Grieving an End We Created: Learning to Die in the Climate Crisis

The following takes a “learning to die” approach to the climate crisis, offering a thought experiment to examine the ideas, insights, and possibilities that arrive once we approach the environmental catastrophe as a scenario where humans grieve an end they created. The article draws from discourses across the humanities and employs scenes and concepts from literature, social science, agroecology, philosophy, and Christian theology in order to survey an ellipse situated between two points of consideration—death and grief. The article concludes by imagining the end of the human in continuity with creation’s cruciform nature.