Mourning Being(s); Approaches Toward an Ontology of Ecological Grief

Abstract

As ecological crises intensify—characterized by the collapse of familiar ecosystems and vanishing of ancestral landscapes—growing numbers of people report experiences of ecological grief: mournful responses to loss of cherished more-than-human lives and environments. This paper examines how eco-grief unsettles existing ontological narratives and creates space for renewed ways of thinking, feeling, and relating. In doing so, it reframes ecological disorientation as a liminal state which facilitates spiritual reimagining and renewal. Drawing on a comparative analysis of Heideggerian phenomenology with Dagara and Ubuntu philosophy, the essay conceptualizes ecological grief not as a retreat into despair, but as an invitation to reorient within the more-than-human world, thereby scrutinizing existing and persisting habits of separation and linear progress. It subsequently examines how spiritual and symbolic expressions of eco-grief can help to articulate notions such as affect, reciprocity, and care in an eco-centric manner. By explicitly incorporating underrepresented perspectives and aligning contributions across cultural and spiritual spheres, the paper explores how moments of spatial and existential rupture may be approached in a novel manner, thereby bridging existing eco-grief research gaps and framing spiritual notions as a generative force within the realm of ecological engagement.

1. Introduction

The ecological crisis unfolding around and within us—marked by accelerating climate change, mass extinction, and the collapse of familiar ecosystems—has not only destabilized the life-system of our home world. It has also unsettled inherited frameworks of temporality and spatiality, exposing a deep conceptual rupture through the dislocation of frameworks by which humanity orients itself in the world. Contemporary environmental crises resist linear narratives of progress and control; the rhythms of seasonal cycles, the recognizability of landscapes, and the continuity of ecological memory are fraying within a human lifespan. In this unraveling, we encounter a profound disorientation that cannot merely be characterized as a loss of direction, but also as a decaying of the familiar coordinates by which humanity navigates meaning. What does it mean to move forward when the ground beneath us is shifting? What does transformation entail when the future itself feels suspended? And, if grief accompanies us, can its acceptance form a light that can guide us forward, or is it a sign of dim and quiet resignation? This paper departs from the premise that this disorientation does not constitute a failure of understanding, instead positing that it accompanies us as a meaningful existential condition.

As ecosystems collapse and ancestral landscapes vanish, growing numbers of people report emotional responses that exceed personal mourning. In this paper, I contend that such experiences of ecological grief are collective, planetary, and deeply existential. They signal not only sorrow, but also a rupture in worldview—a liminal state that invites us to reimagine our place within the Earthly community. Recent scholarship has approached ecological grief from multiple angles: psychologists have examined its clinical dimensions (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018), sociological accounts have linked it to collective identity and activism (Macy and Brown 2014, p. 21), and philosophers have explored its existential and spiritual resonance (Sideris 2020). While these perspectives have advanced the field meaningfully, they leave space for integrative approaches that combine these registers affectively, culturally, and ecologically.

Planetary health, understood as a concern for the well-being of all life, especially in the face of environmental collapse, demands a profound transformation in how we inhabit Earth, in how we imagine our place within it, and in how we relate to our fellow, non-human inhabitants (KNAW et al. 2023, p. 20). This transformation must be existential and spiritual, engaging our deepest values and modes of care to reshape our collective orientation. Ecological mourning offers a poignant entry to approach this transformation. While often pathologized or framed through anthropocentric models of mourning, eco-grief is increasingly recognized as a collective emotional response to environmental loss (Sideris 2020). Debates persist on whether ecological grief should be understood as a pathological condition, a mobilizing force for environmental action, or a spiritual practice of attunement to the more-than-human world (Albrecht 2019; Cunsolo and Ellis 2018). In the context of this paper, I contend that grief can become a guide, since it holds the potential to draw us into affective and spiritual registers that resist dominant narratives of control, separation and linear progress, instead opening space for an ecological reimagination of thought, affect, and relationality. The present text is a humble attempt to aid in exploring how ecological grief can catalyze this imagination.

In the sections to follow, I propose to focus on two paths to reimagine ecological grief as a generative force: a synthesis of perspectives from African and Western philosophical thought and the analysis of aesthetic and symbolic expressions of environmental bereavement. I begin by situating the concept of ecological grief within current discourse, using a theoretical framework that is rooted in the notion of affectivity1 to frame eco-grief as a novel phenomenon in terms of temporality and spatiality. This subsequently allows us to explore this concept by viewing it as a liminal experience that disrupts persistent worldviews. Next, I turn to Heideggerian phenomenology and Ubuntu philosophy to show how their synthesized perspective explains underlying intricacies and furthers the understanding of expressions of ecological grief. The discussion of these specific accounts is a conscious one, which is made for various reasons. Importantly, and despite prolonged effort, as emphasized by Coffey et al. (2021, pp. 1–6), present-day research on eco-grief is lacking in terms of its conceptual grounding, while viewpoints from cultures from the global South—communities who are and have been experiencing the consequences of climate change most severely—are being underrepresented in the current corpus. Because of this, the discussion of Ubuntu philosophy can, while of course being worthwhile in its own right, aid in bridging this gap. Because of the paper’s aim to construe eco-grief in terms of its specific spatio-temporal dimensions, the inclusion of Ubuntu philosophy is a fruitful one, since these ontological aspects of existence, emphasizing relationality, form a cornerstone of Ubuntu thought. In a similar vein, Heidegger prioritizes, within his account of Being and world, becoming over a stable form of being, thus allowing room to further understand experiences of eco-grief as they highlight a perceived rupture of a world that has long been thought stable. While I am aware of the fact that Heidegger’s legacy is contaminated by his political positioning, one that is more than worthy of condemnation and has arguably influenced his thought, I hold that his philosophical work nevertheless contains insightful notions on worldhood and relationality that are relevant when answering the questions posed in this paper. Finally, the choice to synthesize these accounts is also a deliberate one. The intention of this paper is not to weigh two modes of thought against one another, but rather to showcase how conceptions from varying cultural backgrounds and traditions can be intertwined to meaningfully incorporate underrepresented perspectives into the domain of eco-grief research. One of the goals of this paper is, thus, to expand this research field by highlighting how the current conception of eco-grief can both be enriched and challenged by incorporating perspectives that are of critical importance to adequately and more fully understand it.

Finally, I discuss the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of eco-grief—including phenomena such as rituals of mourning and artistic expressions—to illustrate how grief can be framed as a generative force that offers affective ways of spiritual engagement with the more-than-human world.

By following this path, I will argue that a reframed conception of ecological grief can aid to understand mourning not as a passive sorrow, but rather as a mode of attunement that reshapes the human orientation towards planetary health and relational care. Consequently, this paper asks how environmental mourning can help us to imagine new ways of living together on Earth. In doing so, this paper reframes ecological grief as a call to reorient within the Earthly community. In this reorientation, imaginations of grief become a spiritual and existential response to planetary collapse that affirm our capacity for relating and caring in an eco-centric manner. This perspective aligns with worldviews found in nature-based spiritualities and environmental philosophy and resonates with contemporary understandings of spiritual care by navigating existential challenges to move beyond anthropocentrism and towards planetary health (Hvidt et al. 2020, p. 5).

2. Temporality, Spatiality and Liminality in the Context of Eco-Grief

• “A letter to the future
•  
• Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
• In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
• This monument is to acknowledge that we know
• what is happening and what needs to be done.
• Only you know if we did it
•  
• Ágúst 2019
• 415 ppm CO₂”
•  
Andri Snær Magnason, A letter to the future (Luckhurst 2019).

There is an anxious tone within these words, written as an epitaph for the glacier once known as Okjökull, located in the northwest of Iceland. “Ok”, as it was affectionately called by locals, was ceremonially commemorated by a group of around a 100 people in 2019, marking both the first instance of an acknowledged death of a glacier, and the very first funeral ceremony for one. Mourners collectively walked up to the place where Ok had been living for over 700 years, laying a plaque to memorialize it while also paying attention to what is likely to come. The inscription, which can be read above, was written by Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason and ends by stating the date of the ceremony and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air globally at that time—415 parts per million (ppm) (Luckhurst 2019).

The funeral for the Okjökull glacier serves various purposes. While the ceremony echoes and laments a separation, both regarding the disappearance of the glacier from the Earth and the death of a culturally important natural monument, Ok’s funeral provides the opportunity for communal mourning and reflection that extends beyond personal boundaries (Cf., Craps 2023, p. 74). Amplified by the widespread attention the ceremony has received, the ritual exemplifies the possibility of new beginnings, since the demise felt might entail a path of transformation towards a future where (glacial) life can be cherished in such a way that looming losses could be averted. The inscription does therefore remember a glacier while also addressing the witnesses that have lived on while Ok is no more, urging them to come together and act collectively to prevent further, future losses.

Additionally, performed rituals such as the Okjökull funeral serve a vital purpose in rendering the effects and emotional pains of climate change visible and tangible (Cf., Ivanova and Lagaay 2025, p. 125). In pinpointing a moment and cause of death, the ceremony provides the opportunity to sharpen the lens on environmental destruction by enacting grief and mourning2 for a specific instance of felt loss.3 In this sense, the ceremony serves as an expression of separation, namely the separation of Okjökull from our world, while it simultaneously attempts to forge a location for ecological bereavement that constitutes a lasting connection at the physical and spiritual root of its rupture.

Finally, the Okjökull funeral illustrates how ritual practices, typically reserved for human bereavement, are extended to the non-human world, thereby signaling a shift in how ecological loss is culturally processed through a dialogue between established customs and innovative expressions (Cf., Chamel and Dansac 2023). By adopting the structure and symbolism typically associated with a funeral, Ok is reframed not as entity, but as a being that deserves mourning. In doing so, rituals such as these expand the moral and affective community to include lost environments and their inherent meaning towards the living Beings that take place in the ceremony. This designation serves as a prerequisite for a form of life to be seen as a “life” at all, making dependency and vulnerability into a category that is not necessarily reserved for human beings and thus rendering Ok as a being that is worthy of mourning (Cf., Butler 2004, 2009).4 Ecological grief can therefore be seen, like Donna Haraway has aptly phrased, as an example of an ‘entangled understanding with the non-human other’ (Haraway 2016, p. 39).

The Okjökull funeral does more than merely marking the disappearance of a glacier; it brings to the front how ecological loss is experienced as uncovering a spiritual rupture that reveals how existential losses are part of the felt disappearance of a meaningful site. Through ritualized mourning, participants acknowledge both a severed relation with a more-than-human being whose presence has shaped their sense of place and community, as well as the desire to restore this relation, even if the mourned being in question will never return. As Pikhala (2018, p. 553) argues, experiences regarding climate change and ecological loss often carry this distinctly spiritual dimension, since these losses unsettle the fundamental sense of belonging and connection to the living world by revealing an ‘experienced engagement with something that is larger than the self’. The ceremony’s blend of grief, communal witnessing, and consciousness thereby gestures towards a broader affective condition—one in which environmental loss is experienced as a disturbance that is simultaneously emotional, spiritual, and existential in nature. It is within this specific landscape that the notion of ecological grief becomes most resonant.

Scholars have defined ecological grief in various ways, the most influential of which being articulated by Cunsolo and Ellis (2018, p. 275) as “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change”. In this article, I frame my analysis of ecological grief using this conception, since Cunsolo and Ellis’ definition is explicitly oriented across temporal and spatial dimensions. In contrast, Comtesse et al. (2021, p. 7) describe ecological grief as “a phenomenon of yearning”, thereby implicitly framing it along the lines of past experience and recollection as it relates to a physical environment,5 while Burton-Christie (2011, p. 30)6 and Pikhala (2022, p. 4) do not include a temporal involvement and conceptualize eco-grief as a personal affective state which, while perhaps unintentional and implicit, does not contain room for a relational component towards that which is lost.7

In framing eco-grief as an affect that takes an anticipatory form, Cunsolo and Ellis reserve space for the mortality of beings that have not or will not come into existence. This “double death”, as it has been called by Deborah Bird Rose, revolves around the idea that loss entails the conditional characteristic that “death work unmakes time” (Rose 2013, p. 94), or, in other words, that the eradication of a future in time and place is yet another result of ecological loss. Simultaneously, the current geological epoch is “haunted, structured, and shaped” in the light of what van Dooren (2019, p. 105) calls “legacies of the past and the anticipation of what is to come,8 thereby synthesizing time and place through the enactment of ecological bereavement. While the same could possibly be said for interhuman instances of death and loss, in the sense that the death of a loved one entails the loss of a possible and imagined future time–place, the anticipatory and relational structure of ecological grief takes place on a different timescale. Interhuman mourning is typically oriented towards a singular and identifiable other, taking place within a sphere of relationality that has unfolded within an enclosed social world. The temporal horizon is therefore bound to a determinate and conceivable past.

Ecological grief, by contrast, can stem from losses that originate in a distant, unknown past and extend into an uncertain future while being directed towards entities and systems that are harder to perceive and know (Cf., Saint-Amour 2020, p. 139). This entails that the disappearance of these entities destabilizes not only personal attachments, but also the conditions that render these attachments—both present and future, actual and potential—possible (Morton 2010, p. 254). The loss of a glacier, a species, or an ecosystem is not merely the loss of a discrete being, but rather the unraveling of a web of relationality, meaning, and future that exceeds any individual life, similar to how we typically understand the loss entailed in instances of interhuman death. In this sense, expressions of eco-grief express not merely what has been lost, but also that which can no longer be imagined, inhabited, or inherited, both temporally and spatially.

Moreover, interhuman mourning presupposes a continuity of the world in which grief can be processed, witnessed, and eventually integrated. Ecological grief unsettles this assumption: it arises precisely because the world itself, as a ground of meaning, stability, and future, is perceived as eroding. The being in mourning is thus confronted not only with the absence of the lost being, but with the fragility of the relational matrix that once sustained both self and world. Eco-grief therefore marks a qualitatively different affective terrain, one in which mourning becomes inseparable from a broader confrontation with planetary precarity, the dissolution of ecological time, and the recognition that the losses at stake are collective, ongoing, and in some cases irreversible.

It is in this sense that ecological grief uncovers a distinct spatial and temporal orientation, one that departs from the frameworks through which mourning is typically understood. Ecological mourning reveals that the losses at stake are not confined to a single moment, place, or being. Instead, they reveal themselves as diffuse and recursive, unfolding across layered temporalities and dispersed geographies. Each act of ecological grief—whether ritualized as in the Okjökull funeral, or personally felt in everyday encounters with degradation—renders visible a temporal field in which past, present, and future are no longer sequential, but become entangled in novel and scarcely known ways. Spatially too, ecological grief reveals a rupture of inherited boundaries. The sites of ecological mourning are rarely fixed. Rather, they are distributed across ecosystems, communities, and symbolic landscapes, making apparent relational geographies of loss that exceed any single locality.

All of this points to a degree of liminality that is disclosed through environmental mourning. Liminality, as Turner (1969, pp. 94–95) describes it, marks a threshold in which established categories, identities, and orientations transition and lose their stability, creating the conditions for new forms of meaning and relation to take shape. In the context of ecological grief, mourners find themselves inhabiting such a liminal space: one where a cherished environment is neither fully present nor fully gone. Through such temporal, spatial, and liminal reconfigurations, ecological grief becomes not only an affective response, but a previously undisclosed mode of perceiving and being in a world that is marked by ongoing loss and the foreclosing of denied and imagined futures and places (Cf., van Dooren 2019, p. 106).

As such, eco-grief discloses a form of time that is ruptured yet continuous, and a form of space that is dispersed yet intimate, thereby expanding the boundaries of what is deemed a grievable life. In this sense, ecological grief becomes a generative, if painful, spiritual lens that reveals a radically altered condition of being. At the same time, the direction or intentionality of ecological grief is not self-evident. Rituals such as the Okjökull funeral beg the question of whether ecological mourning genuinely expands the moral community to include more-than-human others, or whether it ultimately recenters human concerns under the guise of environmental care. This tension became visible during the ceremony itself, when Iceland’s then prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir stated the following:

“This is the first Icelandic glacier that is formally declared an ex-glacier. If the predictions of the scientists, if we see them happening, we will see other glaciers disappear in the next decades and centuries, which is obviously a very big thing for our landscape, nature, ecosystem, but also for our energy system, because we produce renewable energies from the glacier rivers.”

(TIME 2019)

Jakobsdóttir’s remark reframed the loss of Ok not only as an ecological rupture, but as a disruption to human infrastructure. Such moments complicate the assumption that ecological grief necessarily fosters an eco-centric orientation. They suggest that mourning may oscillate between two poles: a desire to draw closer to the more-than-human world, and a desire to preserve the conditions for continued extraction and human-centered development. Whether ecological grief ultimately moves us toward this eco-centric relationality, or whether it is absorbed back into human-centered narratives, remains an open and pressing question. This question might cautiously be approached by examining the underlying foundations that guide how ecological grief is mobilized.

3. Becoming, Loss, Other, and Significance

If ecological grief is understood as a mournful reaction to the simultaneous and evolving finitude of being, space, and future, it seems reasonable to argue that this type of bereavement discloses an inherent sadness or anxiety concerned with the possibility of becoming itself, in this case grasped as a concept that goes beyond any individual subject. This type of mourning can thus be understood as a dissolvement of significance, namely that of a world which can be called safe or possible. A loss of place and time therefore entails a loss of possibility, both on a subjective and a communal level (Cf., Fernandez Velasco 2024, p. 237). In this sense, ecological grief reveals itself not just as a response to environmental decline. It also discloses a disturbance in the very frameworks through which meaning, orientation and belonging become possible. Of course, it is necessary to concede that our world—both physical as well as experienced—is constantly evolving, changing and transforming around and from within us. This influences our idea of stability or grasp of the world as we inhabit it. In this world, disturbance is always looming in various forms, be it a sudden change in environment or the loss of a loved one. In the context of eco-grief, however, both the velocity and influence of these losses are ever-accelerating and ever-encompassing, thereby forming a novel form of change that is difficult to understand through calling on existing knowledge on world-loss.

To aid in structuring what will follow, I propose to call this multiplicity the loss of horizon, since this figure of speech grasps both the individual and shared, as well as the spatial and temporal dimension of this loss. To be exact, the factors of significance that direct both ecological loss and environmental mourning are tied to factors of meaning and meaningfulness, which in turn point to the emergence of structure and identity (Ratcliffe 2023, p. 156). The loss of inhabited place therefore entails a disturbance in the very structure of both our world and our place in it, possibly leading to a feeling of remaining alone in a place that was. Perhaps it was this what Aldo Leopold alluded to when speaking of interspecies mourning, writing that “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” (Leopold 1999, p. 265).

Experiences of environmental mourning, when oriented outwards, seem to gesture towards a form of affect or care that exceeds the boundaries of the self by acknowledging the interdependence of beings that inhabit a shared ecological horizon. However, as discussed in the previous section, eco-grief can also turn inwards, thereby possibly becoming counterproductive if approached from the perspective of concern for the self alone. In this sense, ecological grief may echo a self-concerned anxiety regarding one’s personal environment: a mourning for the collapse of the world that sustains our own possibilities. Understanding this inherent ambivalence thus requires a conceptual understanding which can aid in explaining both of these tendencies, while also differentiating between these polarities to provide a path forward that highlights the eco-centric potential of environmental mourning.

By explicitly framing the specific characteristics disclosed by phenomena of ecological loss and mourning through the lens of temporality and spatiality, it becomes possible to analyze said phenomena by utilizing Heideggerian phenomenology. Martin Heidegger’s thinking, while sometimes controversial and often criticized for its density and neologism-heavy terminology, provides an apt lens through which to scrutinize these phenomena. This is the case since his understanding of Being, and his thinking on how a Being understands itself, relies heavily on notions of temporality and relationality, the relevance and importance of which—within the context of this topic—are already determined. Central to Heidegger’s account in his seminal work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) is the idea that existence (Dasein9) is conditioned as a form of disposition or state of mind (Befindlichkeit) that is always attuned (Bestimmt, Stimmung) to its world: “Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has” (Heidegger 1927, p. 135; 1962, p. 17410). The nature of Befindlichkeit thus includes a form of dependence towards the world where something that concerns or affects us can be encountered, which subsequently entails a form of attunement towards that which brings about this experience in the first place. In other words, the condition of attunement renders it possible to grasp the meaningful totality in which the surrounding world emerges in its significance.

Importantly, this form of attunement comes, as Oele emphasizes, prior or anterior to the differentiation of beings, thus rendering it a form of affect that befalls a being in association with the totality of beings—in this context the ecological Umwelt in which we find ourselves (Oele 2024, p. 6). The way in which we attune ourselves is, then, not a subjective emotion, but rather a fundamental mode of world disclosure: it reveals how one finds oneself in the world as it matters. Ecological grief, understood in this light, can be seen as a form of attunement that stems from an experienced world-loss which exposes the fragility of worldhood itself, since it reveals that the structures of significance that ordinarily sustain and continuate the orientation of our attunement—for example, the rhythm of seasons or the recognizability of a cherished lifeworld—are no longer secure. Crucially, his form of attunement is concerned with both being itself and the lifeworld we inhabit. As Heidegger states, any form of understanding on how we orient ourselves, what our possibilities are, can only be obtained via an analysis of the kind of being with which we sustain ourselves (or perhaps, our self) most closely (Heidegger 1927, p. 118; 1962, p. 153). This omnipresent mode of being, which Heidegger calls ‘Mitsein’ (or Being-With), is crucial, since the relationality between us and another becomes necessary for us to disclose the shared significance of worldhood: “Being–in is being–with others” (Heidegger 1927, pp. 118–19; 1962, pp. 153–54). Additionally, an important element within this structure is related to the earlier-discussed concept of affectivity. As Ratcliffe (2002, 2008) has argued on various occasions, (background) affectivity discloses the world as a significant home, one within which a Being finds themselves dwelling. In other words, Heidegger’s conceptions of mood and attunement show how “emotional dispositions fundamentally place us in certain relations to the world” (Fernandez Velasco 2024, p. 240).

Crucially, this attunement, which befalls our being as it finds and orients itself within a present state or mood, stretches across the horizon of being Heidegger describes in Sein und Zeit. In his terminology, this omnipresent process is called Historizing (Geschehen) or the Historization of Being, which points to the idea that “(a)nything that ‘has a history’ stands in the context of a becoming’”, thus determining “‘a future’ ‘in the present’” (Heidegger 1927, p. 378; 1962, p. 430). When Heidegger thus speaks of the historizing of Being, he characterizes it as extending over past, present and future in an attempt to make sense of a perceived current moment or place we find ourselves in (Heidegger 1927, p. 144; 1962, p. 184). This notion ties in to the ‘horizon’ described earlier, since the loss of the world we find ourselves in denotes the mutation of both the past and the future as it constitutes a present experience or understanding that stretches towards both ends of the temporal spectrum.11

To summarize Heidegger’s view thus far, a present understanding of Being comes about as the self converges with both its temporal and spatial grounding and dependence, with its subsequent possibility to constitute itself forward being mediated and disclosed through their influence. This notion of disclosure holds an existential depth that mirrors Heidegger’s understanding of finitude. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger argues that Dasein is, through its condition of being able to project or design (Entwurf) itself forward from its initial thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the world, always disclosing its own possibility in light of its final movement: the cessation that renders it whole.12 Importantly, Heidegger states that, as early as a someone Is, a Being Is already its death and Is in light of its own death, regardless of the moment at which this might come to pass (Heidegger 1927, pp. 244–45; 1962, p. 289). This omnipresent existential condition, characterized as Being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode), thus entails that a Being’s possibilities are shaped by its orbit of becoming and projecting that considers its inevitable approach towards non-existence. In other words, a Being always exists both in relation to and in regard of its own end, thereby recognizing that its existence is fundamentally finite and unguaranteed (Heidegger 1927, p. 251; 1962, p. 295).13

Interestingly, Heidegger describes death as a Being’s “ownmost possibility”, in the sense that the knowledge of an ever-impending death “wrenches” a Being away from the outside world, thereby throwing the Being in question back towards itself and, in the process, rendering it fundamentally non-relational (Heidegger 1927, p. 263; 1962, pp. 307–8). Out of all the possibilities that present itself within Being, non is as personal as death: “With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. (…) This ownmost non-relational possibility is at the same time the uttermost one.” (Heidegger 1927, p. 250; 1962, p. 294). In this sense, death casts Dasein back upon itself and thereby to its own Being, since it becomes conscious in anticipating its own death and the impending severance of its bond with the world. Moreover, when a Being stands face to face with itself in this manner, all relations to the Beings of others are experienced as momentarily severed. The knowledge of Being-towards-death thus brings with it an understanding of death as one’s own, non-transferable possibility. Death addresses a Being as an individual and attunes it to non-relationality. This seems to echo the sentiment mentioned earlier by Deborah Bird Rose, whose notion of death and the unmaking of time seems to hold a possibility of decreased relationality within it.

Contained within this existential constellation is another fundamental condition of Being, one which seemingly exceeds this solitary movement in the face of death and loss of possibility. In Sein und Zeit, following the discussion of Being-towards-death and the unmaking of relational ties, Heidegger goes on by describing a meaning-invoking context that is approached when encountering the outside world. This underlying framework, which he terms as “care” (Sorge), is constituent of the foremost understanding that a Being has of itself (Cf., Ratcliffe 2002, p. 288–89). As Ratcliffe observes in Sein und Zeit, “Care is the condition for the possibility of apprehending the world as a significant whole (…). It incorporates the sense in which Heidegger claims that we are anchored in the past (facticity), situated in the present (fallenness) and forever looking to the future (projection), and the way in which these dimensions are inseparable from each other as conditions of engagement with the world” (Ratcliffe 2002, p. 289). From this interpretation, it becomes possible to situate a constellation that holds equal room for three variants of temporality, variants that are, crucially, similar to the cross-temporal presence found in experiences of eco-grief. As Heidegger argues, this form of care is experienced through relations that pertain to forms of intersubjective existence such as Being-in and Being-with: “Because Being-in-the-world is essentially care, (…) being with the Dasein-with of Others as we encounter it within-the-world could be taken as solicitude14 (Heidegger 1927, p. 193; 1962, p. 237). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Heidegger argues that care does not primarily and exclusively entail an “isolated attitude of the “I” towards itself”, rather holding that it lies a priori before every attitude and situation of the Being in question as a “primordial structured totality” (Heidegger 1927, p. 193; 1962, pp. 237–38). It would, thus, seem that Heidegger’s account of Being contains an inherent tension between isolation and openness, both becoming manifest in specific contexts. This tension will be further analyzed in the next section of this paper. For now, let us turn to the final subsection of this third part. This next subsection turns to Ubuntu philosophy, which offers a relational ontology that challenges, complements and expands Heidegger’s insights.

Ubuntu15 philosophy begins from a premise that contrasts the suspense between self and Other observed in Heidegger’s thought: a person becomes a person through other persons (Terblanché-Greeff 2019, p. 97). Identity is, thus, not self-contained. Instead, it emerges from and through relationality, community, and interdependence. This relational ontology extends beyond human sociality to include nature, ancestors, and the more-than-human world. As Chévanni Davids, who graciously and kindly agreed to converse with me during the writing of this article, writes, Ubuntu is “the realization that we are because everything is” (Davids 2024). Within this framework, ecological grief is not only an individual confrontation with finitude, but most principally a recognition of relational rupture that comes to be in response to the disturbance in the web of connections that constitute being.

From an Ubuntu perspective, the loss of horizon revealed by ecological grief is a loss of relational grounding. When ecosystems collapse or landscapes disappear, what is threatened is not only the stability of one’s world, but also the communal and ecological relations that render existence meaningful or significant. When holding that the aforementioned decline of horizon entails the obscuring of the means by which one moves forward, it is reasonable to argue that, in this context, the presence of this horizon is at all times mediated by a co-constitutive, reciprocal exchange of possibility between Beings. The loss or decline of this horizon would thus entail a decline in relational grounding as well. Ecological grief can thus be seen as a form of recognition that illustrates how one’s Being is intertwined with the Beings that are lost in the entirety of the natural world. Ubuntu philosopher Mogobe Ramose describes this condition in the following manner:

“[T]he dignity and importance of the individual human being can best be understood in terms of relations with other human beings as well as relations with physical nature. In this sense human dignity is crucial and decisive but by no means absolute. Human dignity and its decisive importance in African philosophy is at times expressed by the saying feta kgomo o tshware motho. This means that if and when one is faced with a decisive choice between wealth and the preservation of the life of another human being then one should choose to preserve the life of another human being. Mutual care for one another as human beings precedes concern for the accumulation and safeguarding of wealth as though such a concern were an end in itself. There is a link between the above insight and its correlative, namely, that no single human being nor any other entity is the centre of the universe. The universe is understood as the unceasing unfoldment of interaction and interdependence between and among all that there is.”

(Ramose 1999, p. 109)

While the excerpt on the preservation of another human being above one’s own material wealth does not contain any mention of the natural world, the fact that relational importance between humans and nature is stressed in a seemingly egalitarian manner right before would suggest that the same principle applies towards more-than-human actors. This recognition carries a spiritual dimension: it acknowledges that humans are part of a larger web of life and that their flourishing depends on the flourishing of the surrounding, more-than-human world. It would, therefore, seem that the notion of care as it pertains to one’s becoming or flourishing is unequivocally extended towards non-human Beings, seeing as they also contribute to the wholeness of the world as it pertains to the multi-layered interaction of all entities.

Furthermore, Achille Mbembe notes that Ubuntu, as a form of African metaphysics or ontology, emphasizes a circulation of matter and significance across all living forms. In his interpretation, “no impenetrable wall exists between living forms”, since they are all governed and directed by a circulation of currents and energies: “In order to constantly adapt to the changing conditions of their environment, they make use of transfers, exchanges, and new combinations of all kinds of substances and tools. Humans derive things from plants, which in turn take the form of animals, which again do not hesitate to put on the mask of the ancestors” (Mbembe 2025, p. 22).16 In this context, the Earth is described as a Being itself, an “animated body” and a “renewing life” that co-creates other lifeforms and is thus “both ground and shelter” as an ever-progressing and ever-becoming tissue of Being: “We must not view the earth as soil or a plot of land, but as a life that renews itself” (Mbembe 2025, pp. 91–93). Within this dynamic, where the Earth empowers its inhabitants to pursue their possibilities to the point of actualization, the notion of becoming is both crucial and interdependent. Becoming in light of one’s possibilities cannot happen in isolation in Ubuntu, as Beinghood is attained through the interaction with other living Beings (Terblanché-Greeff 2019, p. 98). Consequently, a Being does not exist in isolation, but is instead seen as inherently communal since presedence is designated to relationality and interdependency. Identity is thus exemplified through and within communion. In this context, the concept of Ukama (relatedness) prescribes a form of “communion between humans and nature, which is often expressed through identity, respect and solidarity” (Terblanché-Greeff 2019, p. 98). This notion of relatedness, that forms an extension of Ubuntu thinking, holds that “no person is complete in him/herself; s/he is fully human in as far as s/he remains a part of the web of life, including creation and the earth” (LenkaBula 2008, p. 378).

Finally, Ubuntu helps reconnect ecological grief to the temporal and spatial dimensions discussed earlier. In Ubuntu, belonging is always tied to place, community, and continuity across generations (Cf., Terblanché-Greeff 2019, p. 99). Ecological grief reveals a rupture in these dimensions by revealing the fragility of the places and relations that sustain identity. Yet, it also opens the possibility of re-inhabiting time and space through renewed relational commitments by viewing Ubuntu philosophy as a spiritual guide. In this sense, ecological grief becomes a generative attunement, since it foregrounds the vulnerability of our world while simultaneously inviting a reorientation toward care, humility, and ecological responsibility. This sentiment is echoed further by Chévanni Davids, who argues that Ubuntu “calls us to recognize that our well-being is tied to the well-being of everything around us. That we cannot thrive while the earth suffers. That our joy is diminished when the waters are poisoned when the animals are silenced when the forests are cut down. Ubuntu reminds us that we are part of a vast, intricate web of life and that our task is not to dominate or control, but to care for, to tend to, to be in deep relationship with all that exists” (Davids 2024).

Through emphasizing the embeddedness of possibility, or becoming, within the Earth and its ecosystems, it becomes possible to reframe eco-grief as a phenomenon that confirms how Being is co-constituted by and with more-than-human others. To conclude while circling back to the temporal and spatial characteristics of eco-grief discussed earlier, Ubuntu can aid in articulating ecological grief, viewed as a response to death and loss, as a collective, spiritual and planetary phenomenon, instead of an individuated and individuating experience like Heidegger seems to suggest when discussing death, thus re-grounding the temporal and spatial ruptures described earlier. The “loss of horizon” is thereby also cast as a loss of relational grounding, or a rupture in the web of interdependence. However, eco-grief might be a way of re-inhabiting time and place through relational care if understood from the perspectives discussed in this section. In order to substantiate this thought, the next section will analyze these perspectives further within the context of eco-grief, while also attempting to intertwine the aforementioned accounts to illuminate structural resonances that help to clarify the ontological and spiritual dimensions of ecological mourning.

4. Meanders into a Relational Ontology of Ecological Grief

Let us now commence by knitting together the most important threads of this analysis to subsequently suggest an intertwined framework that can be utilized in the context of eco-grief. As mentioned in the previous section, the concept of eco-grief, as well as its experience, denotes its own novel, previously uncharted territory in terms of temporality and spatiality. What makes Sein und Zeit useful within this context is its relevance for the matter at hand, which becomes apparent through a form of alignment. For Heidegger, temporality is always pressing itself upon a Being as a navigating structure that consists simultaneously of past, present and future, overlapping and cascading into one another to present a now that becomes a fruitful ground in terms of possibility. Much like the effects of eco-grief, Heidegger’s account of existence takes into consideration this temporal horizon which becomes predominantly meaningful or significant as a whole, rendering it a guide for the understanding of self and world. Importantly, notions of self are seemingly put into the background, since any form of seizing a possibility necessarily comes about with and through the Other, the omnipresent state of care guiding a Being towards transformation or becoming, thus always becoming with the Other.

The communal element of this becoming is even more important in the framework presented by Ubuntu philosophy. As Ramose aptly puts it, within Ubuntu “there is never a final immutable whole but only enduring and transient wholes always governed by the principle of motion responsible for change” (Ramose 1999, p. 108). Because of this, the various wholes, which can be found dwelling the Earth, are aspects of the universe17 as a totality of wholeness, bound in “a perpetual process of generation, death and regeneration; of the construction of an intrinsic order from the ruins of apparent destruction and chaos” (Ramose 1999, p. 108). This entangled view of death and life (seen as a form of perpetual becoming) echoes the spiritual foundation important in expressing eco-grief, namely the tacit idea that to care for what is ceasing is to understand it as being alive and as a form of life that is deserving of grief, care, and growth.

In this sense, experiences and expressions of eco-grief point to a recognition which posits that life and significance are never static, but rather in constant development within and amongst the whole web of life. In this sense, motion can be seen as the core principle of Being, understood here as an unfolding process of evolution that contributes to the idea that this same unfolding contributes to the preservation of the universe as a whole.18 As we depart while acknowledging this premise, it becomes possible to further intertwine the two perspectives discussed in this paper by pointing out their respective critiques on and separations from the notion of humanism. When defining Ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose makes the following remark:

“The concept of botho/hunhu/ubuntu in indigenous African languages is not readily translatable into humanism, especially if this latter is understood as a specific trend in the evolution of Western philosophy. Humanness is a better rendition of the concept than humanism. The former suggests both a condition of being and the state of becoming, of openness or ceaseless unfolding. It is thus opposed to any -ism, including humanism, for this tends to suggest a condition of finality, a closedness or a kind of absolute either incapable of or resistant to any further movement. But motion being the principle of change, it follows that resistance to it is tantamount to resistance to change. This basic difference between humanness and humanism speaks to two different perceptions of and perspectives on reality and being.”

(Ramose 1999, p. 105)

Here, Ramose clearly distances Ubuntu from (Western) humanism, arguing that the former contains both a condition of being and a state of becoming, of “openness to ceaseless unfolding”, whereas the latter suggests a condition of closedness or “a kind of absolute either incapable of or resistant to any further change arising from the principle of motion” (Ramose 1999, p. 108). A similar notion can be found in Heidegger’s thinking, particularly in the Letter on “Humanism”. In this piece, Heidegger characterizes humanism, and in turn Western metaphysics, in terms of its failure to raise the question of Being (Cf., Wearing 2025, p. 665): humanism “does not think Being as such, does not think the difference between Being and beings” (Heidegger 1998, p. 246).19 Heidegger departs from humanism, seeing as he holds that this view is concerned rather with static characterizations of the human being, instead of emphasizing the nature of Being itself: a form of existence (or in this case, ek-sistence) that is characterized as a continued becoming. As he emphasizes, his view of Being “is not identical with the traditional concept of existentia, which means actuality in contrast to the meaning of essentia as possibility” (Heidegger 1998, p. 248). Being is, thus, not a subject in a traditional philosophical sense, but rather an entity whose significance lies in its existence—in its Being-in-the-world. Unlike the humanistic description, which views humans as rational subjects endowed with inherent qualities, Heidegger’s notion of Being is defined by its potentiality-for-Being or, in other words, its capacity to engage with existence as a form of becoming20: “The human being in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of being, into the open region that first clears the “between” in within which a “relation” of subject to object can “be”” (Heidegger 1998, p. 266).21 Ubuntu’s relational ontology resonates with Heidegger’s critique of humanism: both reject the idea of a fixed human essence and instead understand existence as a process of becoming. However, Ubuntu extends this becoming beyond the existential horizon of the individual toward a communal and even ecological horizon.

Within this context, the concept of death, seen here a partial endpoint of becoming, plays a vital role. While Heidegger argues that the impendence of death throws a Being back towards itself, it can be argued that the underlying care-structure of Being supersedes this initial thrownness. To contextualize, as Adkins (2007, p. 84) observes, “Heidegger is at great pains to keep death as an internal phenomenon. Death cannot be treated as an approaching event. Death cannot be properly treated as a thing. In fact, we might go as far as to say that death cannot be properly treated as external”. Despite this, three objects might be made. First, as Heidegger writes, the structure of existence within his view makes it so that “death is ontologically grounded in care”, seeing as the potentiality for becoming is always absorbed by and within the world (Heidegger 1927, p. 252; 1962, p. 296). In this sense, it would seem logical to keep with this particular view, thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger, and hold that the knowledge of death necessarily comes about in relation to the outside world, the world where both self and other reside, where both self and other are at the disposition of death and decay. Second, the notion that death cannot be treated as an approaching event or thing would seemingly fall flat, since the death of an Other, be it a cherished human or cherished Being beyond the human, necessarily discloses a partial foreclosure of one’s own possibilities to become and traverse the world in a significant manner.22 Third, as Alison Stone argues, “because we are relational beings, when someone dies who was important to us, we lost part of our own selves, part of the unfolding web of relationship, meaning, and value of which we were constituted” (Stone 2019, p. 181). The idea that death is in its essence a solitary phenomenon as it befalls a Being is, thus, problematic since “our deaths are continuous with one another (…) so that ‘my’ death is always ‘ours’” (Stone 2019, p. 187).

If we turn, once more, to Ubuntu philosophy, we can see that it posits a view of death that is both ecological and communal in nature. In describing the process of death and burial, Achille Mbembe makes an interesting point: “If it is true that dying entails that we inhume the earth or let smoke rise to the heavens, then death is ultimately a way to nourish the earth and the cosmos. Death has the task of affirming the principle of the unity of life between the earth and the human being.” (Mbembe 2025, p. 75). This view emphasizes the notion that humans are not viewed as separate from nature, but as beings that, upon death, merge into a larger, cyclical whole. As the physical body is stored within the Earth, circles of life and death merge into one another: the elements that make up the human body (such as carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen) aid in rendering the Earth as soil and ground for new life, allowing a being to merge into nature upon death. Additionally, we can turn to West-African Dagara culture to see how death and bereavement is approached as a communal event that befalls the larger web of life. While Ubuntu has its origins in the Bantu cultures of southern Africa, the underlying principles of shared humanity, interconnection, and collective well-being are, importantly, found in many African traditions, including Dagara spirituality. In his description of a customary grief ritual within Dagara culture, Malidoma Patrice Somé writes how “[a] group would come together around that person, forming a village to help him or her heal from the loss by going together into the person’s grief” (Somé 1998, p. 221). As he states, the responsibility of this village is “to show the person that her or his loss is a loss for the entire village” (Somé 1998, p. 221). Beings thus share a sense of loss and grief, one which, crucially, is framed communally within and amongst sites of nature (Cf., Somé 1998, pp. 54–55).

Continuing from this discussion on death and care, Heidegger’s account of Sorge opens up a possibility for an expansive orientation concerning eco-grief. As discussed before, care is not merely concern for oneself, but can rather be interpreted as a fundamental structure through which a Being relates to the world and others. When ecological grief is interpreted through this broader notion of care, it can disclose not only the finitude of one’s own possibilities, but also the vulnerability of the world in which those possibilities are embedded. Importantly and perhaps even logically, Barnett (2022, pp. 138–39) highlights the specific relation to grief and care, discussing how mourning and caring, “always already entangled”, fall into a more explicit form of intertwinement in such a way that they “mutually instigate, inform and inflect one another”. Barnett goes on to illustrate how grief reflects our interconnection and interdependence, positing that “our acts of care—sometimes subtle, sometimes substantial—also reveal to us for whom and what we would mourn and, thus, who and what we will labor to safeguard against loss” (Barnett 2022, p. 139). In light of this, it can be added that expressions of eco-grief are not merely reflective of this care, but that they can also help to strengthen it beyond a mere recognition, aiding the process of safeguarding and strengthening it as it is shared with our world and environment. To substantiate this view again, explicating it from a concurrent point of view, Ramose renders the idea of mutual care between the human and more-than-human world explicit by arguing that an Ubuntu viewpoint of mutual care subsists “not only between and among human beings but also between the latter and physical nature. Underlying this and the preceding insights is the idea that looking at the universe from the de-centred self’s point of view is the most realistic orientation to life as a wholeness” (Ramose 1999, p. 109).23

This shift broadens ecological grief into a recognition of shared fragility, revealing that existence is not experienced in isolation, but as a being in the world where existence is intertwined with the Beings that co-constitute its environment. All this hints toward an eco-centric form of Being (or Being-towards-death) that acknowledges the mortality of the world. However, such an orientation requires a spiritual or existential shift: an acknowledgment that Being is part of a larger web of life and that one’s own finitude is inseparable from the finitude of the world it inhabits.

Heidegger’s framework thus clarifies the existential stakes of ecological grief, but leaves the relational and communal dimensions that are essential to an eco-centric orientation underdeveloped. His analysis focuses on the individual’s confrontation with finitude and the structures of worldhood, while not fully articulating how identity and meaning are co-constituted through relations with Others, both human and more-than-human. Simultaneously, however, and despite their different genealogies, Heideggerian phenomenology and Ubuntu converge on a shared critique of humanism and a shared emphasis on becoming. Heidegger rejects the notion of a fixed human essence, instead understanding Dasein as a being whose existence unfolds through its possibilities, guided by the knowledge of its finitude and its attunement to the world. Ubuntu similarly rejects the isolated individual and conceives personhood as a relational becoming, constituted through ongoing participation in a web of human and more-than-human relationality. Ecological grief brings these strands together: it reveals that becoming is not merely existential nor merely social, but also, for an important part, ecological. The loss of ecological horizons destabilizes the very process of becoming through which humans understand themselves, while simultaneously being able to invite a renewed, eco-centric orientation grounded in care and interdependence.

Taken together, Heidegger and Ubuntu aid in revealing how ecological losses disrupt not only worlds and relations, but also the very process of becoming through which humans understand themselves. This shared emphasis on becoming opens a conceptual space in which ecological grief can be understood as a transformative, eco-centric attunement. As such, this expanded view of eco-grief does not overcome or surmount the distinct temporal and spatial idiosyncrasies posited by its experience and expression. Instead, it suggests a possible way to embrace this peculiar ontological condition, one that acknowledges how both the natural world and climate change do not have a visible beginning or end and one that recognizes the toll of environmental degradation in terms of facticity and projection, possibly allowing us to harbour it to allow values such as reciprocity, care and co-becoming to emerge.

This understanding of eco-grief is essentially spiritual in nature. In defining spirituality, I follow the notion put forward by Dorothy Dean, seeing as it explicitly incorporates the more-than-human world within its conception. Dean defines spirituality as “a subjectively meaningful connection with something that troubles the boundaries of subjecthood and affects one’s experience of oneself” (Dean 2023). In this context, the word ‘something’ pertains to “the totality of all the interconnected life forms and ecosystems of planet Earth” (Dean 2023). As such, eco-grief can be interpreted as a source that bolsters a deeper insight into the inner workings of relationality with the natural world, as well as a deeper, more meaningful connection with it. This notion is perhaps best expressed by the Algerian–French philosopher Hélène Cixous who, in writing about the relationship between humanity and the Earth, posits that “matter is not abstract but intelligent, alive, and powerful. One has to follow a path to arrive at matter […] we began as matter before moving away from whence we came. The journey is spiritual because it is not enough to put one’s foot on the ground to come back to earth. It is an extremely difficult spiritual exercise, reintegrating the earthly, the earth, and the earth’s composition in one’s body, imagination, thought” (Cixous 1993, p. 150). Seeing as experiences of eco-grief open up and disintegrate notions of subjectivity and individuality, instead inviting mourning as a phenomenon that transcends the self in feeling with the more-than-human inhabitants of planet Earth, a spiritual dynamic becomes apparent: one where meaning and significance are located in relation to community and nature, expressed through the performing of eco-grief and its subsequent ritual practice.

If Heideggerian thought and Ubuntu philosophy illuminate the existential and relational structures of ecological grief as a form of spirituality, aesthetic and symbolic practices reveal how these structures are lived, enacted, and transformed in concrete cultural forms. Because of this, this final subsection will return once more to the funeral of the Okjökull glacier to showcase how a specific expression of eco-grief echoes the aforementioned characteristics. The example put forward seemingly utters a mournful plea, caused by witnessing the melting process of a glacial mass, conjuring what it could be like to witness the deterioration of the Ok glacier:

•  
• “It’s not something you can hold in your arms.
• You can’t rock with its image in a blanket
• and keen away the nearing pain.
•  
• That white face is distant, and cold, unrelenting
• in its forward grind to the sea,
• stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back
• into history and oblivion.
•  
• The sun itself finds nothing to love,
• save soft rivulets of water its rays release
• from eons of hard frozen luck.
•  
• But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant,
• and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch
• thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.
•  
• So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed
• and imagining what next will show itself,
• what balded rock and bared shoreline,
• as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.
•  
• We know it is leaving, abandoning us
• to what our kind has created,
• and we know its gift of rarified water
• will only bring more sorrow.
•  
• Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration.
• Its glowing face turned toward
• what the living cannot see.”
•  
Marybeth Holleman, How to Grieve a Glacier (2019, p. 441–42).

While there is no suggestion that this poem was written with the funeral for Ok in mind, one cannot help but see and, more importantly, feel the resemblance in affect. It starts by situating the glacier as an atypical subject of mourning. Yet, it is directly thereafter imagined as a being that is worthy of love and affection, which leads to the realization that the reader’s gesture towards the glacier makes them feel awkward, since they are not particularly used to mourning such an enormous Being, one that feels both distant and near at the same time. In framing the glacier’s life in terms of an immeasurable amount of time, the speaker implicitly touches upon the woeful realization that what they are seeing is not something that is ordinary or to be expected: “save soft rivulets of water its rays release/from eons of hard frozen luck (Holleman 2019, p. 441). Within this phrasing, the glacier is seemingly described as containing a source of fortune, thus framing its existence as being valuable or treasured, further framing this mournful plea in terms of communal care, respect and empathy.

This same sentiment is expressed in the next stanza, when the speaker utters: “I do love this blue-white giant,/and grieve its leaving” (Holleman 2019, p. 441). On the basis of the account provided in the previous sections of this paper, one can construe that the grief that is being expressed in the poem stems from the knowledge that this glacier is part of a vital, embedded ecosystem. This contributes to an idea of sustenance: of the life and Being of both the Earth and the Beings that flourish because of its existence, the soft streams of water it exerts seemingly echoing the speaker’s tears of grief. Importantly, Somé has argued that ‘water is also grief’: “The salted taste of tears of grief is the cleansing taste of reconciliation, of the desire to reconcile, because water cleanses and washes away the impurities of our failures” (Somé 1998, p. 172). With this in mind, this notion evokes feelings of guilt over the destruction of the natural world brought on by mankind, a sentiment echoed in the poem: “We know it is leaving, abandoning us/to what our kind has created” (Holleman 2019, p. 442). As Menning (2017, p. 39) discusses, eco-grief often involves emotions such as shame, guilt, and complicity, thereby creating a careful and perhaps perilous balancing act that complicates eco-grief which becomes apparent in the poem. The question of whether the glacier has abandoned us or whether we have abandoned the glacier first by letting it come to this thus becomes particularly pressing. Regardless, the tears of mourning that haunt the glacier and the poem can be construed as a unison cry between the glacier, speaker, and reader, thus evoking a sense of community in the face of loss and mourning. The agency of the glacier is suggested even further in the final words of the poem, where it is suggested that it is able to see: “Its glowing face turned toward/what the living cannot see” (Holleman 2019, p. 442).

The glacial subject of the poem is, thus, rendered as a Being with existential qualities and an outlook on the world it is a part of. Crucially, the speaker articulates that “its gift of rarified water/will only bring more sorrow” (Holleman 2019, p. 442). The rising of sea levels that will accelerate the decay of the natural world is being foreshadowed and anticipated, suggesting that another tragedy will likely follow. In framing the glacier’s outpour as a “gift of rarified water” however, the Being of the glacier is once again deemed as precious and cherished, even if its accompanying deterioration is almost too mighty to endure.24

Taken on its own, the poem seems to express a form of grief that is crashing down upon both the speaker and the reader, almost alluding to a sense of immobilization in the face of loss. However, viewed from the perspective of the eco-spiritual framework posited in this paper, the flashes of mourning seemingly contain the seeds of renewal that are necessary to engage a loving connection with the glacier’s spiritual remnants, viewing it as part of the natural world that is to be preserved and cared for. In this framework, it is perhaps necessary to concede the obvious fact that losses due to climate change are inevitable. However, when viewing this grief as a reminder that every Being that dies can still be traced in the living that is found in the world that remains, entities such as the Okjökull glacier might not die in vain. This can be the case since the spiritual ontology of eco-grief posits that the process of becoming will still continue and that this becoming can be turned into a generative force when the wholeness of life is foregrounded in such a manner that its revitalization becomes the highest priority. In mourning, through a form of active remembrance, a path forward might show itself in the sense that that which has died simultaneously reminds us of the precarity of life and of the understanding that all Beings exist in possibility as part of a larger web of life and that the act of grieving might reinforce these ideas. If those who grieve are those who remember, those who grieve might also be the ones that, through grief, re-member.25

5. Conclusions

At the right side of my desk, a collection of square memo-notes has accumulated that extends beyond the space of the table. The newest one has reached the floor, ending the cascading waterfall of orange and yellow paper, at least for now. Each note has a question written on it in black ink and the beginning of a reply in blue. The first one is yet to be answered convincingly: how can we really feel with the non-human other? It is an understatement to say that this picture is a bit cliché, but the question persists.

I do not believe this paper will give us the answer.

Maybe this is to be expected. Let me be clear: the intention of this essay is not to make bold claims about what certain philosophies and/or spiritualities are and are not. Its intention is neither to present a definitive tool for ‘overcoming’ experiences of eco-grief, or to ‘solve’ the climate crisis as a whole. Rather, it aims to be suggestive in nature in the sense that it tracks overlapping characteristics between differing accounts to engage with the questions posed by the ever-growing experiences of ecological mourning. The choice to include the word “meander” in the title of the fourth section is thus made on purpose. This paper is a cautious attempt to understand some of the novel and understudied characteristics of eco-grief, especially concerning temporality and spatiality, followed by an analysis of philosophical views and metaphysical accounts and concepts that might aid in reframing them within a site of possibility among the remains of a continually declining Earth. The Earth is becoming regardless. The question is just where this will lead and, in this context, how eco-grief might be employed not just as an expression of lament, but also as a generative spiritual force that aids in the becoming of a place that makes its inhabitants experience it as a home or a safe haven.

To this end, this paper has attempted to illustrate how ecological grief reveals a disruption of the linear time of progress, development and the future, as well as a destabilization of the idea of spatial belonging. The disappearance of Okjökull, like the bleaching of coral reefs or the collapse of ancient forests, unsettles the temporal rhythms through which communities orient themselves. Glacial time, once measured in millennia, now collapses into the span of a human lifetime (Glick 2007). The future, once imagined as an open horizon of progress, becomes overshadowed by uncertainty and loss at an ever-accelerating tempo. Climate change thus produces a temporal vertigo in which past, present, and future no longer align with familiar narratives. Spatially, ecological grief emerges from place-bound rupture: landscapes become unrecognizable, ecosystems degrade, and the sense of being at home in the world is destabilized. This spatial disorientation reveals the relational nature of place as a form of belonging, showing how human identity is co constituted with the environments we inhabit. Extinction and ecological decline generate forms of anticipatory grief in which people mourn not only present losses but the foreclosing of possible futures (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, pp. 275–56). Eco-grief can thus be viewed as revealing a particular liminal experience, one where past, present and future blur into a singular experience of disorientation and possible despair. Within this liminal space, ecological grief can expand the moral and emotional community. It can invite us to consider what it means to mourn a forest, a coral reef, a river, or a glacier as entities with whom humans share reciprocal relations of dependence and meaning. This orientation toward the more-than-human challenges anthropocentric assumptions that grief is exclusively a human-to-human phenomenon. It reveals that mourning can also be understood as an expression of ecological embeddedness and a recognition that human life is entangled with the vitality of the Earth’s systems.

Parallel with the perils of anthropocentrism lies the risk of construing eco-grief within frameworks of ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’. In this context, I would like to highlight the point made by Sacks (2018), who argues that “Even if “sustainable” was originally intended to mean development that is viable in an ongoing way that protects and sustains the biosphere for all life forms, sustainability has, in many instances, local and global, been confused with a particular growth agenda to the point where its priority is to increase corporate dividends, with environmental benefits as a secondary factor” (Sacks 2018, p. 173). The same might be said, despite best intentions, for the term “rewilding”, which suggests a return to a point of time where environmental degradation was a far-fetched concept, and the Earth was cultivated in a respectful manner. However, if the concept of sustainability points to a future that would counteract the necessary changes discussed in this paper, not least since this term has become infused by anthropocentric thought, it seems legitimate to ask the question of whether a retreat into an unknown past constitutes an eco-centric way forward. While it might seem like a noble path, a “rewilding” of sorts begs the question of whether this is an empty promise, since this wilder epoch has nevertheless been one where the seeds for destruction have taken root, sprouting in a thought-place that might therefore have been poisoned to begin with.

These paths, either forward or backward, can be seen as dangerous in their own right. It is for this reason that the notion of eco-grief as posited in this paper is enclosed within the simultaneity of past, present, and future, pointing to an ecological horizon that stretches towards both ends. In this context, the idea of eco-grief as a communal sense of becoming is crucial, for it combines the relationality with the idea of care that is necessary to move towards a reciprocal future. As discussed, notions of eco-grief can risk a degree of individualization that is present in Heidegger’s account of Being-towards-death, leading to a tendency to care for one’s own home environment for the sake of their own sustainment and their own possibilities for becoming. However, when viewing eco-grief from the perspective put forward in this paper, expressions of eco-grief might contribute to viewing oneself as being a part of the natural world. The burial of Okjökull, for example, renders visible a form of separation through the ritual of burying a deceased Being. However, a form of significance is still located at the funeral site for Ok, a significance that echoes its aliveness forth into the Earth and its inhabitants through eco-grief. At the center of these rituals thus lies an emphasis on becoming that is inseparable from notions of reciprocity, care, and affect. This relation is not merely existential. In light of the notion that life is shared with the Earth and Earthly beings, it can be construed as exis-spatial, so as to emphasize that Being is a shared and interdependent condition within a communal space.

While expressed instances of experienced ecological grief are being studied more extensively than ever before, gaps within the existing research are being highlighted as well. This most notably includes the incorporation of non-Western perspectives, with its inhabitants being recognized as the groups which are most prone to suffering from instances of ecological mourning and place-bound disorientation (Coffey et al. 2021, pp. 4–5). Additionally, as Suzanna Lindberg argues, theoretical understanding regarding eco-grief which stems from the disciplines of philosophy are currently being underutilized in the context of environmental mourning, leading to an argued gap in understanding (Lindberg 2023). In selecting the perspectives discussed in this paper, I have tried to answer these respective calls. I do, however, want to point out that this comparative approach is not meant to collapse cultural differences, but rather to illuminate structural resonances that can help to clarify the existential and relational dimensions of ecological grief. Additionally, I do concede that the discussion of only two perspectives is, to an extent, limited, albeit fitting for the scope of this paper. Further research should be conducted in order to further contribute to the necessary changes to the research field as discussed. While highlighting these limitations to my discussion, I would like to stress that this is not an attempt to use either Heideggerian or Ubuntu philosophy as a mouthpiece for the entirety of a local mode of thought, nor do I want to view these perspectives as being part of a homogenous union as it pertains to their respective traditions or dichotomise them against one another. Endeavours such as this one necessitate a degree of vigilance, which I have tried to navigate out of academic curiosity, attempting to do so with respect and sincerity. This essay has attempted to bridge a gap between two perspectives which are not often construed to align in order to showcase the potential for an intertwined account that puts the philosophical and spiritual aspects forward that might aid in navigating one of the most troubling and at the same time generative affects of the modern climate epoch.

In response to this epoch, this paper has tried to aid in clarifying an understanding of becoming in the face of finitude. This entails the idea that existence as Being can be extended through eco-grief, harbouring it to voice resistance against the decay of the Earth, the cruel passing of its inhabitants, and the deterioration of their inter-Being relationality. Grief might, therefore, not only function as a means of mourning what has come to pass, but it may also once again bear witness to the renewal of the Earth in a continued yet novel path towards ineluctable becoming.