There Is Grief of a Tree

These verses from the Book of Job turn on two distinctions: between hope and grief, and between trees and human beings. Hope belongs affirmatively to the tree, which the scent of water may bring back even from old roots or dead stump. For the human there is no sprouting or budding again—no regeneration, at least not "till the heavens be no more." Yet even as the passage divides grief and hope in this stark way, it poses messier questions about where subjectivity resides in matters of hope and grief. The King James Version's expression, "hope of a tree," leaves unsettled the question of the subjective versus the objective genitive. Does the tree experience hope of its own regeneration, or is it only the object of some other subject's hopefulness on its behalf? More recent versions of the passage tend to settle the question. The New Living Translation makes the tree the hoper ("Even a tree has more hope!"); the New International Version casts the tree as the hoped-for ("At least there is hope for a tree"). But even as these versions dispute, together, the question of whether trees are subjects or objects of hope, they all know for whom hope is absent. In an early note on transspecies grief, ecologist and hospital chaplain Phyllis Windle recorded her astonishment at finding that she was "in mourning for these beautiful trees," the Great Smoky Mountain dogwoods of her youth that were being decimated by the fungus Discula destructiva (Windle, 1992, p. 363). Job 14 takes a different view: if there is transspecies grieving to be done, it is not the grief of humans for trees, but the grief of trees for humans.

Grievable: in the work of Judith Butler and others, the word designates a person's worthiness to be mourned. But the term also signifies "meriting grievance" (as in the expression "grievable offense"). And in the way that viable means "capable of living," grievable might also be understood to mean "capable of grieving." This essay constellates these three senses of grievable in relation to ecological grief, which poses challenges—certainly in most Western contexts—for all three of the word's meanings. For where established griefways instruct individuals in mourning tangible, individual losses, biodiversity loss and other causes of ecological grief can be unpunctual, diffusive, intangible, and collective in every sense. They collapse distinctions between figure and ground, subject and object. Particularly in cultural forms that rely on such distinctions, they can make mourning's compass go haywire. To take just one example, traditional elegies are, in Jessica Marion Barr's words, "premised on resolving mourning and finding consolation and comfort in nature's cycles" (Barr, 2017, p. 192). What happens to elegy, then, when a reliably cyclical "nature" is no longer available as the reassuring foil or backdrop to human loss because it has become, itself, a lost object? How does elegy function when the bereaved are both differentially complicit in and differentially threatened by the loss they mourn? Of what possible use is elegy when the very futurity in which the mourner is meant to reinvest appears imperiled or foreclosed? Climate change and attendant forms of environmental peril, distress, and devastation can leave us at a loss to grieve for, and to enter grievances over, losses we're only just learning to designate as grievable.

In "the new mourning" required by the present ecological crisis (Albrecht, 2017, p. 295), at least one thing seems indisputable: the temporality of griefwork will need to change utterly. Freud's human-centered mourning is touched off by a loss, proceeds through the incremental withdrawal of cathexis from the lost object, and eventually terminates in the ego's becoming "free and uninhibited again" (Freud, 1917, p. 245). Even the disordered mourning that is melancholia reacts to the real loss of a loved object and can end with the ego's having loosened its libidinal fixation on the object through repeated, ambivalent confrontations with it. Both mourning and melancholia, in other words, are terminable processes that occur in human, calendrical time, moving "forward" from...