Why did Icelanders mourn the death of a glacier?
In 2019, Icelanders held a funeral for Okjökull, a glacier lost to climate change. But why mourn something that was never alive? From Indigenous ecological rituals to the emerging idea of “eco-grief”, the death of a glacier raises a larger question: can humanity learn to grieve the natural world before there is nothing left to save?
What makes us, the modern humans, and Neanderthals, who disappeared approximately forty thousand years ago, so alike? The fact that both mourned the loss of their kin and had rituals for the burial of the dead shows that grief is not only a human phenomenon. In reality, many animals, such as elephants, some primates and birds, also mourn the death of a member of their own species. It can be argued that the feelings associated with lamentation have perhaps always been extended to nonhuman animals. One species can also mourn for another; for example, humans mourn companion species such as dogs and cats, and similarly, domesticated animals also show signs of sorrow when a human companion passes away. But what is the limitation of such lamentation?
Do we only grieve over the loss of sentient beings? Or is it possible to mourn the loss of botanical life and also other nonliving, inorganic constituents of the environment, for instance, the loss of a river or the disappearance of an island?
In 2019, in Iceland, climate activists and scientists redefined what we understood as ‘grief’ by holding a funeral for Okjökull, the first glacier to vanish due to global warming. The bronze memorial plaque, titled 'A Letter to the Future,' reads:
“Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
However, this was not an isolated incident. Many indigenous communities, who have historically lived in harmony with nature, also have mourning rituals for ecological losses. A few years ago, for example, Indigenous Marind people from West Papua mourned the destruction of the ecology caused by large-scale oil palm plantations. For weeks, the Marind villagers cleared the ravaged tree stumps with care, planted bamboo, wove together and sang songs. Environmental anthropologist Sophie Chao records one such song, composed by a young Marind grieving the death of a snake killed on the road:
'Here you lie, Sami, sister snake
I was not here to save you, I could not spare you death
Sami, Sami, in leaves and fronds, I’ll wrap you
With my arms and my legs, I’ll take you
To a quiet, green place, I’ll carry you
To that place where your fathers and forefathers were born.'
But why should we pay attention to such human grief over the damage inflicted on the ecology? Why is this so important all of a sudden? It is because today’s climate change, primarily driven by massive greenhouse gas emissions and the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, has made the planet and its inhabitants vulnerable to an impending catastrophe: the sixth mass extinction. Humans are responsible for the extinction of hundreds of species and plants in the last century, a period also known as the great acceleration of human activities on the planet. The impact of humans on the environment and geology was so far-reaching that Nobel laureate chemist Paul J. Crutzen proposed calling the present geological epoch the Anthropocene, in which ‘anthropos’ is the Greek word for human. Eminent historian and climate thinker Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that, for the first time in history, the universality of this sense of fear makes humans aware of their entanglement with nature like never before. Chakrabarty predicts that in the face of planetary crises, like tsunamis or earthquakes, rich and poor, flora and fauna, humans and nonhumans will all be equal and reduced to the question of survival. He suggests that to cope with the present environmental crisis, one needs to look beyond the human perspective to what he calls the ‘planetary’ perspective, a point of view that de-centres humans. That is, to see humans as part of the evolutionary history of species rather than as a special kind. To note that humans share close to 99% of their DNA with some primates and about 85% with rodents is to see that all life on Earth shares the genetic code of our primordial common ancestor, making all species a certain type of family. This mode of thinking also makes us aware of our interconnectedness with the planet’s non-living components – the air, the soil, the water – which have sustained life for billions of years and which we had taken for granted. The rights of nature movement, for instance, argues for treating ecosystems not as resources but as bodies with legal rights. It underscores that ‘the Earth system’ thrives on the interdependence of living and non-living components and calls on humanity to regard other forms of existence with care and empathy. In this view, mourning the loss of a glacier is not merely theatrical, but natural and just.
At a time when the construction and expansion of giant AI data centres is causing habitat loss, and this technocentric development at the expense of biodiversity is not slowing down, grieving for ecological deaths must be part of climate politics and environmentalism. This particular distress in response to ecological losses is also known as ‘ecological grief’ or, in short, ‘eco-grief.’ In these dark times, when we anticipate sea levels rising on an unprecedented scale, intense heatwaves, and more species going extinct in the next decade, it becomes imperative that we listen to the cries of dying animals, plants, rivers and forests, and to the people who mourn them, their eco-griefs and grievances.
