Mourning Nature

Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief

Ashlee Cunsolo, Karen Landman, Ashlee Cunsolo, Karen Landman

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780773549333
• eBook ISBN:
  9780773549364
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including global climate change, large-scale industrial development, rapidly increasing species extinction, ocean acidification, and deforestation - challenges that require new vocabularies and new ways to express grief and sorrow over the disappearance, degradation, and loss of nature.

Seeking to redress the silence around ecologically based anxiety in academic and public domains, and to extend the concepts of sadness, anger, and loss, Mourning Nature creates a lexicon for the recognition and expression of emotions related to environmental degradation. Exploring the ways in which grief is experienced in numerous contexts, this groundbreaking collection draws on classical, philosophical, artistic, and poetic elements to explain environmental melancholia. Understanding that it is not just how we mourn but what we mourn that defines us, the authors introduce new perspectives on conservation, sustainability, and our relationships with nature.

An ecological elegy for a time of climatic and environmental upheaval, Mourning Nature challenges readers to turn devastating events into an opportunity for positive change.

Contributors include Glenn Albrecht (Murdoch University, retired); Jessica Marion Barr (Trent University); Sebastian Braun (University of North Dakota); Ashlee Cunsolo (Labrador Institute of Memorial University); Amanda Di Battista (York University); Franklin Ginn (University of Edinburgh); Bernie Krause (soundscape ecologist, author, and independent scholar); Lisa Kretz (University of Evansville); Karen Landman (University of Guelph); Patrick Lane (Poet); Andrew Mark (independent scholar); Nancy Menning (Ithaca College); John Charles Ryan (University of New England); Catriona Sandilands (York University); and Helen Whale (independent scholar).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: She Was Bereft
• Introduction: To Mourn beyond the Human
• 1 Mourning the Loss of Wild Soundscapes: A Rationale for Context When Experiencing Natural Sound
• 2 Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination
• 3 Mourning Ourselves and/as Our Relatives: Environment as Kinship
• 4 In the Absence of Sparrows
• 5 Where Have All the Boronia Gone? A Posthumanist Model of Environmental Mourning
• 6 Losing My Place: Landscapes of Depression
• 7 Climate Change as the Work of Mourning
• 8 Auguries of Elegy: The Art and Ethics of Ecological Grieving
• 9 Making Loss the Centre: Podcasting Our Environmental Grief
• 10 Emotional Solidarity: Ecological Emotional Outlaws Mourning Environmental Loss and Empowering Positive Change
• 11 Solastalgia and the New Mourning
• Epilogue: The Wild Creatures
• Contributors
• Index