We get used to what we have.

Sometimes what we have is right in front of us, actively acknowledged and purposefully interacted with. Sometimes it’s background noise: useful, even appealing, but so consistently present that we think it will always be there. It’s a shock to discover that one day it mightn’t be, or that it’s disappeared while we weren’t paying attention. Worse . . . that it disappeared while we were.

There’s a lot disappearing around us right now. Ecological grief—the loss and anxiety that we experience at the degradation of our natural environment—is an increasingly present, and increasingly studied, phenomenon. It’s also one that many people will experience at some level at least once in their lifetimes. This is reflected in the stories that we tell ourselves.

As the impacts of environmental change, and particularly that sparked by climate change, are increasingly observed, they are also increasingly explored. Both speculative and eco-fiction have a history of imagining new relationships and new ways of interaction between the human and the nonhuman. While these interpretations have often tended, in the past, towards the physical—such as the effects of new environments on disease and contagion, or that of different gravities on human physiology when exploring new planets—the emotional response to environment is of more and more interest.

That emotional response is complex and has reliably developed out of personal experience. Fittingly, the genre response to ecological grief is one of space and time. Loss is filtered through movement—migration to a different environment, leaving the familiar behind—or close observation over disaster or decades. It’s the difference between no longer seeing your favorite species because you left it behind, or no longer seeing it because it died around you. This is a simplification, of course, and these two elements can interact with each other in a number of different ways. Fiction written by Indigenous authors, for example—such as The Swan Book (2013) by Alexis Wright, in which Indigenous characters navigate an Australia significantly impacted not only by settler colonialism but by waves of climate refugees—combines the experience of loss over both space and time. Similarly, Witi Ihimaera’s Whale Rider (1987) has Koro Apirana lament the loss of marine life due to commercialism, overfishing and the cessation of traditional fisheries management practices: “Listen to how empty our sea has become,” he grieves.

Notably, however, migration can lead to a second loss, as a new place or habitat may subsequently change over time, ensuring a continual cycle of grief. Writers with a history of migration, of having to leave a place and an environment behind, may recreate those initial journeys in stories of future dislocations. The poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué wrote Losing Miami (2019), as a “thank you to Cuban exiles and their kids,” engaging with family history to illuminate the future loss of a major coastal city to sea level rise. Losing Miami grapples with the sort of grief that can be seen coming, and there’s a familiar sense of frustration and anger underlying that grief. One of the most resonant passages of the book states “I am trying not to show it but I am enraged. I feel cheated by consequences I cannot fully comprehend. I feel guilty enough in causation but unequipped to remedy my/our actions.”

Ecological grief is rarely felt in the absence of other emotions. Few of these are positive. As Ojeda-Sagué illustrates, rage exists as an accompaniment to loss. The link between human activity and climate change is well-documented. It would be comforting to think that, in a rational world, no cities or other beloved coastal habitats would be swallowed up by a rising ocean. Anger seems a reasonable response to disillusion. There’s guilt, too, for those who could have done more (even if they didn’t quite know how) and certainly justifiable resentment on the part of those who are least insulated from consequence and who are, simultaneously, least responsible for that shift in climate to begin with.

If much of the accompanying emotional effects of ecological grief are linked to anger and guilt, the remainder can also be linked to a sense of dislocation. There’s something almost eerie—and certainly unbalanced—in continuing to live in a landscape, or an ecology, that is so heavily impacted by loss, if only because that loss is so marked by change: a change which can occur in a number of readily observable ways.

One example of this is the disruption of an existing system, such as through the removal of predators, which can result in increased populations of prey species, to not always positive effect. Overfishing of snapper and lobster in New Zealand coastal waters, for instance, has led to the population explosion of kina—the sea urchin Evechinus chloroticus—which has subsequently grazed so heavily on local kelp beds that the loss of the kelp has led to the deforested reef systems known as kina barrens.

Another example is that invasive species may spread by climate and environmental change, such as is occurring when warming weather encourages the spread of mice into the rocky Fiordland habitats of endemic and endangered skink. A third relates to the fact that the extinction of a particular species not only results in an empty ecological niche, but is also an implicit invitation for that niche to be overtaken by another organism—albeit in ways that do not entirely match up with the original occupant of that niche. The extinction of the moa, for example, removed a primary grazer from the New Zealand ecosystem. That role has been partially filled by introduced deer species, but the differences in population density and biomass are significant, and there may also be differences in the seed dispersal patterns of each organism.

These three short examples are, of course, non-exhaustive, but they all indicate observable changes, occurring on a local to national scale, and one of the consequences of such changes is ecological grief. The transformation of reef system into wasteland, the peril of small and fascinating creatures, and the extinction of an icon. These are all things to grieve over. They are also things to be slightly unnerved by.

There’s a word for it. Uncanny. The sensation you get when something should be familiar but isn’t. There are certainly enough apocalyptic imaginings out there, where artists and scientists and other creative types imagine a future that is wholly different than our present. A wasteland effect, all thirst and desert and emptiness. And while this is not, in certain regions and under certain conditions, entirely impossible, for most of us the experience of ecological grief is likely to begin more in the realm of the uncanny.

Small changes and limited losses, at least to start: changes where the world looks (and sounds and smells) almost the same. Then when it gets to the tipping point, the layered perceptions of past and present collide to make the new reality appear unreliable. Unbelievable, almost. When Hana, the marine biologist protagonist of The Coral Bones (2022) by E.J. Swift, dives into a decimated reef, her sense of disorientation, of dislocation, causes her to panic. She describes her reaction to the reef—notably in second person, to make the disconnection between expectation and reality even more apparent. “Imagine a place you know intimately,” she begins, before the horror sinks in. “You stand, turning on the spot, looking about you. After a while, the doubt creeps in. You begin to disbelieve that this is the place you knew. That you were ever here at all. Such is the transformation, you cannot truly take it in. There must be some mistake.”

Part of the anxiety and the frustration so intrinsic to the experience of ecological grief relates not only to that perception of futility, but to the observation of its opposite. In specific cases, that grief is reversible. Conservation efforts, especially when directed at high-profile charismatic species, are able not only to spark interest from the general public, but to encourage their active support and emotional engagement with the species in question.

In New Zealand, for example, the drive to save the kākāpō—Strigops habroptilus, a flightless and nocturnal bird, the largest parrot in the world—from extinction is both popular and ongoing. The Department of Conservation keeps a public running tally of the surviving population, currently at 244 individuals, and all of these are named. There is even an ambassador “spokesbird” kākāpō, called Sirocco, who imprinted on humans after being hand-reared following juvenile illness and who periodically tours the country to meet his human compatriots. (Yes, he’s that parrot.)

The kākāpō conservation efforts have been a success, with the population increasing from a recorded low point of 51 birds in 1995. This is a result of ongoing hard work and expense, but it illustrates the fact that conservation can be successful, and that ecological grief—for this species, at least—does not have to be inevitable.

Even so, the ability to avoid such grief is not certain. In 2019, an outbreak of the fungal infection aspergillosis saw approximately a quarter of the kākāpō population isolated; taken into quarantine so contagion and respiratory disease did not decimate the species. By the time the outbreak was over, nearly five percent of the entire population was dead. In any species, that would be a staggering loss. In one that lies so close to extinction already, five percent is incalculable.

What would the national reaction had been if that loss had been greater? If it had, indeed, been permanent? The death of the last giant panda (coincidentally also due to a fungal outbreak) in Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022) is illustrative of the resulting emotional outburst. “You couldn’t usually make generalizations about a nation of 1.4 billion people, but pretty much everyone in China loved Chiu Chiu,” the narrative notes. The Chinese, the story goes on, “fell into a frenzy of lamentation and self-reproach.”

It’s hard to blame them for their response. Grief and shame are difficult to bear.

Species do go extinct every day, but often those losses can be easily missed by most—small creatures, obscure ones, insects and distant rodents and fish that we don’t see all that often anyway, living far below the surface as they do. There’s little emotional connection there. But an iconic species, and one that’s nationally beloved? There’s an awful sort of flinching, a brace-for-impact reaction that’s increasingly being felt, the world over, for an increasing number of species and an increasing number of ecosystems. Charismatic species are the most visibly affected, but even the most humble species or landscape has its fans.

Everyone loves something. Everyone stands to lose something. A lot of them will. No, that’s not quite accurate. A lot of us will.

This sense of inevitability is difficult to reconcile with the knowledge that change can be made but all too frequently isn’t. The kākāpō recovery, punctuated as it may be by natural disaster, is a heartening illustration of conservation success, but it’s also a single species, and one that invites positive attention by being cute and a very feathery sort of fluffy. It looks appealing. Crucially, it also looks achievable.

Ecological grief centered around a single species can be mitigated if that species is allowed to thrive and flourish. Ecological grief centered around an entire ecosystem is less manageable. The scale is enormous. It’s not only the preservation of a species and its immediate habitat. It’s the preservation of potentially hundreds of species, of thousands of them. This is, as it sounds, prohibitively expensive. It also seems, unfortunately, to be politically unfeasible. While it would be tempting to think that governments and corporations and other non-state actors will come together to combat climate change in any real and effective way, it’s difficult not to be skeptical. Conservation, for some governments, takes a back seat to cash. Continuing the national references, New Zealand’s current Minister for Resources Shane Jones commented, in 2023, of endangered species and mining concerns: “if there is a mineral, if there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye Freddy.”

What, then, are potential responses to ecological grief, if we discount removing the biggest mitigation of that grief, the wholesale protection and restoration of ecosystem? The possibilities are endless and are both inventive and depressing.

In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), animals are so rare that people resort to mechanical substitutes of them, desperate to connect in some way to what has been lost. In Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations (2020), the protagonist, moved by mass extinction, trails after the last of the arctic terns, commenting that “The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here”. In my own novella, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (2021), ecological grief becomes so entrenched in society that it leads to mass suicide.

These are all, admittedly, some of the grimmer possibilities. They do not have to remain so. Grief can be a harbinger of change, if only because the act of grieving acknowledges the value of that being grieved—even if that acknowledgment comes too late. Perhaps it’s time for speculative and eco-fiction to turn ecological grief into opportunity, instead.

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