Rituals of Collective Mourning

As so many social justice movements have reminded us, systems of oppression are reinforced when we push their painful legacies into the shadows. That’s why mourning rituals -- which bring visibility to unacknowledged injustice through public expression of outrage or grief -- can act as a powerful antidote. When we name and collectively recognize the tragedy of ecological loss, we engage in an ethical protest against modes of thought that trivialize the annihilation of life on our planet. Meanwhile, on the individual level, these customs help us stay present with grief instead of repressing it. Finally, collective ritual promotes solidarity, since grieving as a community removes our isolation from others experiencing loss, providing a corrective to apathy or mass denial.

Grief as a Political Act

We commonly think of mourning as a private experience, but rituals can also be a powerful political act. In a culture built on a hierarchy of lives that matter and lives that don't, some deaths receive elaborate mourning rituals and public tributes, while others are trivialized or ignored (Crenshaw 2020). Marginalized groups know how this absence of public grief dehumanizes them, which is why Black Lives Matter, people seeking justice for murdered indigenous women, and trans and homeless and LGBTQ activists all use public protests and vigils to demand that those deaths aren't made invisible.

In similar ways, when we openly grieve for the loss of other species or forests or rivers, we're asserting that nonhuman lives and natural elements are also worthy of mourning. We refuse to accept their exclusion from human circles of compassion. And ultimately, these individual and collective rituals can inspire us to transform our grief into political anger and meaningful social change (Cunsolo & Landman 2017).

Activity:

Create a ritual or memorial that helps us acknowledge, process, and respond (collectively or individually) to a particular form of environmental loss or climate injustice. For groups meeting in person, this can include a vigil, art walk, mock-funeral service, a musical or visual tribute, or other public memorials that bring visibility to unacknowledged injustice. If you are working online, you might feature your tribute in a video clip, or use a virtual whiteboard to draw a concept for your memorial, or write a eulogy to present (along with visuals) in a slideshow or video.

Examples

Some of my students have used this assignment to stage funeral processions on our campus, taking inspiration from the "Remembrance Day for Lost Species" -- a global series of events occurring annually to commemorate species driven to extinction. Others have created video tributes to lost glaciers and coral reefs, held vigils for human and nonhuman victims of wildfires, given public readings to name off species impacted by construction projects as our own campus expands into surrounding wooded areas, and created visual memorials representing links between devasted rivers, Indigenous people, salmon, and orca populations in the Pacific Northwest. These practices not also promote visibility but also solidarity, since collectively grieving in a ritualized way removes our isolation from others experiencing loss, providing an antidote to apathy or mass denial.

Work to surface and acknowledge dynamics of race, oppression, privilege and power

Students should remain vigilant in avoiding forms of catharsis that simply provide relief from discomfort so individuals can feel absolved in returning to postures of inaction. Unlike experiences of bereavement where those we love die of causes we played no part in creating, with environmental loss the grieving individual may be complicit, adding layers of guilt and denial to underlying pain. This leads Nancy Menning to argue that "we must mourn not only what we have lost, but also what we have destroyed" (2017, 39-40). Yet even here, the guilty "we" is too often a construct offering political cover for a powerful white minority in the global north that disproportionately benefits from our carbon economy by outsourcing suffering onto marginalized groups (Orange 2016; Guenther 2018). A more nuanced and politicized approach to mourning rituals leads participants to directly address these inequalities. A general prompt, for instance, might ask students "how can your project make visible the role of privilege and the unequal distribution of benefits/burdens in an ecological reality shaped by white supremacy, patriarchy, climate colonialism and consumer capitalism? Where have you benefited from or been harmed by conditions related to the loss addressed in your ritual? Who else profits from or is exploited within this dynamic, and how might those relations be rendered visible as you enact the ritual?" Sarah Jaquette Ray’s article on climate anxiety and white fragility may be a helpful supplement here.

Importantly, the point here is not to amplify personal guilt, as research shows that this affect is not politically efficacious and often leads individuals to disengage (brown 2017; Ray 2020). Rather, the goal is accountability: a recognition of the direct or indirect role played in harm or loss; awareness of white supremacy, consumer capitalism, and other structural conditions that perpetuate this violence; reflection on the values and assumptions invoked to rationalize behaviors and structures; and a commitment to specific action to prevent further violence and loss. Within my seminar, students are asked to address these four aspects as they develop their ritual. For example, a eulogy could explicitly name dimensions of one's complicity in a loss and then outline proposed reparations. Students can also submit a supplemental written reflection discussing how those four elements of accountability inform the project. 

Works cited 

brown, adrienne marie. Emergent Strategy. AK Press, 2017.

Burton, Nylah. "People of Color Experience Climate Grief More Deeply Than White People." Vice, 14 May 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7ggqx/people-of-color-experience-climate-grief-more-deeply-than-white-people 

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.  

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. The Unmattering of Black Lives. The New Republic. 21 May, 2020. newrepublic.com/article/157769/unmattering-black-lives

Cunsolo, Ashlee and Karen Landman. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.

Guenther, Genevieve. "Who Is the We in 'We Are Causing Climate Change'?" Slate, 10 Oct. 2018. slate.com/technology/2018/10/who-is-we-causing-climate-change.html

Menning, Nancy. "Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination." Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief. Ed. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017, pp. 39-63.

Orange, Donna. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics. Routledge, 2016.

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. “Climate Anxiety Is an Overwhelmingly White Phenomenon.” Scientific American. March 21, 2021. scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety

Ray, Sarah Jaquette.  A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. University of California Press, 2020.