by Timothy Robinson
Ten people gather in a circle. The facilitator gently queries, “Anything that’s coming up for you right now with your response to this step?” The “step” in question has just been read by another participant in a gathering sponsored by the Good Grief Network: “Accept the severity of the predicament.” One participant replies, “I love this world so much, but I feel … kind of heartbroken, just all of the time.” Another offers, “I feel this mundane behind-the-scenes, always-constant grief and despair.” Yet another, a university professor of climate science, confesses she has considered giving up teaching because of her own strong emotional response to the material she shares with her young students (See the documentary “Good Grief: The Ten Steps”[1]).
The Good Grief Network is among a growing number of eco-grief support groups and workshops emerging in response ecological change and growing acknowledgement of the severity of the climate crisis. Others include the Green Chalice ministry of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who regularly hosts “eco-grief story circles” online, New Jersey-based Waterspirit that sponsors eco-anxiety support groups, and the BTS (formerly Bangor Theological Seminary) Center that offers a “Lament With the Earth” program, accompanying participants through the liturgical year “honoring the pain of our loss.”
Increasing numbers of persons are seeking groups like these with whom they can share feelings of distress related to climate change and ecological loss. Educators, social workers and clergy among others, are also noticing and engaging persons and communities exhibiting ecologically- related expressions of grief and distress.[2] A new field of inquiry has arisen that explores eco-related emotions like grief, anxiety, fear and despair, attempting to formulate compassionate responses.[3] Ecological grief can arise in response to a favorite tree being cut to make way for a construction project, seeing a clear-cut forest from the freeway, learning about a species of dolphin being declared extinct, or experiencing displacement from one’s home because of rising seas. It can also be spurred by simply hearing about or anticipating occurrences of ecological or climate-related destruction or loss.
How might people of faith respond to such deep feelings of ecological grief? There is a deeply embedded notion in much of Western science and Christian theology that humans have been established as supreme in a hierarchy of creation, set apart above all others; this notion regards everything in that creation as meant to serve human needs and desires and has rendered everything apart from the human as disposable. Thus, the prospect of grieving for trees, plants, animals or landscapes has been regarded as irrational and pointless. Ecological losses are not seen as connected to psychic, emotional or spiritual distress.
One grief expert has introduced the concept of “disenfranchised grief” to identify “grief that is experienced but cannot be acknowledged or publicly mourned.”[4] Yet, human life is utterly dependent upon and connected to the larger whole, to the biological and ecological systems that sustain human life, both physical and spiritual. Humans naturally form deep attachments to other creatures, to places, and to landscapes. Grief—and anxiety, guilt, rage and other emotions—over the state of our current climatological and ecological crises should be regarded as a natural response to the profound rupture that we are now experiencing. More than regarding eco-grief as natural, we must make space for expressing it: in prayer, in liturgy, in pastoral conversation and in the public square. Spirituality scholar Douglas Christie writes, “If we hope to arrive at a deep and authentic response to this crisis, we will have to find a way to speak honestly about all we are losing and what this loss means to us.”[5]
Finding ways to express the grief we experience in these times of profound loss, anxiety and fear and for helping others to express it is essential for persons of faith and for those tasked with caring for souls today. There are least four functions of ecological grief in spiritual contexts today. The first is rooted in the ancient Christian notion of compunction—the anxiety that arises over awareness of guilt. Christie describes “the gift of tears,” or penthos, that accompanied feelings of compunction among the desert ascetics of the Christian East.
Tears evoked by a sense of grief and the recognition of one’s complicity in wrongdoing, writes Christie, have served in spiritual traditions as “crucial means by which persons and communities are able to seek healing for what has been broken asunder.” Christie suggests mourning as a spiritual practice that may heighten our attention and connection to what is being broken and lost in the natural world. Grieving one’s contributions to systems of oppression that are destroying communities of life—social and ecological—can be cathartic, pointing toward avenues of repair: “Grief and mourning can be seen not simply as an expression of private and personal loss, but as part of a restorative spiritual practice that can rekindle an awareness of the bonds that connect all life-forms to one another and to the larger ecological whole.”[6] Allowing ourselves to feel deep sorrow for the losses now occurring helps illuminate how and where things have gone wrong and invites us to imagine pathways of repair.
This leads to a second function for ecological grief: heightening our awareness of the vulnerability that humans share with other creatures and honing our sense of responsibility for one another. The environmental researcher Ashlee Cunsolo Willox argues that mourning functions ethically as “a source of insight into the responsibilities that we share for and to one another” because grief emerges from a recognition of the fragility and vulnerability that we share with other humans and with other creatures.[7] The anxiety, fear, and grief evoked by our current climatic realities are not only expressions of existential dread at the prospect of personal loss, but they also indicate our attachment and feeling of connection with suffering others, calling forth a sense of responsibility for fellow sufferers.
A third function of making room for ecological grief is to affirm the vital importance of creation and its suffering for people of faith. Performing public ritual expressions of eco-related compunction is critical. Liturgical acts of confession and lamentation, which share long histories of practice in both Jewish and Christian traditions, serve an important purpose for people of faith. They indicate that ecological injustices are central concerns of the Church’s mission. Further, they affirm the validity of worshipers’ feelings of eco-grief and anxiety. Ritual acts of eco-mourning and lamentation, whether in ecclesial spaces or the public square, provide opportunities to protest acts of ecological and environmental injustice and to form communities of solidarity and resistance.[8]
Finally, expressions of ecological grief and mourning can function politically to extend our notions of what is considered “grieveable,” challenging exclusive human dominion over the rest of creation and resisting the tendency to dismiss ecologically related emotions. Expressing ecological grief publicly raises awareness of the issues and can serve to catalyze action on behalf of threatened ecosystems. As Willox writes, “From this perspective, grief and mourning have the ability to mobilize, to galvanize, and to cause conscious action through the recognition of others as fellow vulnerable beings, and through an understanding of shared suffering, not to privatize, silence, and subdue.”[9]
The Utah writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams asks in her recent work, “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?”[10] The weight of her question hangs heavily upon many of us who know the difficulty, the vulnerability and the pain of looking upon and grieving the land, the creatures and our fellow humans who are suffering. But we must not look away. People of faith have the resources to open ourselves to the grief and to be moved toward repair.
Timothy Robinson teaches Christian spirituality at Brite Divinity School and the Oblate School of Theology. His work attends the history of Christian spirituality, contemplation and spiritual care amid ecological crisis, and the work of Howard Thurman.
[1] https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org.
[2] See Ellen Barry, “Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room,” New York Times, February 6, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/health/climate-anxiety-therapy.html (accessed November 13, 2023) and Brooke Jarvis, “Climate Change is Keeping Therapists Up at Night,” New York Times, October 21, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/magazine/climate-anxiety-therapy.html (accessed November 13, 2023).
[3] Thomas Doherty and Susan Clayton, “The Psychological Impacts of Global Climate Change,” American Psychologist 66, no. 4 (2011): 265–76; Panu Pihkala, “Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions,” Frontiers in Climate 3 (2022).
[4] Ken Doka, Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989), 74.
[5] Douglas Christie, “The Gift of Tears: Loss, Mourning, and the Work of Ecological Restoration,” Worldviews 15, no. 1 (2011): 42.
[6] Douglas Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 74-75.
[7] Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Ethics & the Environment 17, no. 2 (2012): 150.
[8] Timothy Hessel-Robinson, “Requiem for the Baiji: Liturgical Lamentation and Species Extinction,” in Spirit and Nature: The Study of Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Urgency, ed. T. Hessel-Robinson and R. M. McNamara (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 176–200.
[9] Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” 150.
[10] See her recent works, Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019) and The Glorians: Visitation from the Holy Ordinary (New York: Grove Press, 2026).
