Ecological grief needs public mourning rituals
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- A heron rookery outside Manchester, Vermont has dwindled from a thriving colony to a single great blue heron over nearly two decades of the author's observation, with no public acknowledgment that something integral to the landscape has diminished.
- North Atlantic right whales number fewer than 400, making every birth and death "mathematically and emotionally devastating," the author writes, recounting a whale expert becoming visibly emotional over a mother that lost two calves to ship strikes.
- Australian writer Richard Flanagan published an obituary for the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 following a mass coral bleaching event, giving readers "permission to mourn" rather than ecological statistics.
- Iceland's Okjökull glacier was formally commemorated in 2019 as the country's first glacier lost to climate change, with a plaque installed at the site addressing future generations: "We know what is happening and what needs to be done."
- Great blue herons are "indicator species," meaning their disappearance signals broader disruptions in water quality, habitat integrity, food webs, and biodiversity, the author notes — turning personal grief into a reading of ecosystem collapse.
- The author's creative writing students increasingly submit pieces about environmental degradation — wildfire embers drifting onto brunch, habitat fragmentation on contested public lands, wading through a flooded Thai market — reflecting what the author calls a generational "moral injury."
- The essay calls for new cultural infrastructure — monuments, ceremonies, obituaries, even legislation — to publicly mourn ecological loss, arguing that "grief needs witness" and that scientific information alone is inadequate to the scale of what is being lost.
Why it matters: The piece reframes environmental decline as something requiring public emotional acknowledgment, not just data. Two concrete precedents anchor the argument: Flanagan's reef obituary and Iceland's Okjökull memorial showed that formal mourning can function alongside science, giving the public language for losses otherwise carried "quietly and alone."
