Presentation short abstract

This paper examines ecological grief as a method in political ecology, showing how emotions shape community responses to environmental harm and how affective memory fosters collective repair and territorial defence in post-war El Salvador.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores ecological grief as a political ecological method, examining how emotions shape community engagements with contaminated rivers, deforested hillsides, and drought-stricken fields in postwar El Salvador. Working alongside survivor organizations and intergenerational memory groups, I analyze how affective expressions—grief, anger, pride, fear, and hope—structure environmental meaning-making and guide practices of territorial defense.

Narratives of wartime displacement resurface through accounts of water scarcity, mining residues, and erratic climatic cycles, revealing an affective archive where ecological and political traumas intersect and continue to shape collective interpretations of environmental harm. Ecological grief catalyzes diverse forms of collective repair. Youth photography initiatives, community radio programming, commemorative rituals, and participatory mapping practices become tools through which residents mourn ecological loss while mobilizing resistance against renewed extractive pressures. These affective practices do more than express loss: they create spaces for intergenerational dialogue, restore relations with wounded landscapes, and generate new forms of environmental responsibility grounded in long histories of survival, care, and solidarity. I argue that centering emotions illuminates how political ecologies of memory can foster shared responsibility, strengthen community resilience, and inspire transformative ecological futures. Attending to affect exposes the entanglement of ecological degradation with structural violence, while also highlighting the creative strategies through which communities reclaim agency and articulate alternative visions for their territories. By foregrounding affect as an analytical and methodological lens, this paper shows how ecological grief becomes a generative force for imagining just and sustainable futures in regions marked by overlapping histories of violence, environmental degradation, and climate disruption.