Representing ecological grief

In the 1960s, conservationist Aldo Leopold noted: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Decades later, activist Greta Thunberg interpellated world leaders: “I want you to act as if our house were on fire. Because it is.” Together, these quotes capture two central features of environmental activism. First, despite growing public concern, environmental loss—including more-than-human deaths, species extinctions, devastated ecosystems—is grieved only by environmental scientists, activists, and witnesses. Second, they highlight the temporal gulf separating those who despair at mounting environmental degradation, and those who, trapped in a “business-as-usual” temporality, remain indifferent. While the environmental humanities and eco-psychology have analysed these phenomena, political theorists are lagging behind. This paper addresses this gap by bringing theories of representation and chronopolitics to bear on a flurry of recently published memoirs chronicling activists’ emotional and temporal alienation. I read these as self-authorized representative claims aiming, first, to summon the already-grieving into a self-aware constituency and second, to bridge what P.J. Brendese has termed the “segregated temporalities” of hegemonic and environmentalists’ time. I argue that these texts illuminate a key aspect of representation in the context of environmental crisis: that it can be primarily understood as grounded in a chronopolitical conflict over competing understandings of time. As concrete illustrations, I examine Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World and Danielle Celermajer’s Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future.