Climate Change as the Work of Mourning

Climate change discourse often negates grief and mourning associated with the resulting environmental alterations. Mourning, however, holds potential for expanding climate change discourse in politically and ethically productive ways. This article extends the analysis of mourning to non-humans through a recognition of shared vulnerability, and examines the ways in which constituting non-humans as mournable expands climate change discourse, research, ethics, and politics. By transcending humanism to ground an ethical ecology of mourning, the ways in which thinking climate change as the work of mourning can contribute to an ecological democracy-to-come, and achieve a more inclusive political order, will be considered.