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. Loss on such a tremendous scale ought to be recognized not only with grief but also with public acts of mourning. The most popular practices currently employed to mourn species loss are modeled after rituals for grieving human death: funeral rites and the creation of memorials. The grief, then, is focused on species death. In this paper, I argue that we need rituals of mourning species focused not on death but on the ongoing destruction of relationships between species and human communities.