What Is Ecological Grief?

You probably remember how in early 2020 wild bushfires raged throughout Australia. Reminiscing about bushwalking in her youth in the Yuin nation, the journalist Lorena Allam described the horror of seeing it all go up in smoke: “For First Nations people it is also burning up our memories, our sacred places, all the things which make us who we are. It's a particular grief to lose forever what connects you to a place in the landscape.”

Environmental destruction is rife. We hear with increasing frequency about the ravages of hurricanes, floods and wildfires, and many communities are affected by the slower but chronic effects of drought or melting sea ice. In all this destruction, there is a direct loss of lives, and of livelihoods, but climate change also has important mental health consequences, which clinical psychologists are only beginning to untangle. Among these consequences, one that is intimately tied to environmental loss is ecological grief.

In a landmark review, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis define ecological grief as grief felt in response to ecological losses. Existing studies have investigated ecological grief in contexts such as melting sea ice in the Arctic, warming temperatures in northeastern Siberia, long-term drought in the Australian Wheatbelt, or deforestation in rural Ghana.

But what is ecological grief? While the term ecological grief might strike you as an odd choice of words (for many, grief is usually reserved to the loss of a loved person), there is a renewed focus in psychology on grief over non-death losses, such as breakup, illness, pregnancy loss or the loss of one’s pet.

Grief over non-death losses is often “disenfranchised,” meaning that it is not openly acknowledged or socially supported, but it is grief nonetheless, and the disenfranchisement further compounds the difficulty of navigating the emotion. Of course, extending the scope of grief makes defining it even more challenging, because it raises the question of what is the common denominator that unites all these forms of grief.

Philosophers Matthew Ratcliffe and Louise Richardson argue that we can understand non-death losses if we define grief not as the loss of a person but as the loss of “life possibilities.” The idea is that the structure of our lives is a coherently organized arrangement of significant possibilities, such as our routines, expectations, projects, or pastimes.

Our loved ones are integral to our life structure. So, when a loved one dies, our grief is the emotional process of grasping the implications of the loss to the structure. However, not only our loved ones, but also our projects, our jobs, or our pets can be integral to the structure of our lives in different ways, and when we lose them, we undergo grief.

What ecological grief shows is that place can be equally integral to the structure of our lives. Jeff Malpas, one of the key thinkers about the nature of place, argues that the structure of our lives, our sense of identity, is inextricably tied to the places “in and through which our lives are worked out – which means that we cannot understand ourselves independently of the places in which our lives unfold even though those places may be complex and multiple”.

In Lament for the Land, a community co-produced film about the impacts of climate change, Tony Andersen, the mayor of the Nain community in Labrador, is quite explicit in drawing the link between place and identity as a central theme underlying ecological grief: “Inuit are people of the sea ice. If there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?” The places where we dwell structure our life possibilities, using Ratcliffe and Richardson’s term. When the sea ice melts too early, river crossings, outdoor activities, hunting, and festivals are all disrupted.

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With the loss of these life possibilities, one’s very identity is in crisis. This is a recurrent element for people suffering from ecological grief. Discussing the impact of deforestation in Ghana, one farmer laments how the “hunting for bovines was who we are, but that's no more. Whether we overhunted them or the land became toxic for them [referring to bush burning and increased pesticide use], we don't know”.

Similarly, a victim of a wildfire in Australia explains that it “totally changed everything about our place, not just the inside, not just the house, not just our stuff, but all our history.” Our identity is intertwined with our community and projects, and these are rooted in place, so when the places we inhabit are eroded, our very identities are disrupted.

Ecological grief shows how the very possibilities that we normally experience are rooted in place and disrupted in the aftermath of environmental loss. The people most affected are those living at the frontlines of climate change, whose voices are often ignored. Understanding that ecological grief is both a genuine form of grief and a legitimate response to environmental loss is a necessary step to avoid disenfranchising those who suffer from it. But it is only a first step, and much more needs to be done to understand this particular grief, to learn how to cope with it, and, most importantly, to mobilise society to tackle its root causes.