Moving Through Grief, Towards Hope: Political Mourning in the Climate Crisis

Moving through grief, towards hope: Political mourning in the climate crisis A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Politics-Environmental Studies. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction: “Something I feel all the time but am not able to name” .............................. 1 Section 1: “Chill, Greta, Chill” ........................................................................................... 6 Section 2: “Into the realm of flesh and blood” ................................................................. 11 Section 3: Mourning beyond only the human realm ......................................................... 19 Section 4: Moving forwards.............................................................................................. 28 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 34 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 36 iii iv Introduction: “Something I feel all the time but am not able to name” In 2017, Dr. Jennifer Atkinson, a professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, started teaching an interdisciplinary seminar called “Climate Anxiety, Grief and Resilience.” Atkinson designed the course to help college students address the emotional impacts of ecological loss in the climate crisis and engage in climate work without succumbing to debilitating anxiety or grief, and every seat in the course filled during registration.1 After media coverage of the course, Atkinson and her students became the target of online harassment from climate change deniers and internet trolls who lamented the “absurd” college environment allowing this course, and labeled its participants as “coddled,” “wimpy,” and “snowflakes.”2 The University of Washington was forced to remove Atkinson’s phone number from its website to curb the harassment towards her and the seminar’s students.3 Despite the hostile feedback to the course, Atkinson’s curriculum engages with crucial questions in a growing field of research: the emotional and affective dimensions of the climate crisis. This field of research considers how the human race inhabits a planet faced with existential threat. According to the 2021 IPCC report, “widespread and rapid changes in 1 Jennifer Atkinson, “Addressing Climate Grief Makes You a Badass, Not a Snowflake,” High Country News, May 29, 2018, 2 Atkinson “Addressing Climate Grief.” 3 Jennifer Atkinson, “Episode 2: Why Climate Emotions Matter,” April 22, 2020, in Facing It, produced by Intrasonus UK, 17:28, the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”4 These changes occur on a scale “unprecedented over many centuries to thousands of years.”5 Since the former IPCC report, evidence of intensified heatwaves, drought, heavy precipitation, tropical cyclones, and other extreme events has reinforced the attribution of human influences on climate change. Additionally, the report states that global surface temperature will “continue to increase under all emissions scenarios,” exceeding the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds “unless CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.”6 Beyond reasonable doubt, the climate is changing drastically and dangerously, with many regions in the world already experiencing the effect of greenhouse gas emissions. Climatic changes foresee increased flooding, drought and water shortages, heat, and extreme storms, along with famine, poverty, displacement, and death. Globally, many groups have mobilized to respond to the crisis and curb the course of large-scale destruction. Amidst the ongoing and intensifying crisis, a vast body of research provides support for the ineffectiveness of these responses, but I argue that one important missing factor in the approaches to climate change is deep emotional engagement. In September 2020, smoke from wildfires all around the Pacific Northwest clogged the air in Walla Walla, where I was living. Thick and acrid, the smoke eliminated practically all visibility outside as ash fell from the sky. The dangerous air quality index levels, between 300 and 400 ppm combined with the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic, prevented all of us from leaving the house. While being inside in other spaces posed potential risks to our lungs from the virus, going outside posed certain risks for our lungs 4 Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al., Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (Switzerland: IPCC, October 2021), 4 . 5 Masson-Delmotte et al,.Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, 8. 6 Masson-Delmotte et al., Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, 14 2 from the smoke. I felt trapped and unsure when I would be able to venture out into the world again, and a feeling of profound dread and guilt marked that week in my memory. A pit formed in my stomach when I began to think about how this environmental threat would return in the future, in some increasingly worse capacity, and I was struck with a bodily sensation that I couldn’t articulate. Intellectually, I understood that the world in which I live faces threats from rising global temperatures, yet the arrival of the smoke brought about a new somatic sensation in response to changing circumstances. I had an inclination that this feeling was deeper and wider than run-of-the-mill anger, anxiety, sadness, surprise, or frustration. What formed within me felt gnawing, debilitating, and couldn’t be easily assuaged. Through conversations with friends and family, the term “grief” arose as a way of describing the feeling and creating a vocabulary that transcended any single-faceted emotional experience. I felt as if I was losing the promise of a habitable planet in the immediate moment and in the long term. I wondered what could come out of this intense emotional response to the circumstances. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler poses a few key questions: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, what makes for a grievable life?”7 These inquiries consider the subjection of some lives, including women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities to disproportionate experiences of violence. By calling into question the grievability of some lives versus others, Butler illuminates the conditions of vulnerability that shape our political and social identities. Further, In The Ethics of Mourning, R. Clifton Spargo introduces a “resistant strain of mourning,” which disputes 7 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London ; New York: Verso, 2004), 20. 3 psychological reconciliation of loss.8 This form of mourning is ongoing and preserves the dead’s presence in cultural memory, preventing the disappearance of their life and death from collective remembering. Spargo argues that mourning’s symbolic actions, such as ritual and memorialization, belatedly protect the dead and pertain to the place of the departed “other” in the world. When mourners fail to remember the dead, this act represents the possibility of injustice inflicted on the living other. In developing a working framework for addressing and sharing ecological grief, the concept of resistant mourning provides a basis for considering the ethical and political dimensions of emotional responses. By holding onto the feeling of grief and refusing to disavow the experience of mourning, mourners continually express a demand for the protection of the ecological “other,” or non-human entities rendered ungrievable. As a growing object of study, climate grief encapsulates the feelings that exceed dread, anguish, fear, and loss for a planet in peril, and how these emotional experiences can usher in hope, community support, and solution-building. In developing a new framework of ecological grief, what is required is an ability to recognize the grievability of non-human entities through the relationships they share with humans. An affectively attuned relationship between humans and non-humans may involve recognizing forest systems as essential for human health through carbon uptake, along with their cultural, spiritual, and personal significance for people living in their proximity. Honoring these relations through mourning, whether preemptively or posthumously, visualizes the non-human’s importance and interconnectedness in human 8 R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 4. 4 lives. Ashlee Cunsolo claims that climate grief and mourning “disrupt the marginalization and derealization of bodies (human and non)” and thus “can act as ethical and political resistance to the discourses that socially constitute non-human bodies as unmournable.”9 In disrupting cultural and political narratives that separate conceptions of mournability of human and non-human bodies, traditions, imagery, and language of mourning can serve to render communal experiences of climate and ecological grief in the process of overcoming numbness and despair, guiding coalition-building, and encouraging democratic political change. In this work, I seek to explore how collective grief, whether anticipatory or present, can be mobilized in the age of the climate crisis. I firstly consider the importance of emotional intensity in political contexts and how it often gets dismissed in the name of logic and facts. Then, I provide context for how grief and mourning processes for human citizens have served as motivational forces for political change. I contend how these processes for humans can be reconceptualized to address non-human entities threatened by the climate crisis. I finally argue how this framework of grief for the non-human can be processed and mobilized towards networks of support, essential for the creation of further political organization and mobilization. 9 Ashlee Cunsolo “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 182, . 5 Section 1: “Chill, Greta, Chill” In one foundational text of the environmental movement, Silent Spring, writer and biologist Rachel Carson conjures vivid imagery of landscapes subdued and grayed by aerially deployed chemicals. Carson evokes a “silent landscape that was deserted by all living things,” “a strange blight,” “an evil spell,” and “a shadow of death falling over American towns.”10Atkinson observes that these passages are not rhetorically geared to expose the American public to the scientific data associated with pesticide usage, nor does Carson explicitly provide any organizational approaches to policy changes. Instead, she appeals to the emotional intensity of her audience, requiring them to bear witness to horrifying images demonstrative of environmental harms. Despite the years of quantitative and qualitative research behind Silent Spring, Carson was categorized, by chemical industries, as a “hyper-emotional bird-lover,” a “hysterical woman,” and an “unstable spinster with an affinity for cats.”11 For her storytelling work that illustrates ecological issues, Carson was demoralized and these attacks attempted to undermine her scientific credibility with regards to pesticide use—as has occurred with other actors who pursue climate organizing through emotion. Within the broader scope of the environmentalist movement, climate activism since the turn of the century aims to “pressure economic and political actors to change policies and behaviors in a way that will lead to reductions in emissions.”12 Among these 10 Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” The New Yorker, June 16, 1962, re-issued January 3, 2017. . 11 Atkinson, “Episode 2: Why Climate Emotions Matter.” 12 Dana R. Fisher and Sohana Nasrin, “Climate Activism and Its Effects,” WIREs Climate Change 12, no. 1 (2021): 2, . 6 forms of activism include litigation, divest campaigns, boycotting, striking, and political organizing, with the objectives of achieving policy goals recommended by successive IPCC reports. These forms of activism primarily occur between climate activists and groups, policymakers, and business leaders. The paradigm of climate action concerns political arenas, where leaders and groups are expected to enact change through policybased, legal, and financial engagement. In this way, the quantitative and qualitative data from the IPCC report provides context for concrete political action, but does not address the social, emotional, and interpersonal underpinnings behind work that may be done to remedy these concerns. Activists attempt to address the climate crisis through democratic action, pressuring policymakers to enact legislative changes to reduce emissions to halt rapidly increasing global temperatures. This work occurs primarily in rational, market-based, and scientific realms that do not explicitly embrace emotional intensity in climate activism. Highly visible climate activists, especially women and Indigenous people, are often targeted for their emotionality. After her address at the United Nations., Greta Thunberg became the target of attacks from right-wing commentators. On Fox News, Laura Ingraham called Thunberg’s speech “chilling” and lamented how climate change “hysteria” is affecting American youth, including a clip from the 1984 horror film based on the Stephen King novel Children of the Corn.13 In December 2019, former President Donald Trump quoted a tweet congratulating Thunberg, writing “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie 13 Karen Zraick, “Greta Thunberg, After Pointed U.N. Speech, Faces Attacks From the Right,” The New York Times, September 24, 2019, 7 with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”14 In both of these examples, Thunberg’s critics did not address the content of her speech, on the urgency of climate action, rather her emotive and affective presence. While Thunberg’s emotional demeanor, certainly fueled by fear and anger, corroborated the urgency of her words, the adults that attacked her used her emotional intensity as a rationale for not taking her seriously. Effects of climate change increase vulnerability of human and non-human bodies. The implications of rising temperatures in the IPCC reports pose direct threats to human livelihoods. Events such as drought, famine, and conflict directly threaten wellbeing worldwide, and restrict humans from achieving basic survival needs. Martha Fineman defines vulnerability as a condition “arising from our embodiment,” subjecting bodies to the “possibility of harm, injury and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events.”15 The state of living carries with it the possibility of experiencing harm, pain, and suffering. Fineman continues to clarify that “society can and does mediate, compensate and lessen our vulnerability through programs, institutions, and structures.”16 Instead of approaching the climate disaster through the moderated, highly symbolic political lens, I suggest a conceptualization of how embodiment generates emotional and affective experiences that are far more effective means of community organizing and coalition-building. Emotional and affective responses can serve as potent devices for generating moral and social perspectives for environmental injustices by obligating a shared sense of responsibility and protection over what is considered 14 Kyle Balluck, “Trump Criticizes Greta Thunberg after ‘Person of the Year’ Win: ‘Chill Greta, Chill!,’” The Hill, December 12, 2019, . This article references a tweet that has since been deleted. 15 Fineman, Martha Albertson. “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 20, no. 1 (May 10, 2008), 9, . 16 Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject,” 10. 8 important. A vulnerability approach to the threats of climate change means responding to threats of bodily harm and striving towards creating societal momentum geared to mediate, compensate and lessen threats to living entities. Emotion provides key insights into the formations of ethical and political frameworks. Despite the emotionally charged facets of climate work (i.e., resisting death, suffering, destruction of homes and landscapes), in contrast to logic and reason, emotion gets dismissed within climate politics. Lisa Kretz observes that emotion in climate politics often gets wrongfully relegated to the “domain of the irrational”17 in a process of non-uptake. Non-uptake refers to the failure of outside actors to recognize emotional experiences as legitimate.18 Sue Campbell points to this experience of “being dismissed” as “being told to leave the room before a conversation starts or being treated like a piece of furniture while it is going on.”19 Environmentalists, such as Carson, showing outward displays of emotional intensity, are dismissed on the basis of their reactions being perceived as irrational, unhealthy, and unproductive. Notably, this dismissal often occurs in a gendered fashion, where women’s emotions are dismissed by men, and utilized to further suppress their resistance efforts to misogyny.20 These dismissals and attacks prevent further engagement with climate issues on the emotional level. 17 Lisa Kretz, “Emotional Solidarity: Ecological Emotional Outlaws Mourning Environmental Loss and Empowering Positive Change,” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 261, . Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg: Crossing Press, 1983), 89. 19 Sue Campbell, “Being Dismissed: The Politics of Emotional Expression,” Hypatia 9, no. 3 (1994): 49, . 20 Campbell, “Being Dismissed,” 63. 18 9 Yet, Kretz argues that “possibilities for emotional self-configuration to deal with environmental loss are under-utilized and are potentially extremely powerful sources for motivating positive environmental action.”21 Political actors who organize and strategize for democratic change require emotional and affective support systems to provide them with ongoing energy and motivation, to avoid falling into numbness, distance, and despair. Climate activism requires resilience and flexibility in the face of the looming threat of ecological collapse. Work in the emotional realm can help provide sources of strength and coalition-building. An essential element in this project is creating supportive community networks that can provide uptake and understanding of mourning as a legitimate response to ecological destruction. Groups that value, understand, and share experiences of environmental grief, and prioritize the relationships between human and non-human entities play an important role in addressing and redressing the climate crisis. 21 Kretz, “Emotional Solidarity,” 21. 10 Section 2: “Into the realm of flesh and blood” Grief and mourning are inevitable in the human experience. Each one of us loses things we love, including people, places, animals, and phases of life. We are forced to face the grief that follows, reconciling with the voids left behind in their absence. If a person dies, what follows is a necessary re-evaluation of the impact that said person had on their survivors, their presence in their lives, and the significance of their relationships, accompanied by dynamic feelings of sadness, anger, guilt, and fear. While grief refers to the internal experience in response to loss, mourning is the active practice of processing and reconciling these sensations. Heather Pool defines mourning as an “affective response to loss whose outward expressions signify one’s place in a community projected backward and forward in time.”22 Mourning individuals and groups attempt to reconcile the past with the present reality of being without the person. Traditions such as funerals, memorials, tributes, funds, monuments, and portraits provide avenues for shared mourning, along with maintaining the symbolic presence of the departed despite their physical absence. Butler identifies the condition of embodiment as one of “mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well”23 There is no guaranteed immunity against the ever-present threat of bodily destruction, and the experience of loss and mourning affects every single human. Mourning facilitates 22 Heather Pool, Political Mourning : Identity and Responsibility in the Wake of Tragedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021), 14, 23 . Butler, Precarious Life, 26. 11 the processing of emotional responses to loss, assessing the implications of a life lived without a particular individual or element’s continual presence. Mourning solidifies the importance of relationships, bond, and kinship after cessation of physical embodiment, and reifies the departed as someone of importance and significance in the mourners’ lives. Cunsolo and Landman write how loss catalyzes changes “in ways we cannot predict or control, and in ways that may be disorienting, surprising, or completely unexpected.”24 When human death occurs prematurely and/or unexpectedly, matters of preventability and responsibility get called into question. Survivors mourn the rest of the life that the departed could have lived and their inability to “die a private death after having had the opportunity to live a full and complete life.”25 Despite death’s inevitability for living things, average lifespan may serve as a marker for the amount of vulnerability that particular groups face. Conditions such as violence, chemical or biological health risks, lack of access to resources needed for survival including food, water, shelter, and heat, lack of healthcare, and lack of protection against catastrophic events predispose individuals and groups to both earlier deaths or conditions that deteriorate quality of life. These conditions of heightened vulnerability constitute injustices, as some groups are subjected to higher risk of adverse effects while others do not face the same threats. Vulnerability can be tied to existing systems of violence and oppression, where particular groups lack legal, economic, and political protection and thus cannot expect to naturally 24 Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. “Introduction: To Mourn Beyond the Human.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 10, . 25 Pool, Political Mourning, 12. 12 live to ages where they have felt that they have lived a whole and fulfilling life, dying surrounded by their loved ones and feeling grateful for the lives they led. Instead, more often is the case that individuals die prematurely without fully realizing the potential of their existence. While the mourning process for some human deaths occurs privately by the departed’s loved ones and close communities, others become more public and marked by collective expressions of shared grief. Crucially, mourning can be private, public, or political. Pool specifies that mourning follows an event of loss, yet not all loss prompts mourning. Further, all political mourning is public. Pool writes of a “body that arrests our attention,”26 where death becomes visible in an act of collective and communal mourning. The visualization or witnessing of bodies, subjected to harm and destruction, engages public audiences on an emotional level. The circumstances of the death, perhaps its brutality, prematurity, or injustice, allow people outside of the deceased’s personal life to mourn them due to shared signifiers that connect them to their identities and communities. The deceased’s body takes on a greater significance than just a living being naturally entering into the inevitable stage after life. Rather, it becomes emblematic of its inability to live a wholly realized and fulfilling life. Conditions of heightened vulnerability precipitated the premature bodily destruction, whereas other people are offered greater protections against injury and death. In historic examples of political grieving, citizens’ deaths have been attributed to lack of protections due to race, gender, socioeconomic status, and national origin for example. In these cases, members of the 26 Pool, Political Mourning, 13. 13 deceased families’ invite the public to mourn with them and render visual the injustices that denied them protection against death. In other instances, such as the response to the 9/11 attacks, mourning can easily feed nationalistic, conservative responses instead of democratic or progressive politics.27 While the outcomes of political mourning vary, the examples with which I engage exemplify resistant mourning, where the psychological experience of loss is not resolved and ongoing. Mourning that focuses on continual remembering of the conditions and injustice of deaths shapes the transformation of political responsibility and community identity with regards to protection of citizens. Historic and contemporary movements against racial violence find origins in events that catalyze immense grief. After the lynching of her son, Emmett Till, in 1955, Mamie Till-Bradley elected to display his mutilated body in an open-casket funeral. The image was broadcast widely across the world, opening Till’s funeral to a wider audience than just his family. Till-Bradley, projecting outwards the image of a mother enduring unfathomable grief, invited the public into her experience, declaring “I know the whole United States is mourning with me.”28 What could have remained a mother privately grieving her son became symbolic of Till-Bradley’s pain as shared by collective and overlapping communities. For the Black community, this image represented the continual threat of racially motivated physical violence, and White audiences were not able to look away from the physical embodiment of anti-Black racism inflicted on a child. This sharing of grief between Till’s family and the American public after an act of extreme violence called into question the lack of protection for Black teenagers against attacks. 27 28 Pool, 94. Pool, Political Mourning, 80. 14 At the trial, an all-White Mississippi jury exonerated Till’s killers. The image of violence enacted on Till’s body generated a reevaluation of differing levels of vulnerability between Black and White citizens of the United States. Pool notes how Till’s “broken body breathed life into the law by pulling the abstract claims about equality of Brown v. Board into the realm of flesh and blood.”29 While the legal foundations of Brown v. Board of Education documented theoretical claims about the unequal and unjust treatment of Black Americans, the image of a human body, destroyed by manifestations of distrust of young Black men as sexual predators, evoked a visceral, physical reaction beyond what could be conceptualized intellectually as an issue of structural racism manifesting as violence. Pool also notes how this event connected the “vulnerability of actual bodies to the vulnerability of political bodies in the United States,”30 in that Till’s body conveyed an image of violence enacted on young Black men in general. The mourning in response to Till’s death was political because of the symbolic meaning created from the circumstances–Till was not just Till himself, but demonstrative of the actual and possible threats posed to Black children. Similar to Mamie Till-Bradley, groups including “Mothers Reclaiming our Children” (Mothers ROC) and “Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo” have identified themselves within the political realm as mothers responding to the loss of their children. Mothers ROC, formed in November 1992, organized as a group of parents grieving their children due to incarceration throughout the greater Los Angeles area. Using a variety of strategies, Mothers ROC focused on different areas of the criminal justice system to 29 30 Pool, 72. Pool, 72. 15 advocate for their children directly affected by mass incarceration. The group observed courtrooms, monitored law enforcement, protested outside of police stations, sponsored legal workshops, and worked with attorneys and scholar-activists to research cases.31 Gilmore notes how this group utilized the “ideological power of motherhood to challenge the legitimacy of the changing state.”32 Crucially, this group highlighted the pain of mothers mourning the loss of their children to the criminal justice system and invited the public to grieve with them towards political ends. As political symbols of caregivers and reproductive laborers, members of Mothers ROC approached activist work through their relationships to their children, transforming the narrative of privately mourned losses to public solidarity activated towards democratic political change, questioning the ability of the state to protect certain citizens versus others. Before the creation of Mothers ROC, the Argentinian group Las Madres de la Plaza Mayo shaped the tradition of mourning mothers being mobilized towards political transformation and state responsibility. Between 1977 and 1983, under a fascist military government, abductions of teenage and adult children occurred on a nightly basis. Their mothers made themselves visible at the Plaza de Mayo, donning head scarves made of diapers displaying the names of their missing children.33 Rupturing the boundaries between private and public lives, the Madres protested the alienation of their children and demanded institutional responsibility for their disappearances from state and church officials along with military, police, bureaucrats, and priests. Mathilde Mellibovsky notes 31 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), 184, . 32 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 238. 33 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 195. 16 how the Madres’ “persistence, both before and after the official admission that the children had died horribly, transformed the passion of individual grief into the politics of collective opposition.”34 In applying pressure to institutions in the form of mass protest and resistance, the mothers channeled their private mourning experiences into collective strength, demanding protection from unequal conditions of violence against the people they love. These moments of historic and political change based on communal grief illustrate the capabilities for democratic political action based on reconsiderations of identity categories. Pool argues that “moments of visible death are often moments of identity transformation in profoundly political ways, moments when the “we” in “We the People” may contract or expand.”35 The linguistic analysis of the word “we” brings up the question of for whom governing legal documents actually serve to protect. While the “we” in the conceptual community of “We the People” purports to benefit all U.S. citizens, events such as racially motivated violence and mass incarceration undermine the promises of freedom, protection, and equal rights. The task for agents acting politically after a citizen's death involves critiquing and identifying the exclusion of individuals or groups from the term “we.” The implications of the term evoke the boundaries of political community and can catalyze the process of shifting responsibility and protection. Pool specifies that the five crucial components of political mourning are context, visibility, agents, responsibility, and political change.36 Context refers to the identity of the mourned citizen, and the shared sense of responsibility (or lack thereof) for protecting 34 Matilde Mellibovsky, Circle of Love over Death: The Story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Willimantic, Curbstone Press, 1998): quoted by Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 195. 35 Pool, Political Mourning, 5. 36 Pool, Political Mourning, 8. 17 their life. Highly visible deaths, broadcasted as imagery through print and virtual media, draw the public in and expand the boundaries of the death event beyond just the deceased person’s closest family and friends. Agents refers to those who mobilize the death event and its after-effects to call for political change; Pool notes that these agents often bring attention to the grievability of the deceased, where some deaths are regarded as less recognizably grievable than others, and the work of surviving agents is to reconsider the personhood of the citizen who died. In explicating responsibility, Pool notes the failure of legal systems to uphold accountability for individuals, such as the all-white jury that exonerated Till’s killers and conceptualizes responsibility as a contested site in the wake of tragedy, as communities self-reflect on their successes and shortcomings at protecting certain bodies versus others. While grief can certainly be isolating and destabilizing, these historic examples illustrate how the public sharing of emotionally intense mourning experiences drives political mobilization against structural injustice. 18 Section 3: Mourning beyond only the human realm For many Indigenous groups, environmental injustices spark mourning of land through people’s emotional and affective ties to landscapes. Instead of collective relationships to land being based on material resource acquisition, private ownership, and potential for economic gain, some Indigenous scholars and communities regard humanland relationships based on reciprocity, recognition of finitude, and appreciation for the life-giving quality found in natural landscapes. Land as a living entity shapes the wellbeing of individuals and communities, engendering attitudes of gratitude, protection, regeneration, and shared stewardship, thus intensifying the experience of ecological grief upon the loss of these elements. In an interview with Vice journalist Nylah Burton, youth climate activist Xiye Bastida, a member of the Indigenous Mexican Otomi-Toltec nation said: “For Indigenous people, climate grief comes from when they’re first displaced by fossil fuel companies, by drilling, by fracking infrastructure that makes Indigenous communities be moved from their place of origin, their place that they have a relationship with. (Our) relationship with the land is the first thing that we care about”37 When Indigenous communities are not protected from the risk of displacement at the hands of fossil fuel companies, they suffer losses of intergenerational material, spiritual, and personal ties with land. Bastida’s emphasis on the “place of origin” highlights the importance of land and place in identity and community formation. Even if displacement doesn’t entail physical movement, the destruction of aesthetic and sensory landscapes 37 Nylah Burton, “People of Color Experience Climate Grief More Deeply Than White People,” Vice (blog), May 14, 2020. 19 along with spiritual and cultural relationships to wildlife and plants constitutes immense experiences of loss. Relationships to the land create and contribute to community health and wellbeing. In the film Lament for the Land, Ashlee Cunsolo Willox traveled to Inuit communities in Labrador, and conducted conversational interviews with members of varying ages about the impacts of changing environmental conditions due to the climate crisis. In the chapter “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Cunsolo notes how Inuit livelihoods are closely linked to and reliant on land. She notes: “My colleagues and friends also frequently remarked that the current changes in climate and environment caused anxiety, fear, stress, worry, and anger as well as intense feelings of sadness, disorientation, grief, loss, and lament for a rapidly changing land.”38 Combining shots of imagery of vast Arctic landscapes with both the faces and cultural practices of 24 Labrador Inuit community-members, Lament for the Land connects the progression of the climate crisis to the emotional and affective responses of the people intimately connected to the land. The film’s structure weaves together sections of conversations with individuals of varying ages, professions, and community affiliations within the Labrador Inuit populations, requiring the viewer to bear witness to the anxiety, pain, and love expressed by the film’s interviewees. Cunsolo-Willox centers the relationships between human and non-human entities, highlighting how land is not just land, but representative of history, culture, and livelihood. A key theme discussed by the 24 interviewees is land’s crucial role in cultivating a sense of self, community, and family. One interviewee, Michelle Wood, a researcher 38 Cunsolo, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” 172. 20 and evaluator from the Goose Bay community emphasized how relationships to the land create identity: “For people who live in the north whose livelihoods hinge on the climate that they live in, it’s really important to understand that it’s not just the meat, the fish, the fur, it’s an integral part of how you’re shaped, how you survive, how you learn from your elders and from your family.”39 Thus, the loss of ability to participate in land-based cultural practices engenders the loss of sense of self. For the film’s Inuit communities, human livelihoods are defined by relationships with non-human entities through intergenerational knowledge and methods of self-sustenance. Group and collective identity are created and maintained through the inheritance of practices that reaffirm connections to the natural environment, including hunting, fishing, and food preparation. With the inability to continue on traditions that sustain livelihood and personal, familial, and cultural identities, members of Inuit communities grieve the losses of crucial parts of themselves. Other interviewees noted the direct mental and public health impacts of loss of cultural identity through land-human relationships. Noah Nochasak, a local research coordinator from the Nain community noted how people around him travel on the land to enjoy themselves: “If they can’t go out and travel a long ways to feel good, they don’t feel like people.”40 Not being able to move freely throughout the natural environment restricts the health benefits of Inuit community members and dehumanizes them. In her subsequent TED Talk, Cunsolo Willox highlights the rise in substance abuse in Inuit communities as a result of limited availability of time spent on the land, ability to continue land-based cultural practices, and anxiety about future threats to ice, wildlife, 39 40 Ashlee Cunsolo Willox. Lament for the Land, 2014. Cunsolo Willox, Lament for the Land. 21 . vegetation, and human life.41 The degradation of natural places and their integral cultural practices undermines the emotional and physical health of human communities. The alienation of Inuit community members from land constitutes a collective loss, and through its interviews, Lament for the Land documents the vitality of human and nonhuman kinship in Inuit relationships with the land. I argue that emotional and affective experiences of climate and ecological grief can provide useful frameworks for further political organizing. The inability to properly grieve the significance of a place or species in one’s life can lead to numbness, frustration, and hopelessness.42 Climate grief as a framework plays an essential role in generating mobilizing emotional responses to unfathomable losses and shifting our attention to the lands that sustain us materially. Recognizing the significance of landhuman relationships and the void that would be left in the case of ecological loss catalyzes a transformational process allowing the grievability of non-human entities. While humans must rely on land’s materials for sustenance and continual living, the Western culture of excess recklessly takes without reciprocity or reasonable limits to resource acquisition. Exploitative relationships to natural environments regard land and non-human living things only with regard to the economic value they can produce. Within this paradigm, it does not matter if a drilling project pollutes waterways or causes the extinction of species, because the political and economic impetus of the project 41 Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Lament for the land.” Filmed July 2014 in Cape Breton, Canada. TED video, 13:32. 42 Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. “Introduction: To Mourn Beyond the Human.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 182, . 22 disregarded land-human relationships–despite the likely completion of EIS reports; the importance of emotional and communal ties to the land is not considered important or relevant. This process of transformation does not necessarily require that non-human beings have all the rights, responsibilities, and protections of humans. Rather, I call for the reconceptualization of landscapes, composed of non-human beings, as able to be remembered and considered vital to well-being, instead of something that is able to be easily extracted, exploited, polluted, destroyed, and endangered. Human culpability in the climate crisis complicates experiences of environmental grief. While some threats to environmental relationships come from direct impacts on the land, such as extraction projects, pollution sources, or deforestation, others come from impacts of global climate change, as documented by the IPCC. Centuries of greenhouse gas emissions have led to dangers that unfold over a longer period of time and cannot be immediately identified as a form of structural disenfranchisement. Rob Nixon utilizes the term “slow violence” to describe long-term environmental crises and are not necessarily identifiable as forms of violence, yet still actively undermine quality of life, sense of belonging, and ability to practice cultural traditions and customs.43 Slow violence perpetuates imbalances of pollutants emitted into the atmosphere versus the material effects on communities and locations that are more vulnerable to disaster, drought, and other types of destruction. While effects of the climate crisis threaten some marginalized groups directly, due to their political, economic, infrastructural, and social vulnerability, climate grief plays a role in every person’s life due to the importance of land and place to our social and ethical lives. While responses to environmental loss may be experienced 43 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2, . 23 on different scales, every person will lose (or has already lost) something in the climate crisis. The task of responding to these losses on an affective and emotional scale concerns shared human vulnerability and protection of species and environments globally. The task of mourning a rapidly changing world is unlike any other experience of mourning we as individuals could possibly imagine. Given the IPCC report’s projection of the scale of events that will occur if the 1.5 and 2° thresholds are surpassed, the effects will be catastrophic, widespread, and incredibly detrimental in their effect on human lives.44 The climate crisis, the result of human activities, threatens the livelihood of the human race itself. The question arises, could we bear the weight of watching the planet we inhabit be destroyed by our own actions? Cunsolo and Landman observe that climate grief potentially does not get addressed or named because the scale of the hurt is so massive, and we don’t possess the proper tools for working through it and considering what it means to our lives and futures. Partaking in ecological resistant mourning requires thinking forwards in time and considering the preservation of ecological health and wellbeing for generations that have not yet been born. The task is not just to ensure a habitable planet for ourselves (though that is certainly of importance) but considering the continuation of the human species and the necessity of familial relationships with future generations, whether the children we think of have been born yet or not. The concept of kinship can be utilized as a guide to reconsidering relationships between humans and nonhumans in environmental and climate work. Between humans, kinship refers to a blood relationship, or a sharing of characteristics or origins. David M. Schneider argues that American culture operates according to a conceptual divide 44 Masson-Delmotte et al., Climate Change 2021, 24 24 between the human and natural realms, and regards kinship as biological.45 Sebastian F. Braun expands on this claim, positing that American culture regards non-human entities as part of the religious or biological environment, as part of metaphorical, cultural or symbolic relationships.46 Instead of understanding bodies beyond the human as related to familial and social livelihoods, we, as an American culture, study their biological principles or make meaning out of them through religious or spiritual metaphor or symbolism. Instead, Braun proposes a sense of kinship with land and place that transcends superficial engagement and instead considers “moral obligations” and a “social conscience” that builds a sense of community.47 These values evoke the capacity for attitudes encouraging protection and responsibility for entities outside of biological and symbolic kinship. Thus, the process of mourning natural entities that have been lost or are threatened reaffirms the importance and value of these non-human bodies, extending notions of their grievability. Scholars in the environmental humanities have developed a vocabulary of climate grief, utilizing metaphor, simile, and emotionally rich language to tell stories of connections to land, memory, and fear of loss and destruction. What cannot be expressed in political, economic, or scientific terms can be better communicated through poetry, song, prose, illustration, photography, and film. Implicit in the name “humanities,” expressions of human experiences such as love, loss, guilt, fear, and longing make up the 45 David M.Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 23, 46 Sebastian Braun, “Mourning Ourselves and/as Our Relatives.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2017), 66, . 47 Braun, “Mourning Ourselves,” 68. 25 basis for the discipline. Art and writing exist to nourish the spiritual, imaginative, and affective realms of human life, and get in touch energies that can provide rich foundations for political organizing. Beth Caruthers regards art and art practices as necessary in facilitating a “process of learning through the engaged senses, one that can bypass conditioned patterns of thinking, allowing other ways of knowing to come forward.”48 Thus, political climate work can benefit greatly from the deep emotional engagement and the reconsideration of human-nature kinship found in art, public demonstration, and collective mourning told within a shared vocabulary. Analyzing language and other normative modes of conceptualizing non-human entities provides information useful in rethinking responsibility and mournability. For example, the English language utilizes the pronoun “its” to describe non-human living beings along with objects, while referring to humans with gendered pronouns. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws attention to how language creates moral responsibility and sense of kinship with non-human living beings. Kimmerer tells stories of plants through both her scientific training as a botanist and her personal experience as a member of the Potawatomi nation. In the section “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” she ruminates on how language reflects and shapes relationships with other humans and with the natural world. She writes: 48 Beth Carruthers, “About Cultural Currency,” Cultural Currency (2003): quoted by Barr, “Auguries of Elegy,” 203. 26 “Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one–with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species.”49 Kimmerer’s proposal asks readers to consider, at a basic level, the modes of communication among humans that compartmentalize non-human bodies as unable to be grieved. An analysis of the implications in language is one example of an approach to reconsidering collective moral, social, and interpersonal relationships and creating possibilities for political mobilization. 49 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013), 57-58 . 27 Section 4: Moving forwards Emotional responses to the climate crisis provide grounds for care, community unification, and shared solidarity. Addressing the climate crisis requires political, scientific, and economic solutions, but emotional disconnect and numbness due to the gravity of the impending disaster impedes potential community organizing and solutionbuilding. In “The Gift of Tears,” Douglas Burton-Christie posits that the depth and breadth of losses in the natural world has generated a “kind of psychic numbing, resulting in the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge or respond to this loss lest it completely overwhelm and perhaps debilitate us.”50 The data from the IPCC report presents apocalyptic scenarios that will severely impact the near and distant future, which can potentially lead to overwhelming anxiety, fear, devastation, and anger. This numbing threatens the motivation for humans to find solutions to preserve the habitability of the earth. The shared acknowledgement that humans are responding preemptively to losses that can be mourned collectively presents a rich ground for communal support systems and activist networks in the face of the climate crisis’ existential threat. The practice of ritual and mourning rites for non-human entities mark experiences of collective ecological and climate grief. In August 2019, a group of Icelandic activists held a funeral service for the glacier formerly known as Okjokull, now just known as Ok (removing the Icelandic word for “glacier” from its name). This event included speeches, poetry, a death certificate, and a memorial plaque that reads “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know 50 Douglas Burton-Christie “The Gift of Tears: Loss, Mourning and the Work of Ecological Restoration,” Worldviews 15, no. 1 (2011): 29-30. 28 if we did it.”51 By invoking an event culturally designed to honor a departed person’s life and legacy, the activists made public and collective individual experiences of grief for Okjokull. Their usage of a document and a spatial marker (akin to a headstone) draws parallels to the process of mourning a human, with which ultimately every person is familiar. Further, the words engraved on the plaque connect the “death” of the glacier to human knowledge of the climate crisis’ progression of destruction through the language of “what is happening” and “what needs to be done.” These symbolic actions affirm the activist community’s mourning for the loss of the glacier, understanding of the scale of impending destruction, and commitment to responsibility for interrupting its course, constituting an act of political grieving. Similar to Campbell’s observations on how the dismissal of emotions furthers experiences of silence, Cunsolo notes that people who are more likely to partake in the work of ecological mourning are the most marginalized and disenfranchised in policy and discourses.52 These groups might include Indigenous groups, farmers, or those with reliant livelihoods on natural environments. The threats of ecological destruction exist in conjunction with threats to cultural, social, and economic livelihoods. Movements for ecological justice may be directly intertwined with activist mobilization towards protection for human lives. For example, expressions of resistant mourning amidst ecological loss can simultaneously mourn human lives lost in natural disasters or starvation along with natural landscapes and crops that sustain livelihoods and cultural traditions. Thus, ecological mourning can serve as a guiding force for demanding 51 Nylah Burton, “Iceland’s Glacier Funeral Helped Activists Manage Their Climate Grief,” Bustle, August 19, 2019, . 52 Cunsolo, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,”182. 29 increased protection for human and non-human bodies alike. Jessica Marion Barr writes how artistic and literary responses to both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War emphasize “remembering, on dwelling in the pain of unjust loss” to create an “ethical insurance that such losses would never be allowed to happen again.”53 These principles shape what Pool calls the post-loss reflection”54 of local, national, and global community identities, as they question responsibility, uneven vulnerability, and potential political action. If adopted towards non-human bodies and landscapes through a process of expanding grievability, artistic expression could be translated to mobilize political actors and communities in the face of the climate crisis. Creative work that highlights injustice in violence and environmental degradation possesses the ability to illustrate systems and power structures that may have been previously rendered invisible, appealing to emotional responses to vulnerability and demanding institutional or collective responsibility to prevent the repetition of the violence or injury. Artist Marianne Nicolson, who is part of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast, created an installation at the Vancouver International Airport entitled “Memorial/Monument for the Dalles.” This work features two 26-ft tall glass columns, representative of the Columbia and Fraser/Thompson rivers, the former of which has been dammed 14 times and the latter of which has never been dammed. On her website, Nicolson notes that this piece “memorializes” the flooding of Celilo Falls by the construction of the Dalles Dam. This 53 Jessica Marion Barr, “Auguries of Elegy: The Art and Ethics of Ecological Grieving.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 261, 54 . Pool, Political Mourning, 9. 30 artwork recognizes the “oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent,”55 providing a visual and spatial representation of ecological health versus destruction. With an audience of international travelers, “Memorial/Monument” attempts to render Celilo Falls as grievable, inviting witnesses to consider its loss as continually relevant and something able to be memorialized through artwork. “Memorial/Monument” provides one example of artistic reconciliation with the impacts of environmental loss both on human and ecological communities. Artistic and literary works can help encourage movement through potentially debilitating emotional intensity and overwhelming affective experiences. In an article published by The Guardian, Jo Confino asks “why aren’t we on the floor doubled up in pain at our capacity for industrial scale genocide of the world’s species?”56 Confino ends the article with a testament to how processing this grief may propose an exit out of a dangerous economic system that continues the destruction of natural places and species. Just as visual, musical, and written works can function to help mourners through their grief, art can serve as an avenue for processing and addressing the deep pain of ecological destruction. While not all grief work must be artistic, this particular commitment to addressing and processing ecological mourning possesses the ability to both help individuals work through the difficulty of their own emotional experiences and provide the means for community-based support and creation of political and infrastructural solutions. 55 Marianne Nicolson, “My Work.” Marianne Nicolson, MFA, MA, PhD. Accessed April 7, 2022. . 56 Jo Confino, “Grieving Could Offer a Pathway out of a Destructive Economic System,” The Guardian, October 2, 2014, 31 Practicing ecological grief work can be transposed between the private, public, and political realms. In the late 1970s, deep ecologist Joanna Macy created a practice called “The Work that Reconnects,” which aims to “foster the desire and ability to take part in the healing of our world.” Drawing on Buddhist thinking and systems theory, Macy’s work follows a spiral structure designed to guide participants out of emotional defensiveness and inaction towards productive engagement with the “inconceivably large and messy problems we live among.”57 Her 80 workshops utilize creative practices, ritual, dialogue and systems thinking to facilitate transformative experiences for individuals and groups. In the exercise “Open Sentences on Honoring our Pain,” Macy asks participants to sit in pairs and respond to prompts including “when I see what’s happening to the natural world, what breaks my heart is…” and “ways I avoid these feelings are…”.58 These prompts encourage vulnerability, honest reflection, acceptance of emotional responses, and interpersonal support in the form of deep listening and uptake. Despite the nature of these exercises being not overtly political, they serve the purpose of creating stronger community networks capable of recognizing shared goals, communicating effectively, and identifying human and non-human entities that possess cultural, spiritual, and personal importance. I contend that we need a wide range of resources for coping with, sharing, and working through climate and ecological grief. For some, spiritual and religious traditions provide belief systems for working through grief. Expanding on early Christian monastic 57 Hilary Bradbury, “Sustaining the Heart of Action Research(Ers): An Interview with Joanna Macy,” Action Research 1, no. 2 (October 2003): 211. . 58 Joanna Macy, “Open Sentences on Honoring Our Pain,” Work That Reconnects Network, November 26, 2017, accessed March 21, 2022, . 32 traditions that believed tears were crucial to the healing of the self and the world, BurtonChristie explores how such a practice could take on meaning in the face of unfathomable losses in the climate crisis.59 Expressing and embracing despair are essential parts of healing and moving forward. Another approach considers how to fully and wholly acknowledge grief and devastation in mental health settings and concerns the question of how therapists can better address their clients’ climate and ecological-related distress remains a burgeoning area for more research.60 This work crucially incorporates individuals moving through their own emotional experiences and contributing to the construction of familial, local, and national support systems capable of recognizing the validity of climate grief and going through the reflection process of what is important in its vulnerability in the face of deep and extensive environmental threats. 59 Burton-Christie, “Gift of Tears,” 31. Elizabeth B. Seaman, “Climate Change on the Therapist’s Couch : How Mental Health Clinicians Receive and Respond to Indirect Psychological Impacts of Climate Change in the Therapeutic Setting.” Masters thesis, Smith College, 2016, 86. 60 33 Conclusion Considerations of emotion are often dismissed in climate politics and the leaders who express their own experiences are ridiculed and sometimes ostracized from political movements, as their emotional intensity is not considered legitimate or useful. Nonetheless, Atkinson, Carson, and Thunberg have expressed their impassioned emotional insights regarding the climate crisis and ecological loss. In the face of harsh criticism and harassment, the action of outwardly expressing ecological grief is one of great bravery and honesty. Nonetheless, widespread adoption of climate grief as a concept has not yet been realized or utilized to build momentum for activist movements. Through a reconceptualization of kinship relationships with natural and non-human entities, the possibilities of emotional solidarity and reconciliation are vast. If grief were to be regarded culturally as a response indicative of a deep connection with place, people, and tradition, this understanding could yield transformative experiences that protect humans and non-humans from further harm. I conclude with one suggestion: that storytelling can serve as a potent form of communication through these experiences. If communities and societies were able to tell the stories of wildlife and plant species, they could openly and actively reaffirm what is of importance to their communal identities while helping individuals work through the deep and agonizing experiences of processing the climate crisis. Just as a person can tell the story of a cherished relative and the impact of their shared relationships, humans could explore the connections between their familial traditions, sense of place tied to identity, and ability to obtain their needs from the environments they inhabit. While the study of environmental humanities already exists to give humans the ability to tell these 34 stories, I contend that similar methods of emotional engagement can be utilized to motivate political communities to act. By sharing experiences of climate grief in settings ranging from the one-on-one to local community gathering places to national governmental spaces, this practice expands the boundaries of what can be grieved and what must be protected through conceptual responsibility that manifests in actual, material protections. 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