forms of emotional censorship and control that currently dominate much public discussion of climate change and biodiversity loss. Too often, when people express feelings of sorrow and anguish in the face of current or anticipated losses, their emotions are ignored, denied, trivialised or even laughed at. In Australia, we often see this dismissal happening to broad sections of young people, environmental activists and climate-change-affected communities, many of whom report experiencing not only sadness but anger, anxiety and guilt, regularly exacerbated by a profound sense of powerlessness and betrayal. Yet we routinely see some of our politicians brushing off these people’s grief.

For example, in the Black Summer of 2020, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited the town of Cobargo after it was devastated by bushfires. When townsfolk expressed their anger towards him for the government’s inadequate response to the disaster, however, he cut short his visit and later told the media that Cobargo’s residents were just ‘feeling very raw’ – implying that, with a little time, these uncomfortable and inconvenient feelings would simply pass. In a similar manner, the concerns of youth climate activists about their own and the planet’s future are frequently portrayed as childish and, again in Morrison’s words, ‘needless’.

A lecture hall of scientists holds silence, unsure what comes next. The woman delivering the lecture is not silent but equally uncertain what will follow. Twenty minutes into her talk on addressing climate grief through creative practice, she surprises them all by sobbing. With a few shaky breaths, she finds her way back into the talk. As the next speaker begins, she wades through alternating waves of shame about crying in a professional setting and relief it’s over. In discussion time, a man offers: ‘She needed to cry, so the rest of us didn’t have to.’ For the remainder of the conference, she divides people into those who empathise and those who are mortified for her.

IN THEIR MORE extreme forms, these dismissive engagements with other people’s emotions constitute a kind of ‘greenhouse gaslighting’. Here, ecologically concerned people are subtly positioned as hysterical or unreasonable outliers who are not to be trusted – they simply don’t have a good grip on reality and are blowing things out of proportion. This response can, of course, be profoundly damaging for people who are already suffering trauma. But the consequences are even more insidious. At its base, these responses represent an effort to suppress public emotions as a technique of governance and control. By questioning the legitimacy and ‘reasonableness’ of particular emotional responses, other people will think twice before sharing similar feelings. In this way, the potential of these responses to transform our collective understanding and generate meaningful change is blunted. It’s not simply about controlling public discourse; it’s about creating a broader climate of understanding that shapes what’s seen and felt to be a reasonable response. So, it also ends up pervading our own private thoughts and feelings, encouraging us to self-censor.

In a repurposed bunker, red-robed women file past seated guests, like pagan bridesmaids in slow motion. They form a loose circle around a symbol that resembles an hourglass in the centre of the space, chanting, moaning and swaying long branches around themselves in a loosely rehearsed performance. Some audience members are transfixed, swaying in sympathetic rhythm. Others squeak restlessly on their fold-down chairs, exchanging tight smirks or surreptitiously scrolling on their phones, uncomfortable with this earnest performance of mourning.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF making more room for ecological grief goes beyond reaffirming and empowering those who are already feeling these losses. The simple fact is that many, perhaps most, of us don’t yet seem to be emotionally affected in a significant way by the processes of planetary unravelling that are going on around us. We hear the news of innumerable species lost, of a climate system tipping us towards a deeply unstable future, and we go on with our lives. Part of the explanation for this situation is surely that the economic and infrastructural systems many of us inhabit have done a very good job of insulating us from experiencing these losses and transformations directly – notwithstanding the occasional intrusion of smoke or floodwaters. Other communities haven’t had this luxury.

But another part of the explanation seems to lie in the fact that many of us are also insulated by a kind of cultural infrastructure that we could call ‘human exceptionalism’. This is the view that our species is somehow special and set apart from the rest of the living world – that humans are the sole locus of meaning and arbiter of value. If some sort of change in the environment – such as the extinction of a species of bird or snail – doesn’t impact humans in a significant way (where ‘significant’ is generally reduced to economic considerations), then it simply does not matter; it is not a ‘loss’ at all. Sadly, for many people today, even this limited sphere of regard seems too much, with losses registering as such only if they’re significant to oneself, or perhaps our loved ones.

In this context, making room for mourning might be about drawing people into a more relational or ecological sense of themselves and their world, which means understanding ourselves as embedded within a larger community of life, all of which matters, all of which is precious and significant. When a species disappears – any species – a part of that community, a part of ourselves, is lost. More than simply understanding this situation at an intellectual level, what we need is to generate some genuine care and concern, a felt awareness of ourselves as beings who are in some sense at stake in these Earth-others. This is about cultivating new modes of what the philosopher Vinciane Despret has called ‘learning to be affected’. Today, we need this kind of learning to take place at scale (although it’s definitely the case that some communities in some parts of the world need to learn this lesson much sooner than others).

A crowd gathers to watch an artist methodically erase a huge, painstakingly detailed pencil drawing of an extinct butterfly. She pauses to stretch her aching shoulder and wrist before leaning back into the erasing. In just under six minutes, the carpet of pencil and eraser shavings at her feet becomes the only evidence of 112,000 individual wing scales that took 360 hours to draw. Yet closer inspection reveals ghost species: traces of drawings previously erased on this same large sheet. Between 2019 and 2023, Lucienne Rickard spent six hours a day drawing and erasing sixty extinct species, while visitors passing through the foyer of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery observed her labour. This public performance of loss opened space for collective contemplation and reckoning with guilt and grief over the permanence of extinction.

IMPORTANTLY, THESE DYNAMICS of emotional control and human exceptionalism are tangled up with each other in significant ways. Undermining the social legitimacy of ecological grief – positioning it as childish or irrational – is enabled and reinforced by the sense that grief and mourning really ought to be reserved for losses of human life. Under this logic, the best that we might aspire to is grief for the actual or potential human impacts of climate change or biodiversity loss, not for anything like the global insect apocalypse. Through drawing on human exceptionalism, this social control over legitimate forms of grief helps to reinforce and prop up that sense of human specialness. By encouraging people who feel ecological grief to question the legitimacy of their feelings, and by shutting down public expressions of them, this social discourse limits the capacity of individuals and groups to sit with these emotions, to slow down with them, to learn from and be transformed by them – in short, to work though these losses in a manner that enables them to understand themselves and their world in new ways.

Embracing grief like this does not mean abandoning hope for the future or the necessary action we must take to get there. Instead, it’s about an honest reckoning with the reality that much has already been lost, and that irrespective of what we do now, there will be a great deal of ongoing loss in years to come. Ecologists call this our ‘extinction debt’, and climate scientists tell us about the ‘committed heating’ that’s already locked in as a result of emissions to date. While hope remains vitally important for transformative change, any honest and responsible form of hope must be tinged with this recognition of loss.

In a small trailer about half an hour from Honolulu, a group of scientists has established an ark of sorts, a captive breeding facility for some of Hawai‘i’s most critically endangered snails. Day in and day out, they care for these creatures, feeding, cleaning, monitoring and more. While some of the species will survive, and some might even be successfully released and re-established in the islands’ forests, others will simply disappear, dying out under their watch. How do these people keep up this work, the Sisyphean labour of holding species in the world? More than this, how do they do so in the context of both funding and public relations agendas that demand they maintain an optimistic, even hopeful, demeanour about their work at all times?

EMBRACING GRIEF ALSO means refusing what’s become a kind of dogma in some environmentalist circles: that we must tell only hopeful stories that offer practical solutions that people can take up in their day-to-day lives. Otherwise, we’re told, we risk upsetting and disempowering audiences. But these hopeful and practical narratives far too often let their listeners – and their tellers – off the hook too easily. In emphasising the good news, they can falsely give the impression that things aren’t as bad as those doom-and-gloom merchants have made out. Similarly, in emphasising the value of small, simple actions – writing a letter to a politician or buying a different brand of toilet paper – they downplay the scale of the problem and give a false sense that things are manageable if we just keep on with small, incremental changes. Just as worryingly, these kinds of stories are often complicit in the effort to shift the burden of responsibility onto individual citizens or consumers, and away from the companies and governments most responsible for our current predicament and most able to create the systemic change that’s desperately needed.

In all these ways, making more room for grief seems to us to offer powerful potential for political transformation. But there’s another important layer to the work of mourning that we haven’t yet touched on: namely that it might also be something we do for those who have been, or will be, lost. In this register, grief often takes the form of bearing witness. There are two key facets to bearing witness: being present and observing, then sharing that experience with others. This work is taken up as an act of faithfulness to the dead and dying. Even if we cannot change the situation for them – to prevent the extinction of a species or the loss of a precious ecosystem – bearing witness to that loss is still an ethical obligation. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has argued there’s an incredible violence in causing another species’ extinction, but there’s a second violence in turning away from this loss, in failing to sit with it, to learn from it, to take responsibility for it. While doing so might help prevent future extinctions, this is not the only, or even primary, point to bearing witness. It is, first and foremost, an obligation to the dead and dying: an effort to cultivate some semblance of an ethical relationship with those whose deaths we are, each in our own complex ways, complicit in.

But in our current climate, it seems to us that this witnessing must also take another form. It must also be about bearing witness to the impacts of these losses on a diverse community of life, as well as bearing witness to our own and others’ feelings. For climate-change-affected communities, for youth struggling with a sense of a future that’s closing in on them, for countless other people already experiencing a sense of deep loss and sadness, there’s a similar kind of double violence at work that compounds the trauma of their current harm by refusing to acknowledge that the trauma is real. Not surprisingly, it’s many of the same political and corporate actors and institutions most responsible for our climate and biodiversity crises who are most diligent in their efforts to undermine the social legitimacy of the sadness and anger these people express. And so, in this context too, the work of bearing witness assumes an important role.

In a university classroom, when asked how they feel about the ecological crisis, a few students break down in tears. The atmosphere in the classroom is forever changed. For better or worse, it’s unclear, but the discussion has ruptured the (admittedly imagined) boundary between the personal and the academic, and a stronger feeling of solidarity is emerging. Later, walking back across campus, a different student mentions they’re thinking about learning to use a gun – in response to visions of wars over water and food. Having just read The Parable of the Sower, where a young woman does just that and manages to protect her community, the teacher is lost for words. How to respond?

MUCH OF OUR work has focused on bearing witness in these kinds of ways, holding room for grief in all its varied forms in an effort to be faithful to both those who’ve been lost as well as to those who are most affected and are currently living through the crushing weight of that loss. The short vignettes scattered through this text provide a glimpse into some of our own experiences and practices, as well as those of other people whose efforts we’ve been struck by and drawn into. From classroom encounters and structured workshops to performances of public mourning and the ongoing labours of caring for endangered species in captivity, there are innumerable ways we might take up the work of sitting with and bearing witness to loss. Of course, we hope these efforts contribute to much needed change, but we think that holding open this space matters either way. It’s one small part of cultivating the kinds of social and ecological relationships that are worth safeguarding.

Dwelling with loss is often difficult and painful work. Importantly, it’s work that can also take a myriad of forms. Our aim is not to prescribe a correct way of feeling about, or set of practices or way of responding to, the current period of loss. Instead, it’s to encourage the opening up of diverse spaces and possibilities for us to all find our own ways to connect, to feel, to check in with and process those feelings, and perhaps also to share. While this is something each of us will do in our own ways, it’s also unavoidably a collective project and thus a collective responsibility, requiring us to cultivate public discourses and social infrastructures that can enable liveable, hopeful, empowered forms of ecological grief.

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This essay builds on a conversation that the authors began as a roundtable discussion with Natasha Mitchell for an episode of ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas. That event was part of Living on the Edge, a collaboration between the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney and the National Museum of Australia.

Thom van Dooren is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022).

Blanche Verlie is a Sydney Horizon Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation (Routledge, 2022).

Zoë Sadokierski is an Associate Professor of Design at the University of Technology Sydney. Her most recent book is Father, Son and Other Animals (Cordite Books, 2024)