TY - CHAP

T1 - “A grief more deep than me”—on ecological grief

AU - Frantzen, Mikkel Krause

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - This chapter is an attempt to address environmental losses, to rethink what mourning is and does in the context of the current climate crisis and thus to articulate and advance the concept of ecological grief. While a majority of grief researchers tend to focus on grief as it stands in relation to bereavement, i.e. as the personal reaction to the loss of a loved one, an argument is here made for taking seriously the phenomenon of mourning climate change and the losses that global warming entails (loss of nature, of home, of work, of a whole way of life). Drawing upon the work of Judith Butler and queer death studies, the chapter scrutinizes ecological grief at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the existential and the political, and thus hopes to interject an alternative avenue into discussions around the culture and phenomenology of grief. Consequently, the goal is emphatically not to get ecological grief recognized as a mental illness and included in the diagnostic manuals; what is at stake is finding interdisciplinary ways forward that do not resort to personalizing, pathologizing and depoliticizing the issue in question.

AB - This chapter is an attempt to address environmental losses, to rethink what mourning is and does in the context of the current climate crisis and thus to articulate and advance the concept of ecological grief. While a majority of grief researchers tend to focus on grief as it stands in relation to bereavement, i.e. as the personal reaction to the loss of a loved one, an argument is here made for taking seriously the phenomenon of mourning climate change and the losses that global warming entails (loss of nature, of home, of work, of a whole way of life). Drawing upon the work of Judith Butler and queer death studies, the chapter scrutinizes ecological grief at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the existential and the political, and thus hopes to interject an alternative avenue into discussions around the culture and phenomenology of grief. Consequently, the goal is emphatically not to get ecological grief recognized as a mental illness and included in the diagnostic manuals; what is at stake is finding interdisciplinary ways forward that do not resort to personalizing, pathologizing and depoliticizing the issue in question.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Grief

KW - global warming

KW - Ecology

KW - Climate psychology

U2 - 10.4324/9781003099420-18

DO - 10.4324/9781003099420-18

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9780367568115

SP - 214

EP - 228

BT - Cultural, Existential and Phenomenological Dimensions of Grief Experience

A2 - Køster, Allan

A2 - Kofod, Ester Holte

PB - Routledge

ER -