Ecological grief (Eco-grief) is an emerging concept that seeks to draw the link between people’s lived experiences of environment losses via climate change to mental health. Due to rapidly growing environmental changes around the world, people feel a sense of grief related to experienced or anticipated ecological loss. The environment loss felt include the loss of species, ecosystems, environmental way of life and landscapes. The grief could be a natural response for people who seek to retain a close personal connection relationship. The shift in environment and ecosystems over time comes along with an ongoing sense of suffering and loss.

Ecologist Aldo Leopold was among the first to express the emotional pain of an environmental loss. He was known as the father of wildlife ecology and the “land ethic” – he called for moral responsibility to the natural world. His sentiments expressed in his writing have in recent times been expressed by more ecologists and social sciences researchers.

Unlike other forms of grief, people have outlined it as grief with no end. As human and the global civilisation marched on the precipice of the sixth mass extinction, the challenges of climatic changes and global warming linger in an increasingly interlinked yet complicated world. Despite an emerging concept, there has been little psychological literature that extended to losses encountered in the natural environment.

Eco-grief is regarded to be a form of disenfranchised grief – it depicts an emotion surrounding a loss that is not supported, acknowledged or shared. An important difference to note is that the rituals to celebrate the passing or death of a species, ecosystems or environment landscape is different compared to the mourning of humans. Since the loss is not mourned publicly or openly acknowledged, the loss is not received with the same social support as the loss of a human. It may be viewed as not being able to show the love and respect for the lost relationship they felt. Funeral provide a time period for people to mourn and the transitional period to accept the loss. The disenfranchisement of grief can also be a societal failure to empathise.

The funeral for the loss of somebody can provide a way for people to relieve their built-up anger and build-up emotions within them. It is the notion of “blowing off steam” and this reduces the likelihood of further aggressive behaviour. The funeral may provide a form of catharsis. In Freudian terms, only when people can express (“sublimate”) their emotions under harmless or constructive ways, it prevents the emotions being manifest in acts of violence or as symptoms of mental illness.  There has been extensive literature suggesting that this psychological mechanism may not work under different situations and scenario.

 

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