I remember interviewing a North Atlantic right whale expert years ago. He was a practical, science-minded man. But as we discussed a female whale that had lost her calf, he became visibly emotional. She had lost the previous one, too, struck by a ship. He seemed almost embarrassed by the depth of his feeling.
I wasn’t surprised. I found his grief honorable.
There are fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales left. Every birth is a celebration; every death is mathematically and emotionally devastating. Scientists who spend years studying endangered species inevitably form attachments to them. So do many of us, whether to an endangered tree, a stretch of crumbling coastline, or summer nights once filled with fireflies.
Yet our culture has almost no language or rituals for this kind of grief.
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It feels like a contradiction at the center of modern life: we experience profound environmental loss and largely pretend nothing is happening
Just outside Manchester, Vermont, there’s a heron rookery I’ve driven past for nearly two decades. Each year, the elegant great blue herons and their nests dotted the skeletal marsh trees. The birds stood guard over their young through sleet and torrential rain, their stoic devotion a marker of Vermont’s tenuous spring.
Then, gradually, there were fewer herons. This spring, there was only one. I passed her on my way to dentist appointments and while driving my children to soccer games. The trees and marsh remain. But the once-visible community of herons does not.
This heron raises her young alone.
No one held a memorial service. There was no public acknowledgment that something beloved or integral to the landscape had diminished. Yet each time I pass the rookery, I feel an ache that does not seem entirely polite to share. It feels like a contradiction at the center of modern life: we experience profound environmental loss and largely pretend nothing is happening.
As a culture, we know what to do when a person dies. We gather, tell stories and hold sacred space. We make room for sadness. But what do we do when a species disappears from a landscape? What do we do when a coastline changes beyond recognition, when a forest is felled for wood pellets and lumber, or when a rookery we love becomes an empty, ghostly landscape of broken trees and still water, with nothing but the sound of the highway to drown out the chorus of the frogs?
Over the past decade, I’ve reported on environmental change across the American south. I’ve watched roads widen through wildlife corridors in Florida, housing developments replace maritime forests in South Carolina, and North Carolina’s barrier islands transform under the combined pressures of the climate crisis and relentless development.
I find myself carrying an emotion deeper and more intimate than worry: grief. Increasingly, I wonder whether many Americans are experiencing forms of grief for which we have almost no language or rituals.
The word “grief” can feel excessive. Yet what else should we call the feeling that arises when a beloved place, species or ecosystem is altered before our eyes? The awareness that our federal climate, technology addiction, consumerism and shifting baseline syndrome make these losses increasingly routine compounds the damage. Though exceptions exist, what is lost now is almost surely lost for ever.
I see a significant uptick in my creative writing students writing about environmental degradation. One described having brunch with her mother while embers from a California wildfire drifted on to their eggs. Another wrote about habitat fragmentation and riding horses through contested public lands in the dry American west. Another recalled wading through a flooded market in Thailand after an unusually severe monsoon.
Perhaps part of what they are expressing is not only grief but moral injury: the distress that arises when our values and our actions drift dangerously apart.
We teach young people to care for living things, to tell the truth, and to leave places better than they found them. Then we ask them to watch the steady unraveling of ecosystems while behaving as though nothing fundamental is wrong. The tone of my students’ pieces speaks to the uncanny weather of our era, the eerie sense that the ground beneath us and skies above us are changing and is met with a strange business-as-usual mentality.
Aside from the occasional movement, petition or memorial walk, we are often carrying environmental losses quietly and alone. What could become a collective experience is now privately sorted through, awkward, submerged, accepted.
I grew up in eastern North Carolina in the 1980s. When someone was grieving, the community grieved. You brought a casserole, sat on a porch, gathered at church. You put words to the loss. You wrote cards, you remembered the good times and positive attributes, you cried, you made space for the hard emotions. You helped hold the weight of loss until a family could carry it again.
We know how to mourn grandparents, spouses, friends, and neighbors, but we do not know how to mourn disappearing species, damaged rivers, altered coastlines, democratic institutions, or the healthy futures we expected to inherit. We should admit non-human species and landscapes are worthy of mourning and normalize addressing ecological grief.
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Our current practices do not match the magnitude of our losses
We know from centuries of experience that grief needs witness. In 2016, the Australian writer and activist Richard Flanagan published an obituary for the Great Barrier Reef after a mass coral bleaching event. Written in the familiar language of loss, the piece treated the reef not as a collection of ecological statistics but as something beloved and irreplaceable. Flanagan described the reef as a living structure that had survived for millennia, visible from space and home to extraordinary biodiversity. His point was not that the reef had literally died, but that traditional environmental reporting had become inadequate to the scale of what was being lost.
The obituary offered readers something science alone could not: permission to mourn.
In Iceland, mourners gathered in 2019 to commemorate Okjökull, the country’s first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. A plaque installed at the site addressed future generations directly: “We know what is happening and what needs to be done.” The ceremony was scientific, political and emotional all at once – a public acknowledgment that something essential had vanished.
These efforts may seem unusual, but they point toward an important truth. People do not simply need scientific information in an era of such rapid environmental degradation. They also need more formal places to share their feelings: monuments, ceremonies, obituaries, even legislation. Our current practices do not match the magnitude of our losses, and I believe we’ve underestimated how much environmental degradation will continue to affect us emotionally, physically and spiritually.
What I understand instinctively when I pass that nearly empty heron rookery is that I am not merely witnessing the decline of a bird population, but a larger and more insipid decline of public health and accountability.
Great blue herons are what ecologists call indicator species. Their health reflects the health of entire wetland ecosystems. When herons disappear, it often signals deeper disruptions in water quality, habitat integrity, food webs and biodiversity. First we witness habitat destruction, then species loss, then the diminishment of an entire living community. What follows is often a less resilient world: ecosystems more vulnerable to invasive species, pathogens, flooding and further extinction, and landscapes that feel quieter, poorer and less alive.
Perhaps what we need is not only more data about ecological decline, but more permission to acknowledge what that decline feels like and means to us. We need to name it for ourselves, acknowledge its personal and local impact, and invest in storytelling that reminds us of the ecological richness we once had access to and did not protect. We need to make more noise about these losses, document them, and mourn them together.
Grief, properly understood and articulated, is nothing to be ashamed of, but our growing and quiet indifference to loss almost certainly is.
Source:
www.theguardian.com
