Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief ed. by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman (review)

As testament to the fact that "ecological grief," the subject of this collection of essays, is no longer a purely academic concept, a recent academic survey—the Greenland Perspectives Survey—found a deterioration of mental health amongst the nation's scattered population, brought about by the impact of climate change on their daily lives. As the Guardian reports, the survey, carried out by the University of Copenhagen's Centre for Social Data Science, the Kraks Fond Institute for Urban Economic Research, and the University of Greenland, captured the opinions of residents of Greenland, whose voices are rarely heard in official and scientific discourses on climate change (McDougall, 2019). The lead author of the study, Kelton Minor, points out that the Arctic has been a "bellwether for the unequal impact of global warming on social and economic systems," and while many nations are struggling to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrialization levels, the populations of Greenland and the Artic region more generally have experienced such increases in temperature within a lifetime (as cited in McDougall, 2019). Put another way, this regional acceleration of global warming anticipates what is to come for the rest of the world, but presumably the point of this study was not just to turn the region into a prescient model. Rather, illuminating the discrepancy between states of mind on the ground and the data gathered from above—the sensors and satellites that monitor, track, scan, and measure the condition of Greenland's ice sheet, sea ice, glaciers, and icebergs—this study finds that the population, to varying degrees, is grief stricken about what the climate crisis is doing to their lives, those of their animals, and the ecosystems in which they live. Those ecosystems include, fundamentally, local sea ice, which acts as an "important social, ecological and economic platform," the destabilization (disappearance) of which disrupts the entanglements of ways of human and non-human life (Minor, as cited in McDougall, 2019). The Guardian reports that the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado had calculated that 250 billion tonnes of ice have already been lost from Greenland. The social, cultural, and economic repercussions of the disruption of a way of life that is so tangibly entwined with the environment have resulted in deteriorating mental and physical health for Greenlanders, and especially Innuit communities. Courtney Howard, of the Canadian Association for Physicians for the Environment, describes the psychological and psychoanalytical conditions of those living in the Artic region by extending the definition of trauma and including climate-related anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and "ecological grief" over what has been lost or over what will be lost (ways of life and livelihoods, ecosystems, species) (McDougall, 2019).

In the same month, in the sub-Arctic, Iceland mourned the loss of the glacier Okjokull, which was declassified in 2014 by the Icelandic Meteorologist Office. Between 1890 and 2012, it shrank from a sizeable 16 km² to 0.7 km², losing its status as glacier along the way. This mourning was ritualized and took funereal form. In lieu of the absent glacier, the focal point was a plaque bearing the inscription: "In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it" (Agence France-Presse, 2019). The plaque is entitled "A letter to the future," and ends with the date of its installation and "415 ppm CO₂," the record-breaking level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as of May 2018. As one of the organizers, Professor Cymene Howe (of Rice University, Texas), points out, this was the first funeral for a glacier, but one that anticipates massive losses to come, given the estimates that Iceland will lose all of its 400...