The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions

Grief, Hope, and Beyond

Laura Candiotto, Niklas Forsberg, Antony Fredriksson, David Rozen, Ondřej Beran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781040265956
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

This volume presents new philosophical perspectives on environmental emotions. It explores the motivating nature of emotions such as anger, grief, and hope in relation to the current climate crisis.

Many of our emotional responses to the climate crisis take a distressed form like anxiety, despair, or grief. However, these emotions almost always coexist with hope, a drive toward action, or a strengthened sense of relationality and belonging. This book explores the different levels at which these tensions take place. Part I discusses the conceptual and linguistic notions we use to make sense of our ecological predicament. Part II looks at the embedded dimension of our emotions: how we feel about the climate crisis as members of our communities and how our emotions are interconnected with what we do and how we work in and for our communities. Several chapters in this section explicitly discuss hope. Finally, Part III has a phenomenological and existential focus: it explores the nature of the rootedness and how it shapes our emotional experiences during the climate crisis.

The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in environmental philosophy, philosophy of emotion, and environmental psychology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions: Introduction
• Part I Language, Concepts, and Sense-making
• 1 Clarifying Climate Emotions via Their Foci
• 2 Conceptual Change in Emotional Contexts
• 3 Beyond “Grievability”: Toward an Affective and Moral Lexicon for the Anthropocene
• 4 How to Speak of Nonhuman Ghosts: Language, Moral Beauty, and Animal Ethical Mourning
• Part II Living in Community
• 5 Hope and Agency in a Time of Environmental Upheaval
• 6 Hope and Realizing the Potentials of the Past
• 7 Natality, Parenthood, and Climate Hope
• 8 No Hope without Hope for All: Arendt and Hope as a Communal Endeavour Rooted in the Shared Condition of Natality
• 9 Putting Grief to Work: Planting Hope for Rainforest-Futures as a Multispecies Care
• 10 Friendship and Politics
• Part III The Displaced Self
• 11 Loving a Place That Is Dying
• 12 Kinship and Relationality as Foundations for Environmental Emotions
• 13 In Defence of Despair about Climate Breakdown
• 14 Ecological Grief, Ambiguous Loss, and the Slow Violence of Extraction
• Afterword
• 15 Environmental Grief, Despair, and Meaning: Concluding Discussion
• Index