Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Grief and Loss

摘要

If C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed (1961) can be considered an account of a lost human relationship, then Cunsolo and Landman's Mourning Nature forms a posthuman, but nonetheless personal, examination of the losses of relationships with plants, animals, and even entire ecosystems-an ecological grief observed. In this regard, one of the motivations for this book was Cunsolo's interviews with Inuit residents who experienced profound sadness and despair at the changes in the landscape brought by climate change. Beyond this, each of the contributors to Mourning Nature brought a variety of written, auditory, visual, and meaning-making experiences to their acts of mourning wild nature. The parallels to Lewis' book end here because the authors are not writing about their unique losses, although their accounts may be both personal and compelling. Instead, this book moves beyond the personal and human to the posthuman perspective. In different but recurring ways, the authors explored our ethical obligations to: 1) consider the subjectivities of plants and animals; 2) find ways to mourn the losses of place, land- and waterscapes, and the living things that occupy them; and 3) transform the intense emotions of grief mourning into productive and collective action that can reduce ecological losses. In this way, "mourning nature" is less about an individual, perhaps selfish response to loss, but something that is a testimony to both the scale and the value of what has been lost and a motive for pursuing preventative actions together.