Ecological grief: crying out for science on common ground

The emotions people experience in response to biodiversity loss can adversely impact human health and well-being. Ecological grief has been described as “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.” Ecological grief is a topic of increasing interest by researchers in the biological and social sciences, with potential applications for therapeutic practitioners and their clients. Although we set out to advance standardized, scalable, transferable metrics and tools for the study and application of ecological grief as a class project, we were confounded by the nascency of ecological grief research and philosophical commentary. Thus, in this Perspective, we provide a brief overview of the barriers we observed to rigorous inquiry and application of ecological grief as a transdisciplinary field of work; discuss our own emergent curiosities about ecological grief from psychology, linguistics, and human-nature connection perspectives; and, through recommendations, call on scientists to find common ground in the science of ecological grief to advance the field and meet societal needs.