Environmental commemoration: Guiding principles and real-world cases

Abstract

Addressing the political implications of the ever-accumulating destruction of ecosystems and more-than-human life, this paper asks whether and in what ways environmental losses should be publicly commemorated. Our answer is two-pronged. First, we hold that a politics of environmental commemoration would enfranchise those who are already grieving, by lending legitimacy to their experiences. Moreover, commemorative practices might prompt much-needed norm change by nurturing a recognition of our species’ entanglement with the more-than-human world. Second, we programmatically introduce five principles that should guide environmental commemoration, ethically and pragmatically: multispecies justice, responsibility, pluralism, dynamism, and anticlosure. A critical examination of two real-world examples – the memorialization of the passenger pigeon’s extinction and the annual ritual of the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – substantiates our theoretical argument. Finally, the paper engages with several potential criticisms.

For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Introduction

The present moment is characterized by an astonishing decline in biodiversity: the latest report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services states that around one million species face extinction globally (Brondízio et al., 2019: xvi). This has led some to declare a ‘sixth extinction’ event on planet Earth (Kolbert, 2014; Pimm et al., 2014). Beyond extinction, the slow, yet constant destruction of entire ecosystems – perhaps most emblematically, that of the Great Barrier reef – and mass deaths caused by extreme weather events, such as the great Australian fires of 2019–2020, are undeniable symptoms of planetary upheaval. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Living Planet report (2022) determines that monitored wildlife populations – mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish – have on average seen a 69% drop since 1970, due to habitat degradation and loss, exploitation, invasive species, pollution, and climate change.

While the scientific evidence of such devastation keeps accumulating, commensurate political action is lagging. To invoke Donna Haraway’s (2016: 144–145) remark on the mismatch between the severity of environmental crisis and the paucity of political action, societies today are ‘dithering’. Consequently, individual experiences of anguish at the irredeemable damage to the environment are becoming increasingly common, so much so that ecological grief – encompassing instances of more-than-human deaths, the erosion of ecosystems as well as extinct species – is by now a widely studied phenomenon (Barnett, 2019; Craps, 2020; Cunsolo et al., 2020; Ray, 2016).

Against this background, this paper examines how grief could be publicly acknowledged as a legitimate reaction to environmental loss, in a way that confers moral salience to the destruction of more-than-human life. ¹ Our argument is two-pronged. First, we hold that a politics of ecological commemoration would lend legitimacy to the already grieving, de-pathologizing their painful experiences and overturning their status as ‘emotional outlaws’ (Kretz, 2017), whose affective states remain at odds with the societal mainstream. ² We claim that commemorating loss is capable of nurturing norm change in the broader public, summoning the audience to acknowledge our species’ entanglement with the more-than-human world. Although there can be no guarantee, certain forms of commemoration valorize negative emotions, while prompting those not yet attuned to the ecological crisis to ‘learn to be affected’ (Van Dooren, 2014: 140). Second, we programmatically articulate a set of guiding principles that environmental commemoration should be oriented by: multispecies justice, responsibility, pluralism, dynamism, and anti-closure. To defend these two interconnected claims, the essay draws and expands on ideas from memory studies, political theory, and the environmental humanities.

We proceed as follows: section 2 investigates the experience of ecological grief and teases out its moral and political valences. While a rich literature in extinction studies has examined varieties of grief, we take the debate one step further. ³ Through a critical dialogue with the literature on human-centred commemoration, the paper unpacks the real-world objectives that a project of publicly remembering environmental loss – including extinctions, but not limited to them – should pursue. Section 3 then articulates five principles that enable practices of ecological commemoration to prefigure a world where such loss matters intrinsically. To illustrate how some of these principles have already been instantiated in practice, section 4 explores two cases: the commemoration of Martha, the last passenger pigeon, and the annual rituals around Remembrance Day for Lost Species (RDLS). Even though both cases track extinct species, our argument also applies to more local and punctual types of environmental loss, such as those caused by extreme weather events or the irreversible degradation of ecosystems. The conclusion engages with potential objections and points to the future implications of our project.

Before proceeding, one important caveat: our proposal is evidently not meant as a panacea for the widespread inertia regarding multi-species losses. ⁴ We merely suggest that commemoration might help cultivate a normative-political imaginary wherein more-than-human losses are deemed morally significant in themselves. Moving ahead with positive mitigation and adaptation measures requires coming to terms with the damage already wrought. Therefore, we suggest that (provided certain conditions apply) commemorating environmental loss could become a productive force in tackling the current ecological crisis.

Legitimizing grief, changing norms

In the communities that are most receptive to, and most affected by, environmental loss, individuals experience grief on different scales, sometimes even before they occur (Albrecht, 2017; Barnett, 2021; Cunsolo, 2012). ⁵ Those affectively attuned to the specific case of extinction – scientists, activists, and people whose ordinary way of life depends on certain species – frequently despair at its ‘depressing inevitability and crushing finality’ (Rose et al., 2017b: 2). Communities disproportionately harmed by the combined effects of colonial history and capitalist exploitation – Indigenous peoples and socio-economically marginalized groups – are riven by anguish and desolation at various forms of natural degradation (Hogan, 2020; Lockwood, 2021; Thomas-Muller, 2021; Watt-Cloutier, 2015).

Attending to these diverse experiences of grief constitutes an important occasion for demystifying ideas of human separateness from nature and for affirming the moral salience of more-than-human loss. Since grieving opens up ‘a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying’ (Haraway, 2016: 39), it can help recalibrate our moral compass in a climate-changed world. For, as long as negative emotions vis-à-vis environmental loss remain ‘disenfranchised’ (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018: 275), those who grieve will feel isolated and alienated. What is required, then, is a reasoned strategy for recognizing ecological grief via projects of commemoration that publicly valorize more-than-human lives, widening our sense of justice beyond the human victims of the ecological crisis.

Besides offering a forum where the already grieving can come together for comfort and consolation, such projects also prompt a reconstitution of a community’s broader identity. As scholars of mourning have argued, ‘[m]ourning links subjects to their past, but it can also sustain an impression of who they aspire to become in the future’ (Hirsch and McIvor, 2019: ix). Memorializing more-than-human loss may thus lend support to much-needed political revolutions, by prefiguring a world that eschews the exceptionalism of human lives and instead affirms multispecies relationships. ⁶ In Blanche Verlie’s (2021: 8) words, ‘[r]ather than cultivate tolerance of the unconscionable violences that are being wrought on species, ecosystems, human people and communities, we need to transform ourselves and our affective norms and repertoires’. The hope is that, in coming together to mourn, differently located people might also learn to take responsibility for the environmental crisis they contribute to and acknowledge more-than-human life as non-instrumentally valuable.

To substantiate this proposal, it will initially be useful to home in on existing, human-centred commemoration. ⁷ While staying cautious about the limitations of anthropocentric frameworks, our assumption is that, for novel practices to take hold, they need to build creatively on existing frameworks. So, how can we repurpose established models to address more-than-human loss?

The public commemoration of human loss resulting from structural injustices provides a suitable starting point for answering that question. Settler colonialism and systemic racism, to give two prominent examples, emerge from complicated patterns of oppression that reproduce themselves trans-generationally, across multiple locales. Given their temporal and geographical scale, their intractability, and the variety of responses they elicit, practices of memorializing the victims of such structural injustices are best placed to inform a discussion of environmental loss.

Public rituals and ceremonies, ⁸ narrativization, ⁹ monumentalization, ¹⁰ and museumification ¹¹ are the most emblematic instruments of a commemorative politics targeting structural injustice, oriented towards both backward- and forward-looking goals: to acknowledge the wrongs committed, express regret and archive evidence of their systemic nature; to highlight the dignity of victims and mourn them, thereby asserting their moral standing; to uphold survivors’ right to justice; to admit the present reverberations of past injustice; to take collective responsibility for change and formulate an alternative vision of a shared future; and to reveal opportunities for political relationships to be re-founded on an egalitarian basis. ¹²

In the case of commemorating environmental loss, we suggest that similar objectives ought to apply. Such a novel memory politics should aim to create spaces where losses are registered and mourned; where responsibility for differentiated contributions to harm is collectively assumed; where the grieving and the despairing are able to come together as fully enfranchised, rather than as ‘outlaw’ subjects; where suffering gets validated, and uncomfortable experiences of guilt are constructively channelled into collective action.

Most importantly, we suggest that commemorative practices could also ‘engage speakers and audiences in the process of imagining and actualizing alternative public norms’ (Richards, 2009: 7), that is, norms that overturn the widespread disavowal of more-than-human loss. Against the backdrop of the ecological crisis, new norms are needed to construct novel social identities and institutions that respond to ongoing losses and thereby support efforts at mitigation and adaptation.

Our trust in such identities’ and institutions’ transformative potential derives from the extensively documented power of mourning to valorize lost lives. As Judith Butler (2009) has shown, hierarchies of ‘grievability’ build on, and reproduce, differences in moral worth, which can sometimes be disrupted by public rituals of mourning. Ashley Cunsolo’s (2012) analysis of how the commemoration of HIV-AIDS victims altered the community’s moral structure is a case in point. Moreover, women have historically mobilized as mothers, visibly grieving their (usually male) relatives in order to demand justice in the wake of large-scale, state-orchestrated violence – just think of the cases of Argentina (Bouvard, 1994), Sri Lanka (Kodikara, 2022), Russia (Caiazza, 2002) and the former Yugoslavia (Athanasiou, 2017). The mourning of the victims of police brutality by the Black Lives Matter movement provides yet another example of how public commemoration seeks to comprehensively modify a community’s system of values (McIvor, 2016).

Based on such precedents, we suggest that the transformational potential of mourning – its capacity to convert disavowed deaths into grievable ones – can be harnessed to constitute more responsive publics. Since ‘[m]ourning is a practice that opposes disavowal. [. . .] It seeks connections, discovers secret kinships, and recognizes intersubjective relations’ (Stănescu, 2012: 580), commemorative practices around ecological loss encourage audiences to accept their interconnectedness with the environment and take responsibility both for the damage already done and for an uncertain future.

Importantly, legitimizing existing practices of grief through public mourning is not only necessary for the sake of grappling with the catastrophic destruction of more-than-human lives. It is also a direct result of how losses are experienced and perceived by various human communities whose material circumstances and cultural practices are unequally affected by the ongoing crisis.

Our argument thus presupposes that whom, what and how communities remember is essential for their identity and their institutions. The demand for commemorating more-than-human loss summons humans to ‘recognize themselves as embedded within a multispecies planetary memory’ (De Massol De Rebetz, 2020: 878), and to act accordingly. Provided they gain traction, such commemorative practices lend credibility to the already grieving but also, perhaps more significantly, prefigure a world where our sense of justice becomes extended to cover more-than-human lives. Such a memory politics could conjoin what P. J. Brendese (2013) dubs ‘segregated temporalities’, bridging the rift between those who conveniently ‘forget’ or dismiss ongoing losses and those who, recalcitrantly grieving, insist on remembering. ¹³

But how exactly should ecological commemoration be organized so as to achieve these broader goals? The next section delineates several principles that might enable environmental commemoration to reorient publics, emotionally and cognitively.

Principles for a new memory politics

This section proposes five interrelated principles that, taken together, facilitate an ethically and pragmatically astute approach to reckoning with environmental loss. First, decentring the human as the sole subject of moral consideration and adopting a multispecies perspective represents a key challenge to commemorative practices. ¹⁴ Adjusting existing frameworks to accommodate environmental loss is not merely a matter of widening the scope of moral consideration to also cover more-than-human beings, only to then subsume them, once again, under a reinforced hierarchy with our species in the top position. ¹⁵ Such a strategy would simply entrench the subordination of the more-than-human world to human priorities and reinforce complacent attitudes of ‘business as usual’.

While a full renunciation of anthropocentrism might be difficult, a loosening of its grip seems both feasible and essential. At a minimum, ecological commemoration should acknowledge ‘the numerous, wide-ranging, cross-scalar, and everyday interactions that bind individuals and societies to networks of close and distant others, including other people and more-than-human beings: animals, plants, rivers, seas and more’ (Tschakert et al., 2021). More-than-human life, on this view, needs to be valued intrinsically and not only in relation to human needs and interests. We suggest that the commemoration of environmental loss must therefore advance an alternative normative-political imaginary that stresses our implicatedness (Rothberg, 2019) with the more-than-human world and paves the way for a reckoning with the environmental harms our species has – however differentially – already inflicted.

The second principle is that of responsibility. Any politics of ecological commemoration must grapple with two levels of inequality: in the global distribution of structural liability for environmental loss and in the shouldering of ongoing burdens resulting from it. Historically vulnerable populations have borne the brunt of natural degradation (Yusoff, 2018). Therefore, the politics we envision must render visible the profound connections between capitalism and colonialism on the one hand, and the destruction of whole ecosystems and species on the other.

This becomes imperative because, as the critical literature on the nomenclature of the ‘Anthropocene’ has uncovered, homogenizing talk of a ‘human planet’ obscures the socio-economic disparities fomented by complex destruction, as well as the variegated contributions to it (Davis et al., 2019; Moore, 2016; Nixon, 2014). Indigenous scholars have, as a consequence, insisted on decolonizing the Anthropocene (Davis and Todd, 2017; Whyte, 2017a, 2017b, 2018). The racialized and gendered connotations of the term have also been intensely scrutinized (Chiro, 2017; Tuana, 2019; Yusoff, 2018), debunking the proposition that ‘we are all in this together’ (Tschakert et al., 2021).

Environmental commemoration must therefore refrain from absolving the biggest contributors to the ecological crisis in the name of an abstract notion of humanity, and instead acknowledge the disproportionate costs shouldered by vulnerable populations. A more-than-human approach to public mourning needs to attend to the heterogeneity of the human world, foregrounding its distinct contributions, as well as the differentiated vulnerability to the consequences of environmental loss. That is to say, our programmatic proposal insists that, in stressing the merits of commemorating environmental loss, the classed, gendered, and racialized dimensions of both its root causes and its harmful impacts must be accounted for.

A third principle relates to pluralism, on the institutional and cultural level. Not only material (monuments, memorials, museum exhibitions, artworks), but also intangible commemorative institutions (oral traditions of remembrance, performances, ceremonies, rituals, and official holidays) provide valuable opportunities, whether publicly or privately staged, so long as they facilitate processes of taking responsibility, of learning from one another, and of imagining and acting otherwise. Culturally, we plead for a radical openness to multiple hermeneutic repertoires. To become successful, environmental commemoration must not reproduce Eurocentric and colonial frames of reference. On the contrary, it needs to tap into various interpretive registers, genres, spiritualities and types of remembrance. In short, a contextually grounded approach is required to remedy historical patterns of cultural subjugation, including, for example, the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies of deep entanglement (Celermajer et al., 2021).

Institutional and cultural pluralism is simultaneously an ethical and a pragmatic imperative: it helps rectify the historical suppression of marginalized knowledges and enables cross-cultural learning about humankind’s place within ‘the vast relational web of co-existence within and across species’ (Tschakert et al., 2021). Pluralism of this kind responds directly to the ecological crisis’ variable manifestations across geographical locales and to their accessibility to humans via cultural mediation. Since communities rely on their own interpretive frameworks to make sense of natural degradation, a politics of commemoration that is culturally legible and locally legitimate will more likely gain traction.

Our fourth principle is dynamism. Environmental commemoration needs to stay alert to emerging more-than-human losses and cultivate an ethics of responsiveness. Therefore, by dynamism we mean a combination of flexibility, fallibilism, and the avoidance of mnemonic rigidity. As the example of ‘anticipatory ecological grief’ (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018: 278) for what is yet to perish due to environmental destruction demonstrates, communities of memory (Booth, 2020) need to stay attuned to the emergence of new losses and patterns of responsibility. Moreover, as novel institutional and cultural resources are devised to cope with environmental loss, commemorative practices must remain malleable so as to facilitate cross-cultural and transgenerational exchange. Such adaptability would also reflect an admission of our imperfect capacity to grasp natural degradation in its full complexity and scale, as well as a willingness to transgress cultural boundaries in reciprocal processes of dialogue and illumination.

Our last principle, that of anti-closure, requires that environmental commemoration reject calls for ‘closing the books’, ‘fresh starts’ and ‘clean slates’. Instead, it should embrace a ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). While scholars of ecological grief have long emphasized the psychological succour and guilt alleviation that collective mourning can produce (Cunsolo, 2012; Jensen, 2019), we side with those who envisage public mourning as a continuous, institutionalized process of reckoning with and fighting against ongoing destruction and its invisibilization. As Joshua Barnett (2021: 14) reasons, we require our mourning to remain ‘vigilant’ as ‘a practice of tarrying with our grief, of remaining awake to those beings and ways of being on earth which have already been lost and of staying alert to those which today find themselves under threat of erasure’.

Theorists working in the psychoanalytical tradition engage creatively with the concept of melancholia that, on the initial Freudian view, was perceived as a pathological failure to overcome loss (McIvor, 2016; Winters, 2016). They adapt it and celebrate its generative impact on resistance: ‘[w]hile mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects’ (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003: 4). ¹⁶ ‘Environmental melancholia’ (Lertzman, 2015) calls for collaborative, welcoming spaces where individuals can share inner thoughts and feelings, but also unsettle entrenched normative-political imaginaries.

Only by resisting closure can environmental commemoration account not only for losses in the past, but also for present and future ones. Writing about the specific case of extinctions, Thom Van Dooren and Deborah Rose make a strong case against moving on too quickly, highlighting the compatibility of mourning and action:

[. . .] in our time of anthropogenic mass extinction, dwelling with extinction – taking it seriously, not rushing to overcome it – may actually be the more important political and ethical work. The reality is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response. (Van Dooren and Rose, 2017: 376)

To the extent that the language of healing is deployed at all, we should ‘shift away from therapeutic and individualistic approaches towards healing that is social, collective and focused on holistic wellbeing and interconnectivity with the Earth system’ (Westoby et al., 2022: 1). And that, we suggest, resonates with an approach to more-than-human loss that remains disconsolate for as long as the problem persists.

To conclude, a note of caution: although these principles are intended to offer ethical and practical guidance, they do not amount to a blueprint for assured success. It is to be expected that new principles might need adding to the list, and it is quite possible that our principles might not always be realized simultaneously. Moreover, no commemorative politics that seeks absolute perfection or purity is likely to take root: compromises will be necessary to enhance these practices’ contextual legibility and legitimacy. Thus, our principles are meant to serve as a conceptual scaffold for others to build on when thinking about how one might respond to the ever-accumulating destruction of ecosystems and more-than-human species.

Imperfect precedents

This section introduces two cases in which our principles are already partially at work: the commemoration of Martha, the last member of the extinct passenger pigeon species, and the annual observance of RDLS. We selected one material and one intangible form of commemoration – a set of physical memorial sites on the one hand, and an iterative ceremony, on the other. While the former represents the first attempt to publicly remember an extinct species, the latter focuses both on extinct and endangered species, and is constantly evolving.

Our initial case concerns the commemoration of one extinct species across three institutional sites: a private monument, a national museum, and a memorial complex in a city-owned zoo. In 1914, a captive passenger pigeon called Martha (named after Martha Washington) perished at the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio of natural causes. She was the last of her species, an ‘endling’ (Jørgensen, 2017). While their numbers were in the billions at the start of nineteenth century, constituting between 25% and 40% of the overall bird population on the continent, the pigeons became extinct due to increasing industrialization, the building of large infrastructure, the ever-growing demand for food and agricultural land, as well as recreational hunting (Fuller, 2015; Greenberg, 2014). ¹⁷

The passenger pigeon is at the centre of several commemorative sites. ¹⁸ Initially, a private monument was built by the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology and by local activists, as the globally first memorial to an extinct species in 1947. It resembles a ruin, with a plaque attached to a chimney-like structure decrying the ‘avarice and thoughtlessness of man’ (Boyce, 2015) who had caused the extinction. While human responsibility for the loss is openly avowed, humanity is here homogenized, thus failing to account for differentiated contributions to environmental loss. At the monument’s inauguration, however, Aldo Leopold gave an impassioned eulogy that assigned responsibility for the pigeon’s demise more specifically to the American ‘settlers’ and the ‘grandfathers’ who built the country. In his speech, he affirmed human entanglement with the more-than-human world and contested humans’ rights to dispose of other species at will.

Attuned to the unprecedented nature of this commemoration, Leopold (1949: 110) also observed that for ‘one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun’. While he conferred value to this species’ extinction, his framing clearly foregrounded human needs, emotions, and memories: ‘We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds [. . .]’ (Leopold, 1949: 108). As Jørgensen remarks, the lament ‘is just as much about a human way of life as it is about the lost pigeons’ (Jørgensen, 2019: 111). ¹⁹ The park’s authorities later added a revised plaque, asking visitors to visualize what the sky would have looked like when the species was still thriving, exhorting visitors to ‘never forget’. ²⁰

Today Martha’s stuffed body belongs to Washington’s Smithsonian Institute – one of their ‘most treasured possessions’ (Heller, 2014). ²¹ In this second site, the national museum, extinction is narrated as an ‘unhappy chapter in the conservation of wildlife’ (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, n.d.), but also as one that continues to stimulate the development of conservation ethics. The loss of one species is framed in terms of its mobilizing appeal for future efforts. In 2014, to mark the 100 years’ anniversary of her death, the museum displayed Martha’s taxidermized body as part of an exhibition entitled Once There Were Billions: Vanished Birds of North America (Smithsonian Libraries, 2014). There, Martha appeared alongside other birds, shown alive or dead, as victims of humans. The Carolina Parakeet, the Labrador Duck, the Heath Hen, and the Great Auk were memorialized next to the passenger pigeon as more recently extinct species – victims of alterations of their natural habitat, excessive hunting, and the introduction of predators ‘starting in the 1600’, a reference to settler colonialism and capitalist extraction.

In parallel to the exhibition, the Smithsonian Institute organized The Lost Bird Project, which featured the display of large bronze statues by artist Todd McGrain, representing several extinct bird species. The sculptures were meant to ‘compel us to recognize the finality of our loss. They ask us not to forget, and they remind us of our duty to prevent further extinction’ (Smithsonian Gardens, n.d.). Notwithstanding this open call for responsibility, the ‘us’ here appears to invoke a generic humanity whose actions have led to irreversible destruction.

The third site is the memorial complex in the Cincinnati Zoo, where Martha perished. It comprises a statue with a plaque and a nineteenth-century pagoda that contains an exhibition dedicated both to Martha’s death and to the extinction of other species, thereby emphasizing interconnectedness and ongoing biodiversity loss (Jørgensen, 2018). The exhibition includes various paintings and casts of extinct or almost-extinct species. In parallel, conservation efforts are celebrated, appealing to visitors to get involved with the zoo’s projects. During the memorial’s rededication in 2014, its representatives took the opportunity to not only commemorate the perishing of the passenger pigeon, but also to boost public awareness of other conservation efforts (Passenger Pigeon Memorial Dedication, 2014).

Returning to our five principles, the diverse commemoration of the passenger pigeon across public and private sites presents a multifaceted picture. While all sites do, to various degrees, displace the human as the sole object of moral consideration, they tend to tie the moral salience of the extinct species to human interests and needs. Calls for taking responsibility can be traced in all three locations, yet a full reckoning with the role of white settler colonialism and capitalist extractivism is largely lacking.

In terms of hermeneutic legitimacy and legibility, the private monument and the museum reference national and local history to render the extinction intelligible to their audiences. The memorial complex at the Cincinnati Zoo is perhaps most ambiguous in this regard. On the one hand, its pagoda denationalizes and exoticizes the bird, thereby removing Martha from its erstwhile domestic habitat. On the other, its set-up as a place of pilgrimage reinscribes the endling’s memorialization into an American paradigm of romantically contemplating the natural sublime (Enright, 2019).

As for dynamism, while material forms of commemoration are less flexible – especially in the case of national projects whose aim is to ‘set in stone’ an authoritative record – we can see how discourses around this species’ extinction have evolved over time to encompass other emerging losses and to impress upon audiences the ever-growing urgency of environmental action. ²² Dynamism can therefore be observed across all three sites (via the enlargement of commemoration to recognize new losses) and across time (via practices of rededication and pilgrimage).

Finally, regarding closure, all three sites strive to resist it, albeit with variable success. The increasing prominence given to ongoing extinctions – Martha is frequently construed as the ‘original’ victim species in a process of relentless destruction – and renewed demands for environmental action help keep the loss alive and the mourning vigilant. However, due to a generally shared belief in the necessity of hope to spur conservation efforts, the prominent featuring of successful conservation stories somewhat dents the urgency of such pleas, shifting the attention away from grief and facilitating psychological relief and feel-good optimism.

Let us now unpack our second case, the RDLS, celebrated each year on the 30 November, and examine it against the backdrop of our programmatic principles. Founded by the British Feral Theatre and Life Cairn organizers in 2011, RDLS wishes to provide a ‘chance [. . .] to explore the stories of extinct and critically endangered species, cultures, lifeways, and ecological communities’ (Remembrance Day For Lost Species, n.d.-a). Currently, each year, a central theme is chosen, around which various commemorative practices are organized. For 2021, 10 years after RDLS’s founding, the theme was interdependence, signalling a recognition of complex biotic communities and the relationships binding them together. Earlier themes included islands and seas (2016) and pollinators (2017).

Institutionally, RDLS is a commemorative project that remains ‘decentralized, fragmented, open to interpretation’ (Barnett, 2021: 25). The instructions for local organizers include the following suggestions, which betray its pluralistic orientation:

• Respond to the story of a species, community or issue you’re passionate about.

• Focus on local stories of extinction or endangerment, and on ways to restore relationships with one or more species of your ecological community.

• Explore links between human-induced extinctions and other forms of structural violence.

• On days before or after RDLS, organize or participate in personally and collectively restorative activities (e.g. beach and waterway cleans, tree planting, gardening with pollinators and soil in mind). (Remembrance Day for Lost Species, n.d.-b)

As evidenced by an online map, most events under the umbrella of the RDLS have been located in North America and Europe. ²³ Despite this geographical clustering, in its aspiration to constitute a planetary community of human and more-than-human beings, RDLS seems to go beyond what Ursula Heise (2008: 62) dubs

the [. . .] ‘ethic of proximity’, so as to investigate by what means individuals and groups in specific cultural contexts have succeeded in envisioning themselves in similarly concrete fashion as part of the global biosphere, or by what means they might be enabled to do so.

Being part of the global biosphere does not imply that all humans are equally affected by the environmental crisis. Rather, during RDLS, each participating group develops their unique take on the suggested theme, thereby abiding by our principle of institutional and cultural pluralism. Rituals, temporary memorials, processions, performances, and visual artworks – all remain embedded within local traditions and respond to specific environmental losses. RDLS’s ambition is therefore to offer a flexible set-up for hermeneutically variable experiments in memory-making.

Clara De Massol De Rebetz (2020: 884) offers the most detailed analysis of RDLS, showing how its origins were saturated with ‘anthropocentric and Western-centric’ ideas and simplistic visions of humanity. While this diagnosis remains correct, the project has since evolved over time and across locales. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, RDLS decided to make anti-racism the annual theme for the 2020 commemorations (De Ferrer, 2020). The organizers acknowledged the project’s own complicity with white environmentalism and its ‘bad record of harm to Black, Indigenous and POC-led and economically marginalised communities and movements’. They committed to deepening the ‘consciousness of the role of white supremacy and colonialism in human relations with the more-than-human’, supporting ‘the leadership of environmental defenders of colour’ and actively engaging in ‘the anti-racist, anti-capitalist environmental movement that works for a world beyond white supremacy’ (Remembrance Day for Lost Species, 2020). This statement testifies to a more discriminate understanding of the uneven responsibility the Global North bears for the biodiversity crisis, as well as to a commitment to integrate marginalized knowledges in ongoing commemoration.

One might worry whether, in taking their cue from existing funeral traditions, RDLS participants nonetheless remain trapped in an exclusively human-centred framework. As discussed above, commemorations of more-than-human loss are by necessity inspired by such traditions, since institutional innovations never commence ab ovo. To the extent that RDLS stays alert to the risk of a tokenistic approach to environmental loss and continually monitors its varied practices, it will manage to modify existing templates of commemoration and become successful at ‘taking others seriously in their otherness – whether cultural, biological, geologic, chemical, or something else entirely – and consequently learning to ask and to see how we might be called to respond’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 87).

As a continuous, thematically changing, and multi-sited project, RDLS harbours the potential of ritualizing commemoration dynamically, in accordance with emerging losses and new cultural resources. RDLS’s recurring and adjustable attempts to come to terms with ecological grief keep it open as a form of commemoration. Moreover, the ethical learning manifest in their rejoinder to the decolonial critique is proof of the project’s internal elasticity.

Finally, given its annual iterations across different communities, RDLS intends to resist closure, a commitment also reflected in its recent rejection of memorializing single species, focusing instead on comprehensive topics that can accommodate a variety of intersecting and evolving losses (Mitchell, 2016). Moreover, the artistic interventions frequently accompanying RDLS ‘play on the idea of extinct species as ghostly or “spectral” presences’ (McCorristine and Adams, 2020: 103), which keep on haunting humans’ everyday lives.

To conclude, then, these cases serve as early instantiations of a novel memory politics that is still incipient, in flux, and imperfect. However insufficient, their attempts to recognize the moral salience of more-than-human loss as the result of human actions, their reliance on a variety of hermeneutic repertoires to reach different audiences and the invitation they both launch to re-imagine our place within the environment can potentially catalyse social transformation.

As per our initial proviso, such practices do not amount to silver bullets. Under certain circumstances, they may even trigger backlash. As scholars of memory have shown, the effects of commemoration are very much contingent on the efficacy and timeliness of its representative process, but also, quite banally, on ‘who happens to be there at a particular time’ (Haskins, 2015: 13). Provided sufficient attention is paid to their legibility and legitimacy within specific interpretive horizons, exemplary forms of environmental commemoration might still contribute to a moral as well as affective and cognitive reorientation in relation to the more-than-human world.

A tentative conclusion

Before concluding, several potential objections need addressing. First, one might worry that we are already witnessing so much mis-remembered human suffering globally, that tackling environmental loss might undermine a viable memory politics. While human lives are still unevenly grieved and hierarchies of human worth need contesting, our attention to more-than-human loss does comprise human suffering, however. The point is not to stop commemorating humans: we advocate commemorating a variety of losses, human losses included, that can all be traced to the environmental crisis. The problem is that only some of them are currently being mourned, albeit in a disenfranchised and misrecognised manner. Our paper aspires to correct this imbalance.

A second worry is that, given how environmental action is already under enormous pressure everywhere, commemoration projects may hamper progress by using up valuable resources. We reject the zero-sum game assumptions behind this concern: the kind of commemoration we propose does not need to be in direct competition for resources with necessary mitigation and adaptation measures. Not all manifestations of the emerging memory politics we advocate for are resource-intensive – just think of the bottom-up initiatives assembled under the RDLS banner. Besides, substantial budgets are currently allocated to human-centred commemorations that further militaristic, nationalistic, and racist agendas. Taking environmental loss seriously therefore involves a politicization of these investments and a reconsideration of communities’ scales of moral worth.

Third, as Stow (2017) and Pool (2021) have shown, public grieving is politically malleable, in the sense that it can either support or undermine inclusivity and dialogue. Perhaps most importantly, it can become a conversation stopper through moralization, that is, through the elevation of the grieving above critique and contestation. This ineliminable risk raises the question of how commemorative practices should be best organized to enable reflection, social learning, and transformation. The principles outlined above can, to a certain extent, mitigate that risk, by endorsing a notion of responsibility that is simultaneously past- and future-oriented, and ultimately geared towards comprehensive norm change. So, while the moralization of commemorative practices remains an ever-present danger, it does not amount to a sufficient reason for dismissing environmental commemoration from the get-go.

Finally, one might doubt this project’s capacity to effect political and social change. To reiterate our earlier caveat, we do not naively presuppose a teleological trajectory, from commemoration to effective mobilization. The new memory politics this paper proposes responds to the existential question, with all its moral, affective and cognitive ramifications, namely, of how humans ought to conceive of their entangled relationships with the environment (Hulme, 2009). Here, we have but tried to offer an account of where and how this issue could be tackled constructively, through a systematic framework of recognizing ecological grief and commemorating ongoing more-than-human loss. Given this essay’s programmatic nature, and the limited examples it had to rely on, it is impossible to provide firm guarantees of success. Yet, once we recall how the public commemoration of disavowed human victims has eventually triggered processes of political accountability and social transformation, we are perhaps justified in entertaining some cautious hope.