Grief and Mourning in an Era of Extinction: Alternative Models

Species are disappearing from our planet at an alarming rate as we move quickly toward a possible mass extinction event, the sixth in Earth’s long history.  Scientists worry that we could lose a quarter to a half of the species on Earth over the next century, an astounding loss of millions of species. Scholars attending to this loss have rightly argued for the importance of grief and mourning.

How, though, are we to mourn the extinction of species? The most common approach is modeled on the way we mourn the death of human beings. The organizers of Remembrance Day for Lost Species, for example, employed what Clara de Massol de Rebetz calls “memorial and funeral practices” to mark the passing of species.[i] On Remembrance Day, activists at different locations around the world gather to perform funeral rites and other acts of memorial. The building of physical memorials is also a common practice.

In this paper, I argue for an alternative approach to grief and mourning in this era of extinctions, one based not on mourning death but on mourning the loss of relationship. My argument builds on two primary sources: Judith Butler’s work on grievability and Max Liboiron’s account of colonialism.

Judith Butler’s account of grief illuminates the relationality and mutual precarity of human life, and the same account, as others have argued, can be extended to non-human life as well. In *Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence* (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2004), Butler argues that when we undergo grief,

“something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who ‘am’ I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do.” (p. 22).

Grief, then, displays the ways in which each of us is bound up in the other, mutually constituting the other. This is, at least in part, why refusing to grieve – treating another as ungrievable – is politically significant. It is a way of excluding the other from the web of relationality in which we find ourselves, of denying that part of ourselves is lost in their loss.

Butler is thinking about grief and mourning in light of the death of another. Death, after all, destroys relationship (or at least a significant part of relationship) and thus part of all of those constituted in and through it. Insofar as human lives are also relationally bound up with the existence of other species, the extinction of a species, too, can and should give rise to grief. The extinction of a species, though, is disanalogous to the death of a person in important ways.

Most importantly for my purposes, a species can continue to exist with vastly diminished populations on a fraction of its range for long periods of time after it has been radically decimated. Moreover, even when it no longer seems to exist, it is rarely declared extinct until it has not been seen for decades. The important point here is that there is a substantial gap in most cases between the severing of relationship and the formal declaration of extinction. By the time species are declared extinct, the relations in which they once stood with human communities have not existed for years. The work of grief – of discovering who one is after the loss of the other – has already been done, at least among those willing to do it. For this reason, the focus of grief and mourning on the extinction event – the moment of “death” -- is misguided. It would be better to grieve the unraveling of relationship itself.

Another reason to prefer mourning the loss of relationship rather than the moment of extinction is that it tethers grief and mourning to local forms of relationality. To mourn all species that are driven to extinction – if it were even possible to do so – would be to at least implicitly claim a relationship to every species. Yet I am not – except perhaps in the thinnest sense – related to all species. As Thom Van Dooren writes in *Flight Ways*, while all creatures “may ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matter – *who we are bound up with and in what ways*.” (Columbia University Press, 2014, p. 60).

In their book, *Pollution is Colonialism*, Max Liboiron criticizes the current practice of setting pollution standards because it relies on the capacity of lands and waters – including distant lands and waters – to filter and manage the pollution (Duke University Press, 2021). These standards, Liboiron argues, are a form of colonialism for the simple reason that they presuppose access to Indigenous lands.

A similar danger lurks in the attachment of people to species in the lands of others, including in Indigenous lands where 80% of Earth’s biodiversity is found. For me to mourn the loss of a species in, for example, the Amazon is for me to implicitly claim a relationship to that species, one which could empower me to intervene for the protection of that species. This implicit claim to relation can become a form of colonialism in Liboiron’s sense: presupposing access to Indigenous lands.

The destruction of species is also a destruction of relationality, one which ought to be honored through grief and mourning. Focusing too much on the moment of extinction, however, separates grief and mourning from relational unraveling, which should be their proper context. We need different rituals for mourning species, rituals not modeled on funerals and memorials.

[i] Clara de Massol de Rebetz, “Remembrance Day for Lost Species: Remembering and Mourning Extinction in the Anthropocene,” *Memory Studies* 13, no. 5 (2020): 875-88.