In Iceland, a ceremony in 2019 commemorated Okjökull, the country's first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. A plaque installed at the site addressed future generations: 'We know what is happening and what needs to be done.' This public acknowledgment of loss points to a growing need for rituals to address ecological grief, a phenomenon many experience but few know how to express.
The Unspoken Grief of Environmental Loss
Ecological grief is the emotional response to the loss of species, ecosystems, or landscapes due to human activity and climate change. A journalist recalls interviewing a North Atlantic right whale expert who became emotional discussing a female whale that lost her calf to a ship strike. With fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales left, every death is devastating. Scientists studying endangered species often form deep attachments, yet our culture provides almost no language or rituals for this kind of grief.
Just outside Manchester, Vermont, a heron rookery has hosted great blue herons for nearly two decades. Gradually, the number of herons declined. This spring, only one remained. No memorial service was held; no public acknowledgment marked the loss. Ecologists refer to great blue herons as indicator species; their disappearance often signals deeper disruptions in water quality and habitat integrity. The author feels an ache each time she passes the rookery, an emotion that seems impolite to share, reflecting a contradiction at the center of modern life: experiencing profound environmental loss while pretending nothing is happening.
The Need for Rituals and Collective Mourning
As a culture, we know how to mourn a person's death: we gather, tell stories, and hold sacred space. But what do we do when a species disappears, a coastline changes beyond recognition, or a forest is felled? Over the past decade, reporting on environmental change across the American South has revealed an emotion deeper than worry: grief. The author wonders whether many Americans are experiencing forms of grief for which there is almost no language or rituals.
Creative writing students increasingly describe environmental degradation: brunch with embers from a California wildfire drifting onto their eggs, habitat fragmentation while riding horses through contested public lands, or wading through a flooded market in Thailand after a severe monsoon. Part of what they express may be moral injury—the distress when values and actions drift apart. Young people are taught to care for living things, then asked to watch ecosystems unravel while behaving as though nothing is wrong.
Formal Spaces for Ecological Grief
Aside from occasional movements, petitions, or memorial walks, environmental losses are often carried quietly and alone. In the 1980s, eastern North Carolina communities grieved together: casseroles, porch sitting, church gatherings, and words for loss. But we do not know how to mourn disappearing species, damaged rivers, or altered coastlines. We should admit that non-human species and landscapes are worthy of mourning and normalize addressing ecological grief.
In 2016, Australian writer Richard Flanagan published an obituary for the Great Barrier Reef after a mass coral bleaching event. Written in the language of loss, the piece treated the reef as beloved and irreplaceable. The obituary offered readers permission to mourn, something science alone could not provide. The Icelandic ceremony for Okjökull pointed toward an important truth: people need formal spaces to share feelings—monuments, ceremonies, obituaries, even legislation. Current practices do not match the magnitude of losses.
Indicator Species and Broader Implications
Great blue herons are indicator species; their health reflects the health of entire wetland ecosystems. When herons disappear, it signals disruptions in water quality, habitat integrity, food webs, and biodiversity. First comes habitat destruction, then species loss, then the diminishment of an entire living community. What follows is a less resilient world: ecosystems more vulnerable to invasive species, pathogens, flooding, and further extinction. Landscapes feel quieter, poorer, and less alive.
What is needed is not only more data about ecological decline, but more permission to acknowledge what that decline feels like. We need to name it, acknowledge its personal and local impact, invest in storytelling that reminds us of ecological richness we once had and did not protect, and make more noise about these losses. Grief, properly understood, is nothing to be ashamed of—but our growing indifference to loss almost certainly is.
