It was in 2016 that Cymene Howe, a scholar at Rice University, Texas, first heard of the “death” of Okjökull, a small icecap in western Iceland, two years earlier.
Glaciers are charismatic, with snouts and tongues of ice that crawl over land as they grow, but when their ice becomes too thin to continue moving – an increasingly common event amid rising temperatures – the glacier is pronounced dead.
“Its death, its loss, its disappearance … being consumed by climate change was not really being recognised,” felt Howe, a professor specialising in the study of Anthropogenic climate breakdown. “Because part of the problem was that there was no structured way to emotionally go through that process of loss.”
Howe, with the help of colleagues and local experts, organised a funeral for Okjökull, which was the first glacier in Iceland to be declared dead. In August 2019, after an arduous hike up challenging terrain in wind and cold, they hosted a ceremony attended by more than 100 people, with readings, speeches, a moment of silence and the placing of a memorial plaque. “There was a feeling of solidarity and a form of empowerment. We weren’t in tears, but we had a strong feeling of conviction and it was a collective conviction,” says Howe.
Just as populations over the millennia have dealt with grief towards loss of human life through rituals, the climate emergency and growing feelings of “ecological grief” have seen the emergence of events and memorials to mark the loss of nature. Since the ceremony for Okjökull, funerals have been held around the world, including for the Swiss Pizol glacier in 2019, Clark glacier in Oregon in 2020, Ayoloco glacier in Mexico in 2021, and Basodino glacier in Switzerland in 2021.
Swiss glaciers recorded their worst melt rate since records began more than a century ago, scientists announced last month, so this trend for funerals for the death of nature will probably continue, says Howe, specifically in relation to glaciers, although it may take a little longer to see funerals for other environmental destruction, such as the loss of forests and rivers, because they are more regenerative than glaciers.
Accepting ecological grief is made harder by the fact that it is often accompanied by a sense of guilt. “People are feeling the grief, but also feel implicated in the grief because as humans we’re consuming resources and we’re implicitly and explicitly part of the broader social capitalistic, colonial processes that have created these wide-scale, extractive and destructive processes,” says Ashlee Cunsolo, founding dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at Memorial University in Canada.
More and more people from cultures that don’t have a connection to the natural world, and don’t necessarily deal with death very well, are trying to find ways to remember, says Cunsolo.
The bronze plaque used for Okjökull’s funeral has since been translated into the languages of some of the glacier memorials that followed, according to Dominic Boyer, who worked on the Okjökull project with Howe, and was formerly director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University. Boyer notes that while commemorative objects often remember courageous and valiant people who have fought in a war or died after an exceptional feat this plaque “flips the narrative”, as it is for something humans have screwed up. The English translation reads: “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
A similar sentiment is being adopted by a growing number of artists and architects who have embarked on physical projects to commemorate nature. In the UK, the Eden Portland project will include a museum, theatre and biodiversity centre celebrating nature by remembering all the species lost to extinction.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could sort of extend the principle of memorial to animal species,” says project director Sebastian Brooke. The project is being developed in partnership with the Eden Project and will be created in a labyrinth of underground tunnels, cut from the same Portland stone used to construct many of London’s buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral. A series of stone carvings will allow visitors to “look back through the lens of extinction at life on Earth as a sort of total phenomenon”, says Brooke.
Above ground, Ghanaian-British architect Sir David Adjaye has designed a “biodiversity beacon”, a 300-metre tall fossil-like spiral of stone carved with representations of the 860 species of animals that have become extinct since the 17th-century demise of the dodo. “We want to create a memory, and a sort of endless ramp that would sit on top of the quarry, going up into the air, for a moment of reflection, and to see the vastness of the horror [of mass extinction],” says Adjaye. “I think we need to now be a little bit more humble and talk about things that we’ve done wrong,” he adds. “Memorialisation is one of the powerful tools [to do that].”
Designer and sculptor Maya Lin – who achieved international recognition for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington – has created a memorial series for the environment called “What is Missing?”. The Listening Cone – a gigantic bullhorn-shaped sculpture emitting the sounds of nature – at the California Academy of Sciences encourages people to listen to the Earth and reflect on lost wildlife, while the series has also included billboard content for Times Square, and a map of memory for the Hudson River Museum. For her most recent work, in 2021, Lin created a Ghost Forest in Madison Square Park from a patch of 49 40ft-tall Atlantic white cedar trees as a memorial to the once-vibrant woodlands of the east coast, now dead, stripped bare by the climate crisis.
The important thing is that communities find their own way to commemorate what is meaningful about these losses, says Boyer. “These acts of mourning are not going to be just about commemorating something that’s lost in the past, or nostalgia, but rather about the politics of the future,” he says.
Rituals and commemorations of all kinds can help with ecological grief. Janet Lewis, a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, says: “If we lose a person, then the grief is something that we work through to a point where the individual can reinvest in life and take solace in the usual rhythm of life. But when what’s being grieved is what is happening with the natural world, then that loss feels like a harbinger of more losses to come.”
According to Danae Jacobson, an environmental historian at Colby College in Maine, in the US, whose class helped Maya Lin put together material for What Is Missing?, we are likely to see more memorials to nature.
“There’s a lot of precedent, in general history and in environmental history, of people using monuments and rituals to make sense of what it means to live in the Anthropocene,” says Jacobson.
“I’m really interested to see the new forms that this process will take. Memorials are very much about the past, but they’re often about making sense of the present. And they can be about what kind of future do you want to imagine?”
This article was edited on 11 October 2022 to correct a reference to Dominic Boyer, who is no longer director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University
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