Ecologies of Grief: Narratives of Covid, Climate and Care

This lecture explores twenty-first century narratives of loss and mourning and calls for an ecological re-thinking of grief and of the literary genre of elegy. I challenge the widespread view that present-day attitudes towards death leave little room for the work of mourning, and have moved away from the idea of reading and writing as a prolonged, transformative encounter with grief. It is frequently argued that contemporary culture, in the global North, offers a stark choice between melancholia and resilience: it either depicts loss as an open wound that remains forever fresh and raw or assumes that grief can and must be resisted. Against these assumptions, I suggest that the COVID pandemic has been a powerful reminder of the omnipresence of death, but also of the inexhaustible, generative force of human and more-than-human communities, and of the strength of social ties. People have responded to hardship and to the prospect of mass death with purposefulness, immediacy, and surprising creativity. On this basis, I argue that expressions of grief are communal and therefore best understood in ecological terms. We, the heterogeneous, more-than-human mortal denizens of this living, symbiotic planet, live, grieve and die in the company of others, share our time and vulnerability with them and exist in need of their care. The lecture expands on this idea in relation to climate change and environmental degradation and specifically with a focus on apian stories, i.e. twenty-first century fictional and non-fictional narratives of bees, beekeeping and colony collapse disorder. These cultural practices, I suggest, take us beyond solitary grief and help us engage with mass death, not as an unspeakable apocalypse-to-come but as a maker of the fundamental unpredictability of post-holocenic societies and ecologies.

This seminar forms part of UCL Anthropocene's Cultural Ecology programme. For more information, see the webpage for the seminar series.