Mourning Nature

de Ashlee Cunsolo, Karen Landman

"We are facing unprecedented environmental challenges, including global climate change, large-scale industrial development, rapidly increasing species extinction, ocean acidification, and deforestation--challenges which 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 a new perspective on politics, ethics, and praxis in conservation, sustainability, and connections to and 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."--