Representing Environmental Grief

‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.’ (1966) This much-quoted statement by conservationist Aldo Leopold captures the alienation of those emotionally attuned to environmental destruction and still rings true today: despite growing public concern, environmental loss – accumulating more-than-human deaths, extinct species, ravaged ecosystems – is mostly grieved by environmental scientists, activists, victims, and witnesses of devastation. Thus, over the last decade, numerous autobiographical texts have chronicled environmental grief and attested to a temporal gulf between those who inhabit the accelerating catastrophe and condemn the slow pace of redress, and those trapped in a ‘business-as-usual’ temporality. Building on constructivist theories of representation and political theorists’ engagements with autobiography, I read these texts as sources of self-authorised representative claims targeting two objectives: first, to summon the already grieving into a constituency of shared experience built around a vision of grief compatible with both hope and action; second, to bridge the ‘segregated temporalities’ (Brendese 2014) of hegemonic time and that of environmental activists, scientists and survivors. The first section expands constructivist accounts of representation by foregrounding its temporal dimension. The second recuperates theoretical work that outlines the representative functions of autobiographical writing. An analysis of two memoirs then concretises the argument: Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth (2021) and Danielle Celermajer’s Summertime (2021) are theorised as sources of self-authorised representative claims that seek to bring into co-temporality those who grieve and those who don’t.