In April 2024, we co-organised a roundtable discussion on the role of mourning and grief in a time of extinctions. The panel comprised Unworlding Collaboratory members Blanche Verlie and Thom van Dooren with our colleague Zoë Sadokierski. The event was a collaboration with ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program, produced by Natasha Mitchell. An edited recording of our discussion is now available from the ABC’s website.

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Join Natasha Mitchell and guests for a poetic discussion on the ways you can create space to grieve for species that are going, going, gone. Powerful interests collude to tell us that expressing emotion is hysterical, and that humans are separate from Nature, but proper mourning paves the way for what to do next — and places us right back where we belong.

That Big Ideas event was held with the Living on the Edge project, a partnership between the Sydney Environment Institute at The University of Sydney and the National Museum of Australia.

Speakers

Professor Thom van Dooren 
Environmental philosopher
Professor of Environmental Humanities
Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney
Author, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction
The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds
A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions

Dr Blanche Verlie
Climate change educator, sociologist
Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies
Sydney Horizon Fellow, University of Sydney.
Author, Learning to Live With Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation

Associate Professor Zoe Sadokierski
Book designer, writer, creative producer
Co-director, Visualisation Institute, University of Technology Sydney.
Author, Father, Son and Other Animals

Header image by Matt Palmer on Unsplash