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Paper short abstract

Environmentalists frequently engage their grief over lost landscapes, species or individual specimen in collective rituals. I show how such rituals render the intimate a site of political contestation and bridge the personal with the planetary in terms of seeking mutual regeneration.

Paper long abstract

Among contemporary environmentalists, mourning rituals have become increasingly popular. As part or direct-action tactics or, more often, during meetings or seminars, environmental activists across Europe collectively engage their grief over lost or threatened landscapes, species or individuals in dedicated rituals. In due course, environmentalists have enlarged the sphere of ‘grievable bodies’ (Butler 2006) so as to include non-human others and begun mobilizing ‘grief work’ as a vehicle for sustaining activism in times of polarization.

Based on fieldwork among European climate activists, in this paper I demonstrate how collective and ritualized mourning practices appear to be sites of striving for the regeneration of life against the background of darkening future prospects. I argue that such mourning practices are modalities of ‘alter-politics’ (Hage 2015), rendering the intimate a domain of political contestations and of bridging the personal with the planetary in terms of seeking mutual regeneration. Mourning here appears less as an individuum-centered mode of working through loss, than an attempt to retain and regenerate ties – within collectives, across entangled more-than-human worlds or across the life/death divide. I argue that mourning here is performed explicitly in order to shift the imagination and to make efforts towards societal transformation desirable, harnessing grief and anxieties to concrete political projects of regeneration.