**Lisa H. Sideris**

Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA; lsideris@indiana.edu † This essay is dedicated to students in my Spring 2020 seminar on "Extinction" at Indiana University. Thank you for reading and discussing sometimes painful material on species death and environmental grief with me (until a pandemic, whose origins almost certainly lie in humans' destruction of the natural world, isolated us from one another). I fully acknowledge that my generation has failed you.

Received: 11 May 2020; Accepted: 9 June 2020; Published: 16 June 2020

**Abstract:** This essay builds upon recent work in the environmental humanities, and that of various writers and journalists, on the emerging topic of environmental grief and mourning. I consider a spectrum of responses to Anthropocene-era crises like climate change and extinction, with particular emphasis on how we are oriented toward the past and the future. These perspectives range from positions that explicitly reject grief and vulnerability, to voices urging us to embrace grief as part of an essential moral and spiritual environmental practice. At one end of the spectrum, we find articulations of what I call climate humanism, a style of response focused on defending and perpetuating human civilization in the midst of environmental crisis, but with little or no explicit concern for the broader web of living and dying beings. For climate humanists, to grieve for the past and its mistakes is to halt progressive, optimistic movement into the future. At the other end of the spectrum, we find scholars and writers who take profound grief, and sustained reflection on death and loss, as the starting point for genuine, transformative change and the possibility of hope. Drawing on this range of responses to environmental threats and losses, I endorse narratives that ground themselves in the past, in all its surprises and mistakes, as a vital resource and repository for moving hopefully and purposefully into the future. Moral, religious, and religious-like dimensions of environmental grief (or its denial) are recurring themes throughout, and many crucial insights are found in scholarship outside of religious studies.

**Keywords:** grief and mourning; hope; Anthropocene; climate change; extinction; climate humanism

"We are witnesses, and as we probe the ethics of relation and substance, perhaps working our way toward the uncertainty of a quantum god, we may ye<sup>t</sup> engage with the wider gravity of keeping faith in the midst of devastation"—Deborah Bird Rose, *Wild Dog Dreaming*. (Rose 2011, p. 107)

I am not an optimist by disposition. For precisely that reason, I have often sifted through, and mostly found wanting, many narratives of so-called hope in the so-called Anthropocene.<sup>1</sup> This essay constitutes a meditation on—perhaps more than an argumen<sup>t</sup> for—the power and moral significance of grief and mourning in orienting us properly toward an uncertain and perilous future. I explore a spectrum of responses to the current environmental crisis, with particular attention to issues

<sup>1</sup> In much of what follows, I treat climate change and the current extinction crisis as a shorthand for the Anthropocene concept that humans have become a force reshaping the planet on a geological scale. My focus here is less on the implicitly religious nature of the Anthropocene itself than on grief and mourning as responses to it. For a discussion of the former and of the problematic nature of the Anthropocene concept itself, see (Sideris 2016).

of climate change and species extinction. Some of these responses adopt—to varying degrees—a kind of defensive humanist posture that privileges human civilization and seeks to insulate it, to fortify it, against the shocks of climate change and related disasters. Wittingly or not, this defensive stance implicitly renders Earth and nonhuman beings as something less than animate and living, and in doing so, disavows nonhuman nature as truly mournable. Other voices invite us into grief and vulnerability as potentially transformative, contemplative states that reconnect us with human and nonhuman others, and with our own painful history of losses and failures. My own sensibilities incline me toward the latter set of responses, and their potential to humanize us in the midst of crisis. These voices, I believe, contain clues about how to remain upright and forward-facing, how to carry on in the most basic sense of putting one foot in front of the other, when the future is almost unimaginable and the past seems somehow irretrievable, or simply irrelevant to the present situation.

The stories we tell about hope and loss are more important than ever if we aspire to make the "Age of Humans" a little more humane. An unwillingness or inability to mourn for the broader spectrum of life bespeaks a worrisome evasion of responsibility for environmental harms. Building upon existing scholarship in the environmental humanities and the work of contemporary writers and journalists, I a ffirm practices and perspectives that contain somber ye<sup>t</sup> hopeful messages about the complex ways in which the past can orient us toward the future, in contrast to progressivist narratives urging us to relinquish the past and its missteps. By weaving together various narrative strands, ranging from contemporary stories of climate collapse, political action, and spiritual practice, to longstanding myths about death and loss, I consider the value of consciously attending to death, mourning, and loss as a step toward moral reckoning and meaningful change.<sup>2</sup> The story of a small Icelandic glacier, and its recent death from climate change, presents an especially compelling resource for reflection on these interlocking themes. But first, we must consider how and why environmental grief often seems strangely muted or suppressed.
