There Are Bodies
Ecological Grief as A Collective Condition
Early 2019, not long after my son was born, I booked an appointment with a therapist.
I was not sure what category the problem belonged in. Postpartum anxiety, climate grief, collapse awareness made worse by broken sleep and the immensity of caring for a new life: all of the above, probably.
By then I had spent more than fifteen years in climate, agroecology and global justice movements. I had read the reports, organised meetings, worked with land and food systems, watched governments turn emergency into planning. None of this was new. The baby was new. He changed the tense of everything. ‘By 2050’ was no longer a policy horizon. It was the year he would turn thirty-two.
At the time I had not seen a hedgehog for years. Baby-world, however, was full of them.
The retail ecosystem of infancy was thriving with hedgehogs. They smiled from sleepsuits, bibs, blankets, and bath toys. Some wore scarves. One rattled. All of them were plump, fluffy and reassuringly available in pastel.
Their real-life absence and commercial abundance began to feel obscene. We could reproduce the image endlessly while making the animal itself harder to encounter. Every little embroidered hedgehog seemed to be taking the piss. It reminded me of the part of Bladerunner where extinct animals are carefully replicated.
I tried to explain this to the therapist. He told me I could not be grieving because there were no bodies.
I remember thinking, quite calmly: well, this isn’t gonna work.
It was our first and last session.
His answer has stayed with me because it revealed the limits of the frame. He was looking for bereavement: a dead person, a completed event, a recognised mourner. I was trying to describe a damaged relationship with the living world, and a future that had become frighteningly personal.
Climate breakdown rarely gives us a clean loss. A species can disappear from daily encounter long before it is declared gone. A season becomes unreliable by degrees. A familiar landscape remains in place but no longer behaves like itself. A child is alive, loved and well while the conditions of his future are being stripped away.
In 2018, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis described ecological grief as grief linked to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes. They argued that it is a legitimate response to ecological change, not evidence of pathology.1
That should be obvious. It still is not.
Matrescence changes the tense
The discourse on ‘climate grief’ has emerged since 2018, it may be mainstream now, I do not know the therapeutic context well enough to affirm or deny that.
When I heard Dr Allie Davis speak about matrescence in a time of ecological crisis, I wept through much of it, which is an awkward but also efficient way of taking notes.
Her work gave language to something the therapist had refused to see. Davis and Aurélie Athan use maternal ecodistress to describe the psychological, relational and systemic distress that can arise for mothers and caregivers in the context of ecological disruption and uncertainty. They argue that matrescence can reorganise ecological awareness because care becomes bodily, repetitive and future-facing: feeding, washing, checking, protecting, imagining.2
The word systemic matters.
Davis also writes about the double bind of green motherhood. Mothers are given disproportionate responsibility for the health of children and planet, then offered consumption as their main tool. Buy safer toys, better nappies, organic food, the correct bottle, the correct soap, the correct everything. The economy remains extractive. The guilt is privatised in the household.3 The mother becomes a tiny environmental regulator with no regulatory power.
None of this means mothers possess special moral access to the future. I have no interest in sneaking a conservative cult of motherhood into climate politics. Not all mothers give birth, not all parents are women, and plenty of people who do not have children are fiercely committed to those who come after them. Matrescence is one route by which ecological crisis becomes intimate.
The problem with putting all of this in the individual
I do not want to make a cheap anti-therapy argument. A climate-aware therapist might have helped me distinguish responsibility from omnipotence, recognise postpartum overload, sleep better, or simply feel less mad. These things matter.
The problem begins when the therapeutic frame becomes the whole frame.
Climate grief is often met with advice to regulate the nervous system, limit exposure to bad news, practise grounding, cultivate resilience and focus on what we can control. Most of that is sensible. It can keep a person alive and capable. But there is a political question hiding inside the word resilience: resilient enough to endure what, and on whose terms?
A well-regulated person can still be trapped in an intolerable arrangement.
Breathing exercises do not restore wetlands. Better sleep does not make a government tell the truth. Therapy can help a person carry reality; it cannot be asked to make reality less violent.
Marzia Varutti has written about the strange absence of public mourning for ecological destruction, identifying perceptual, emotional, ritual and political obstacles. Pablo Fernandez Velasco and Louise Richardson argue that ecological grief is characteristically shared because damaged places take shared practices, identities and possible ways of life with them. Claudia Benham and Doortje Hoerst show that ecological grief is shaped by geography, social identity and structural power, and needs an intersectional lens.4,5,6
This scholarship moves the discussion out of the consulting room. The lack of a funeral is not a minor cultural oversight. It is part of the problem. Losses that are not publicly recognised are easier to normalise.
When I call climate grief a collective condition, I do not mean everyone feels it, or feels it in the same way. I mean that its causes are organised socially; many of its objects are shared; it travels through families, communities, institutions and movements; and no private coping strategy can repair what has been lost.
Francis Weller and the missing village
Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow widens the category of grief beyond private bereavement. His five gates include the sorrows of the world, what we expected but did not receive, and ancestral grief. Each opens onto ecological crisis. We grieve beings and places. We grieve futures that were promised as ordinary and now feel precarious. We inherit losses, silences and damaged relations that began before us.7
More important for this argument is Weller’s insistence that grief needs company. Modern Western culture tends to treat sorrow as private material, to be processed quietly and returned in an acceptable form. Weller argues instead for witnesses, ritual, song, movement and community.
At Collapse Café I have watched what happens when people can speak about ecological grief, political dread and personal precarity without being corrected or immediately turned into a campaign volunteer. Nobody is cured. We do not end with a five-point action plan. A room does, however, become easier to breathe in when somebody says the frightening thing aloud and another person recognises it. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes there is badly timed clowning (mea culpa), which may be just as necessary.
A circle is not policy, but it is not nothing.
We also need to be careful about how Weller’s ritual work travels. He has spoken openly about the influence of Malidoma Patrice Somé, a Dagara teacher and elder from Burkina Faso, with whom he studied and taught.8 That lineage should be named. The Western climate movement has a habit of treating other people’s traditions as an open cupboard of useful practices. Communal ritual cannot simply be detached from history, authority, place and reciprocity, then repackaged as a workshop.
Rebuilding collective forms of mourning means creating practices that are accountable to the people and traditions that inform them, and rooted in the places where we actually live. It may involve ceremony. It may also look much less exotic: food, silence, testimony, walking, singing, tending graves, restoring a stream, naming what has disappeared, staying in the room.
There is no single climate grief
Collective does not mean equal.
We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same atmosphere with very different housing, passports, incomes, health, mobility, political power and exits.
Farhana Sultana’s work on climate coloniality is essential here. Climate harm is distributed through racial capitalism, colonial dispossession and climate debt. The crisis does not arrive on neutral ground. It deepens arrangements that already decide whose land, labour, health and future can be sacrificed.9
Kyle Whyte has shown how Indigenous climate thought is shaped by collective histories of adapting to environmental change while confronting the ongoing disruptions of colonialism, capitalism and industrialisation.10 The language of an unprecedented apocalypse can therefore be historically tone-deaf. Many peoples have already lived through imposed endings of worlds: land theft, forced removal, destroyed food systems, contaminated water, broken treaties, suppressed languages and governance.
The collapse-aware European who has recently discovered that the future is unstable is not in the same position as a community whose future has repeatedly been treated as expendable.
An intersectional approach changes the questions. Which losses receive public attention, and which are treated as normal? Who has time and safety to mourn? Who must continue working through heat, smoke, flood and bereavement? Whose anger is diagnosed? Who can move away, and who is forced to move? Who profits from the damage? Who gets therapy, and who gets an app?
It also prevents more-than-human grief from floating above human justice. The political economy that makes wildlife harder to encounter is the same one that produces sacrifice zones for people. Caring about hedgehogs is not a distraction from caring about workers, migrants, racialised communities or Indigenous peoples. The work is to understand the system that renders all of them disposable in different ways.
From coping to care infrastructure
If climate grief is collective, the response has to be more than better individual coping.
This does not mean every council needs a grief gong. It means public institutions, movements, schools, health services, unions and community organisations need ways to recognise ecological loss and the distress attached to it.
Some of that work is cultural: public memorials, seasonal rituals, oral histories, art, spaces for testimony, teaching children the names of what lives nearby. Some is clinical: climate-literate mental health care that does not confuse accurate fear with irrationality. Much of it is material: secure housing, clean air, cooling spaces, accessible emergency planning, childcare, income, food, transport, time off after disaster, restored ecosystems and real democratic influence over the decisions shaping a place.
Without that material layer, collective healing becomes another wellness product.
Movements also need to stop treating exhaustion as proof of commitment. Activism is not a cure for climate grief, and telling distressed people to work harder simply converts sorrow into unpaid labour. People should be allowed to grieve without proving that the grief improved campaign outcomes.
Grief can, however, reveal an attachment worth organising around. When it is witnessed and connected to history, it can become less paralysing and more precise. It can tell us what has been damaged, who is carrying the cost and what must not be surrendered.
That is different from optimism. I am suspicious of optimism when it is used as a manners test. People do not need to sound hopeful to deserve company or political agency.
They need the truth to have somewhere to go.
There were bodies
Years later, I still think about the therapist’s sentence. Perhaps he meant there was no corpse. Climate grief rarely offers one.
There were bodies. Mine, newly postpartum and running on broken sleep. My son’s, warm and utterly dependent. Hedgehog bodies, whether or not I could see them. Bodies breathing polluted air, working in heat, crossing borders, carrying water, giving birth, tending soil, losing homes and appearing later as numbers in reports.
The missing thing was not a body. It was a recognised social form for the loss – or as my partner would say the loss was not habitable.
Climate grief is not a defect in the individual. It is what happens when attachment meets ecological destruction and political abandonment. It is collective because the causes are collective, because the losses alter shared worlds, and because none of us can privately repair a damaged climate or bring back a species.
Hedgehogs still appear on children’s clothes. I am not proposing a boycott of knitted hedgehogs. They are cute. But I no longer see them as neutral decoration. They remind me how easily a culture can preserve the image of a living being while making the living being harder to meet.
I want my son to know hedgehogs as neighbours, not only as a print. I also want him to inherit a culture that knows what to do with grief: not hide it in consulting rooms, not convert it into shopping, not demand that it become cheerful before it is heard.
A culture that can tell the truth in company would be a start.
Sources
1. Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’, Nature Climate Change 8, no. 4 (2018): 275-281. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
2. Allison Davis and Aurélie Athan, ‘Ecopsychological Development and Maternal Ecodistress During Matrescence’, Ecopsychology 15, no. 3 (2023): 281-293. DOI: 10.1089/eco.2022.0084.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2022.0084
3. Allison C. Davis, ‘Untangling the double bind of carework in green motherhood: An ecofeminist developmental path forward’, Women’s Studies International Forum 98 (2023), article 102730. DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102730.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102730
4. Marzia Varutti, ‘Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction?’, Ambio 53 (2024): 552-564. DOI: 10.1007/s13280-023-01962-w.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01962-w
5. Pablo Fernandez Velasco and Louise Richardson, ‘Ecological Grief as a Shared Emotion’, Emotion Review 18, no. 1 (2026): 3-14. DOI: 10.1177/17540739251379796.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739251379796
6. Claudia Benham and Doortje Hoerst, ‘What role do social-ecological factors play in ecological grief?: Insights from a global scoping review’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 93 (2024), article 102184. DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102184.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102184
7. Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (North Atlantic Books, 2015).
Source: https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/the-wild-edge-of-sorrow/
8. Francis Weller and Alnoor Ladha, ‘On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual with Francis Weller’, Kosmos Journal, based on a conversation recorded 4 November 2020.
9. Farhana Sultana, ‘The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality’, Political Geography 99 (2022), article 102638. DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638.
Source: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102638
10. Kyle Powys Whyte, ‘Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’, English Language Notes 55, nos. 1-2 (2017): 153-162. DOI: 10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153.
Thank you for this. It’s the core of something critical imo. Loss of reverence, loss of ritual spring to mind but are just small pieces. This helped me put much of my thoughts into a coherent whole.
What a well written, substantiated and insightful piece. Thank you!