Ecological Grief, Hope, and Creative Forms of Resilience: A Creative Practice Approach

1 Introduction

The impact of the Anthropocene – in which human-centeredness has led to the degradation and destruction of the environment – can be witnessed in the acceleration of climate disasters (IPCC, 2022). The climate emergency has, in addition to detrimental effects on health and wellbeing, affected belonging, culture and identities of people and places. This is particularly felt among people whose lives are lived more closely to the ways of land (Cunsolo Willox et al., 2012), and has also brought with it an abundance of different types of grief. From ecological grief framed as “ecogrief” (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018), to anticipatory grief for the future (Furberg et al., 2011), unresolved grief and loss (Randall, 2009), climate trauma (Climate Council, 2023) and a homesickness for nature destroyed – “solastalgia” (Albrecht et al., 2007) – new forms of grieving and mourning the losses resulting from ecological degradation continue to emerge.

In this article, we focus on ecological distress and the ways in which creative practice collaborations can curate possibilities for engaging with the growing ecological distress and grief experienced globally. This is important because ecological distress, including ecogrief and anxiety, can lead to paralysis or despair, making it crucial to explore how creative practice collaborations offer pathways for collective healing, resilience, and actionable hope in the face of the climate crisis. We explore the potentiality of artistic and creative practices to not only address the emotional and psychological impact of climate change but also to activate feelings and responses that move us beyond nihilism, numbness, and denial. As climate scientist Gergis argues (2022), we need to find ways to “unstick” malaise around the climate emergency and activate public grief and mourning into mobilising social change for hopeful futures.

We begin with a discussion of ecological grief in environmental humanities and cultural geography. Scholars such as Ashlee Cunsolo in Canada, Joanna Macy in North America, and Lesley Head and Blanche Verlie in Australia have highlighted the deep entanglement of grief and hope as indivisible companions. Acknowledging this crucial entanglement between grief and hope, we examine the ways creative practice – and the work done by practitioners who are working collaboratively with communities – can activate social change for more hopeful futures.

We are wary of the risk of positioning ecological grief as a recent, Western-centric phenomenon, and, in doing so, denying a long history of witnessing and mourning ecological degradation among First Nation peoples around the world. To address this, we draw on the literature from Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to unpack ecological grief as a complex phenomenon saturated with the questions of colonial, historical, economic, racial, and climate justice (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017; Kanngieser & Todd, 2020; Lynch, 2020, Whyte, 2017). We position ourselves as a collaborative writing team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners, working on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Eastern Kulin Nation, in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. The first author (TB) is of mixed Serbo-Croatian origin, born in the former Yugoslavia, raised in Serbia, and currently residing in Australia. The second author (JL) is a Eurasian woman from Naarm/Melbourne with Chinese and Italian heritage. The third author (JR) is a Canadian Métis-Scottish artist-researcher based in Australia. The fourth author (LH) is of mixed Irish, Danish, Swedish, and Australian ancestry, born in the United Kingdom and raised in Australia. Together, these diverse positionalities inform the project’s commitment to plural, relational, and situated ways of knowing.

2 Situating Ecological Grief: Literature Review

Across social sciences, grief is conceptualised as an emotional response to a significant loss, and a historically, culturally, and socially mediated emotion (Jacobsen & Petersen, 2019). While everybody grieves differently, inequalities around the right to grieve and socially-acceptable forms of grief – especially non-death loss – continue to persist. Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler have highlighted the role of what is “grieveable” as reflecting social and cultural mores (2003). While grief has long been shaped by social and cultural norms, the medical classification of what is now termed ‘normal’ grief – contrasted with diagnoses such as complicated or prolonged grief disorder, as introduced in the ICD-11 – is a relatively recent development (Lund, 2021). Lund notes that the new definitions of grief see it as “deconstructed into a bagful of unpleasantries” and that grief is “to be dealt with by the individual at an increasing pace by designing a specific diagnosis that attempts to locate and segregate those who cannot meet current normative demands of an accelerated society, while simultaneously attempting to ‘speed up’ grief” (2021, p. 195).

Grief is an inevitable part of human experience, albeit one mediated by the sociality of life, and profoundly unruly in that it evades conventions and temporal limits: it is “temporally complex, anticipatory of the future, occupying and embodying loss of the past” (Broom & Peterie, 2024). As a social emotion, grief is uncomfortable, messy, and unpredictable; it comes and goes in cyclic ways and, at times, shapeshifts into other feelings; above all, in requiring the time for remembering, reminiscing, and witnessing, it goes against the late capitalism’s imperative for movement and productivity (Lund, 2021). Exactly this non-linearity, lingering, remembering, and refusal to forget is what sociologists of grief, Broom and Peterie (2024), frame as necessary in order to escape normativisation and pathologisation of mourning and conceptualise “grief as a vital and generative relation” (p. 2). Understanding grief, bereavement, and mourning in contemporary society becomes imperative for understanding the construction and meaning of emotion (Lund, 2021). This is particularly true for forms of grief such as ecological grief.

Grief, traditionally linked to death, is increasingly redefined by decolonial, posthuman, and relational ontologies – as well as climate emotion research – as a response to a broader range of losses beyond the human. Cunsolo and Ellis define ecological grief (eco-grief) as a complex embodiment of more-than-human bereavement – a radically situated and globally implicated response to witnessing and experiencing the “loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change” (2018, p. 275). Ecological grief is at once multi-scaled, multi-generational, and anticipatory (see also Verlie, 2021), and the on-going impacts of the climate crisis on “individuals, families and communities,” as Cunsolo and Landman (2017, xiv) suggests, can be “physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually” affective (see also Breen et al., 2022). Ecological disasters, loss, and grief are both global and personal (Kanngieser et al., 2024). Ecogrief is thus situated in the contemporary moment, though unevenly distributed across cultures and places.

While the influence of human activity on climate change is well-documented (IPCC, 2022; Plumwood, 1993), this does not mean that the impacts of climate crisis are evenly distributed or evenly experienced or that “we” are all equally responsible for pushing “environmental systems to the edge” (McLean, 2020, p. 161). First Nations people have always recognised our interdependency with more-than-human worlds, and by extension, the relational practices needed to care with and for the worlds in which we live. Indigenous scholars such as Lynch (2020) and Whyte (2017) also remind us that on-going practices of capitalist extraction are deeply connected to and can be seen as an extension of colonial violence. Generalising the impacts of the climate crisis fails to acknowledge not only how such framing perpetuates colonial practices (McLean, 2020) but also how we are differently affected by and affecting of ecological crisis (Neimanis & McLauchlan, 2022).

Settler-colonial cultures are often dominated by timelines of “certainty, progress and control of the future” (Verlie, 2021, p. 52) and these linear narratives of progress, which are destabilised by climate change, can inform an “anticipatory grief for the loss of our modern selves” as social scientist, Verlie (2021, p. 52) notes, echoing Head (2016). This spectre is reflected in the research of Cunsolo and Landman (2017, xvi), who, as a non-Indigenous person, working in partnership with Inuit in Nunatsiavut (Labrador, Canada), documents how Inuit experiences and encounters with climate change impacts on (human and more-than-human) life, wellbeing, and culture, “triggered [her] own ecological grieving.” Shared moments of togetherness prompted Cunsolo not only to register how human and more-than-human worlds are changing – for Cunsolo, in the face of our climate-impacted futures, these kinds of encounters, or shared labours of mourning, rather than individualising climate responsibility, provide critical lessons in how to navigate feelings of climate despair, which can otherwise feel overwhelming and fatalistic. Thinking with the scholarship of Butler, Cunsolo, and Landman describe these shared, affective, and relational labours as a practice of “we-creating” that in turn:

exposes our relations to and connections with others—whether we know those others or not—and where the potential for enhancing individual and collective resilience to loss through a shared capacity to grieve, to suffer, and to mourn. Mourning can unite, and grief over a shared loss of something integral to one’s self can be a powerful political motivator and unifier. Grief is also unique in its capacity to reach across cultures, languages, and differences and connect with others through recognition of the shared pain and suffering over the loss (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017, p. 12)

That is, rather than ecological grief paralysing and suppressing or even desensitising our capacity to respond, when we mobilise that pain collectively, it can help us transcend and transform mourning and grief into “a resource for political and ethical change” (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017, p. 23). Artist Marion Barr (in the study by Cunsolo & Landman, 2017, p. 202), as we expand on in the next section of this article, describes “pedagogical and activist” strategies, while human geographer Osborne (2019, p. 148) sees practicing hope by learning to attune to the many “tiny growing entanglements in waste spaces and ruins.” For Osborne and Barr, hope and social change are not an exercise in utopic or wishful thinking but a collective practice in thinking with, and acting from, the pushes and pulls of these moments – or “staying with the trouble,” as Haraway (2016) provokes, amid converging social, ecological, political crises. This is important because coupled with a society-wide propensity to deny grief (Breen et al., 2022; Lund, 2021) and avoid pain perceived as an interruption to business as usual (Willis, 2009), we are forced to notice that “our failure to deal with the collective and individual pain generated as a result of our destructive economic system is blocking us from reaching out for the solutions that can help us find another direction” (Confino, 2014).

Building on these observations, Cunsolo and Landman (2017, p. 15) suggest such practices involve “thinking with grief” as a form of radical hope, and this includes not only an understanding of our shared responsibilities, vulnerabilities, and privileges. Echoing Cunsolo and Landman, Verlie (2021) notes how ecological grief is “often framed as [an] internal, psychological human phenomena” (Verlie, 2021, p.112), which largely reaffirms the anthropocentric “needs, identities and feelings of climate-complicit people.” For Verlie, framing ecological grief in this way through a “disembodied abstraction” via quantitative data (Verlie, 2021, p. 2) further denies the visceral and affective qualities of anthropogenic transformation. This process not only disregards the impacts of ecological grief but can also lead to “climate apathy and inaction” (Verlie, 2021, p. 9).

While research that considers how to practically respond to ecological grief is limited (Verlie, 2021), if ecological grief is to be our constant companion (Head, 2016), there is a need for practices that turn us from consumers of climate knowledge to co-creators of possible climate futures. Indeed, given the distress that climate knowledge can generate, there is a need to rethink the methods through which we respond to, process, and navigate the climate crisis. As we argue in this article, creative practice serves as a vital method for transforming ecogrief into resilience and hope, using collective and participatory approaches to foster empathetic understanding and action toward climate justice.

3 Creative Practice and Its Possibilities in Urgent Times

Creative practice is both a mode of inquiry and a means of engagement, offering ways to navigate complexity, express lived experience, and imagine alternative futures. As practitioners embedded in creative methodologies, we (the authors of this paper) approach this work not only as scholars and authors of this article but as artists, writers, and facilitators who engage with participatory and practice-based research. Our work is situated within an expanding field where artistic practice is not merely a mode of representation but an active, generative process – one that enables new ways of knowing, relating, and responding to crisis. (This is particularly evident in the art works, Portage and Refugium, co-developed by co-author, Jen Rae, and which we discuss in more detail in the next section of this article).

Increasingly, creative and arts-based research methods – broadly termed creative practice research (CPR) – have been used across disciplines to uncover tacit knowledge and lived experiences. Scholars such as Leavy (2018) highlight how arts-based methods, including poetry and photography, have been adopted within social sciences to explore unspoken understandings and subjectivities. Similarly, in Canada, “research-creation” (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2015) integrates creative methods such as theatre, writing, games, and photography to facilitate engagement with complex environments. Springgay and Truman (2018) further emphasise that research-creation is inherently relational, rooted in an intertwined process of thinking, making, and doing.

Examples of creative methodologies in research include Gaver et al.’s (1999) “cultural probes,” which utilise postcards, photos, and writing prompts to elicit affective and tacit responses, and research-based poetry, which transforms auto-ethnographic and politically charged content into poetic form (Griffiths, 2021). Within CPR, participatory installations and interactive techniques – such as drawing, photography, and collaborative making – have been employed to critically engage with embodied and experiential dimensions of social life (Hjorth et al., 2019). Creative practice ethnography, a subset of CPR, emphasises three key aspects: techniques, translation, and transmission. These elements offer both conceptual and practical approaches to reimagining research, enabling the movement of ideas across disciplines while grounding them in material and participatory applications. In this way, CPR serves as a dynamic model for engaging with complex social and environmental issues, particularly those that resist conventional analytical frameworks.

For Cunsolo and Landman (2017), the methods of creative practice can play an important role in cultivating transformative, generative, and hopeful climate practices. Practices that also recognise mourning as a social, cultural, and political ritual and process that binds and connects us in powerful ways, and that can lead to a collective ‘we-ness’ across human and more-than-human relational ties.

Indeed, as we demonstrate in the next section of this article, creative methods not only provide catharsis but can also enchant us into new relations, affects, and experiences with the liveliness of matter and more-than-human worlds. As Thomson and Linnell (2020) suggest, artistic forms can harness enchanting powers “to force through – to enliven and make knowing visible in/as specific spacetime assemblages of therapy or research” (p. 6), which can be particularly notable when engaging with challenging topics such as the climate crisis.

In the book Mourning Nature (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017), artist Barr discusses several provocative art projects that centre around ecological disaster, including her affective work titled “Augury: Elegy,” to suggest that art presents one of the vital ways we can digest what is happening to us and our environment, make sense of it by tapping into empathy and feeling rather than information and intellect, before we can proceed to take action (2017). Barr draws on Morton (2010, as cited in Cunsolo & Landman, 2017, p. 191) to propose elegy as “an appropriate mode for expressing the complex feelings that may accompany an awareness of human-caused climate change.” Barr suggests elegy, or more precisely ecological (visual) elegy, as a mode of deliberate, resistant and ethical mourning “in a hopeful attempt to create a better future” (p. 191). In that way, elegy becomes a mode of “melancholic grieving” and “a pedagogical and activist strategy” (p. 190).

“Augury: Elegy” is a visual installation made of hundreds of bird bones and arranged as a long, dreadful dream catcher-like sculpture presented in an empty room; it warns about species loss and points to the immediacy (now-ness) of the climate emergency. Yet, Barr’s motive is not to scare or paralyse; this work, instead, inspired by modern elegies that immortalise loss and death into a lesson for the future, endeavours to galvanise and move the audience toward collective response-ability and action-taking. Barr advocates for ecological elegy as a way of fostering a relationship with, and a recognition that, we, audiences, are always embedded within more-than-human ecological community, and that this ‘we-ness’ matters. “Grieving is one very real response” (p. 217) to situating ourselves at the centre of climate crisis, and the real work of this grief is to make knowable the magnitude of loss so that a more hopeful future emerges: “this is where collaborative, hopeful eco-art steps in – bioremedial, utopian, community-based, participatory – creating new possibilities for a future of symbiotic collaboration and cooperation within this ecological community” (p. 221). Creativity and art thus become essential methods for visceral and empathetic understanding, and eventually for action-taking.

Todd (2017), a practice-led artist-researcher from a Canadian Red River Métis background, also calls for art that is deeply intertwined with land, memory, and the multispecies world. In the following poem, she advocates for storytelling through art as a means of connection, resistance, and renewal:

I want art that enters my veins and comes pouring out like fish, stories about the river, struggling against the current.

Carrying stories to you, for you to mull over and chew and swallow and feast and rave about as you laugh and sing and dance and move unapologetically on your own terms.

I want art that remembers that the stories we tell through it tie us to land and fish and dreams and past and present and future all at once and I want art that is attentive and tender to the stories that are told even in forms illegible to funding agencies and academic analyses.

I want art that builds up spaces for others. (Todd, 2017, p. 105)

Todd’s vision of art as a facilitator for stories that open and perforate our bodies resonates with the idea that creative practices not only reflect loss but also create space for solidarity, response, and creative resilience.

We understand creative resilience as the capacity of artistic and creative practices to not only acknowledge and process loss, grief, and crisis but also to generate new possibilities for connection, adaptation, and action. It refers to the ways in which art enables individuals and communities to navigate uncertainty and distress, transforming these experiences into sites of solidarity, response, and renewal (following Todd). In this sense, creative resilience is not just about endurance but about the active, imaginative, and collective reworking of crisis into forms of engagement that sustain hope, agency, and future-making.

Art, in this framing, does not merely mourn – it also enlivens, forging pathways for collective transformation. By perforating the boundaries of individual experience and opening space for shared storytelling and meaning-making, creative resilience fosters an on-going dialogue between grief and action, vulnerability and strength, despair, and possibility.

We now turn to five examples that specifically connect ecogrief, collaborative creative resilience, and hope. In doing so, we position these examples as complementary to Barr and Todd’s calls with Verlie’s notion of affective transformation through bearing worlds (Verlie, 2021) as a way of being with the crisis that makes others’ (human and more-than-human) pain more intelligible and meaningful, and ushers us into collective feeling, bearing and imaginative action taking. Building on this, we join Potter et al. (2022) in advocating for creative and response-able engagements with climate injustice that “generate reparative possibilities and alternative futures” (p. 275). In this way, as we discuss, creative practice becomes a site of grief and a catalyst for change, weaving mourning and hope into a shared fabric of planetary care.

4 Creative Responses for Social and Affective Transformation

The artworks we discuss in this section include Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying, Letters to the Earth, Lament with Earth, Portage (and Refugium), and Schools of Sustainability: Agency in the Face of Crisis. These examples broadly respond to the following criteria: (1) the exploration of climate crisis and specifically, ecological grief, anxiety and/or loss, (2) the use of creative practice as a method for bringing people together, collectively, to witness, story, and/or bear worlds, and (3) as a way of thinking with and collectively working towards hopeful futures through encounters (performances, writing, etc.) that reconfigure how we live with climate change including ecological grief.

We begin with descriptions of each artwork, before discussing how they exemplify the role of creativity and artistic practice in fostering empathetic engagement with the climate crisis and ecological grief, utilising the medium of participatory art for advancing the issue of climate justice.

5 Creative Practice Examples: A General Discussion

The creative responses discussed respond to a call for ethical, imaginative, collective, and speculative approach to engaging with growing ecological distress and grief. They draw on the power of artistic and creative modalities to cut across numbness and denial and mobilise embodied thinking, feeling, and action in facing ecogrief. The play, “Transmission in Advance of the Second Great Dying,” decentres dominant Western narratives focused on anthropocentrism to foreground the loss and grief of more-than-human being(s). It playfully facilitates empathetic and compassionate responses to more-than-human grief. When we, the audience, are imagined as one of the relational constituents of this “we-ness,” and not at the centre of it; in other words, when we consider feelings of other forms of life dependent on the Earth, the new possibilities for feeling and acting can emerge.

Could we empathise more readily if the Earth is personified, and humans are decentred? What does this kind of shift do to our feeling capacity? The play reimagines planetary relationships and cuts across silent forms of denial to process loss and pain in a vivid ceremonial and poetic way (ArtsAtl, 2022). In this way, ecogrief is put to work to reach across differences and connect people through recognition of the shared pain and suffering (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017).

Similarly, proleptic ecological elegy “Lament with Earth” fosters the power of collective lament to facilitate a sense of “we-ness” of both the event and the global community in crisis. It mobilises artistic ritual – music, song, poetry – together with scripture to enchant (Thomson & Linnell, 2020) the participants into sensing, feeling, and imagining with the declining planetary ecologies. This can be seen as a response to Verlie’s (2021) call for a practice of bearing worlds, where we work towards enduring the pain associated with the current and potential climate change while actively holding the possibility for more desirable and hopeful futures.

“Lament with Earth” mobilises sadness, grief, and despair into a call for affective witnessing, feeling with, and affective transformation. It emphasises our spiritual interconnectedness with all forms of life, akin to First Nation’s knowledges about our interdependency with more-than-human worlds, to foster relations of care and responsibility. This creative and devotional project coalesces art and prayer into an evocative lament where all our deepest feelings of loss and grief are welcomed. Much like mourning the loss of humans, this project invites individuals and communities into a relational, aesthetic, and devotional lament for the degradation of the interconnected web of life around us.

Projects using theatre and performing arts have been useful in developing psychosocial resources and empowering people to manage the complexities of ecological crisis, including climate disaster preparedness (Davidson et al., 2024). Davidson and colleagues emphasise the potential of arts and creative practice to give voice to and make sense of ecological crisis, including natural disasters, as a way to build empathy and connection, and aid the mental health and wellbeing of those already affected (ibid.) and those experiencing anticipatory grief. The “Portage” project responds to this by drawing on First Nations’ knowledges to foster thinking about disaster preparedness and disaster response, particularly among equity-denied communities who are often underrepresented in disaster management planning and response discourses and most severely affected by climate degradation. This project “is a work of pedagogical art that prompts consideration of where, how, from whom, and for whom learning happens” and questions “what knowledges about our local environments and their hidden gifts might be missing from institutional teaching about climate, and how people learn about climate science and readiness for climate impacts” (Santone and Rae, 2025). It voices some of the participants’ collective fears about dystopian futures to stimulate a dialogue and collective imagining of what climate preparedness and climate resilience could look like.

For Rae and Coleman, speculative practices such as “Portage” provide the ability to see and shape the world differently – to divide our reality from our imaginings, and to decouple our history and future from time in the everywhen. The long imaginary helps us prepare, prioritise, and know what’s worth fighting for when hope becomes fleeting” (2023, p. 71). Creative approach here enables intersectional justice to be taken seriously when considering climate change and its impact, drawing on the notion from the beginning of this article, that the impacts of climate crisis are not evenly distributed or evenly experienced or that “we” are not all equally responsible for pushing “environmental systems to the edge” (McLean, 2020, p. 161). Speculative performance art provokes future imaginings in which affected communities are invited to envision possible and desirable futures.

Yet, multi-year complex projects such as Portage also face practical challenges when working with equity-denied communities, such as refugees and asylum seekers. The major one is the continuity of funding and resourcing to support diverse needs. This includes, but is not limited to, production, translation, and trauma-informed practice support, as well as culturally affirmative protocols, spaces (e.g. for prayer, lavatories, etc.), food provisioning, and communications. These challenges become opportunities for all (e.g. artists, commissioning bodies, researchers, participants, and collaborators) to learn together. They may also open unforeseen outcomes, including pathways for deeper and longer collaborations across sectors and communities, as well as employment and/or volunteer outcomes for newly arrived people, as Portage has achieved.

The other two examples, “Letters to the Earth” and “Schools for Sustainability: Agency in the Face of Crisis,” grounded in collective, participatory art, give voice to concerns, feelings, and ideas about climate justice to activate social change. A public campaign, “Letters to the Earth,” works to activate public mourning and grief into more response-able and hopeful futures (Gergis, 2022). The campaign asks, when we live in such uncertain and unstable times, how can we move forwards with courage and with care? Letters of love, care, gratitude, shame, grief, and more circulate among climate-aware communities, enabling a relational space for acknowledging these public feelings. Ecological grief here is seen as both global and personal, feeling and action, real and speculative. Giving voice to this complex relational entanglement framed as grief gives voice to our collective agential capacity to participate in climate justice and normalises grieving and mourning the losses that have happened and those that are yet to come. Creative writing coupled with community reading events affords space for cultivating critical hope and community. Creation here is seen as an antidote to despair and apathy (Letters to the Earth, 2021), and community events as a way to connect over common feelings.

This is also at the core of “Schools for Sustainability: Agency in the Face of Crisis,” a participatory interdisciplinary art project for young people. Young people are situated at the forefront of climate worries, anxiety, and distresses (Verlie et al., 2021), yet they are also situating themselves at the forefront of imaginative action for better futures (e.g., School Strike 4 Climate Australia). The School for Sustainability art project acknowledges these complex feelings and their entanglement with other intersectionalities, to turn them into engagement and hopefulness (Head, 2016).

Participatory art making is mobilised to challenge climate-related apathy and hopelessness into creative action. These small youth-led creative actions might not do much in terms of undoing the climate emergency; yet their effect is significant in that it stimulates a dialogue about sticky feelings (grief, hopelessness, apathy) and moves them into informed action. For example, in looking to respond to questions such as: Can we taste, smell, hear, or see climate change? Can we touch or haptically feel it Does it stimulate our intuition? The students are sent to search for places of transformation in the city, to record them and create compositions of their own speculative and artistic responses to these questions.

In another school, they look at how can local actions unfold a global effect. What actions can be integrated in our everyday lives to save the climate? What role does art play in this process? These and similar questions empower youth to envision individual and community responses that catalyse climate action and invite hope back into the visions for planetary futures.

Unsticking the heaviness associated with climate justice is an imperative for these creative practices. They invite audiences to think, feel, and act differently when it comes to ecogrief and hope; an important but perhaps unanswered question here is: how do these projects make us think differently about ecological grief, hope and climate justice? While research dimension is more significant in some than in others, creative practice as a method, an approach and action research is embedded throughout the five examples we discuss in this article, highlighting creative practice collaborations that bring hope and resilience into focus.

At the same time, the five creative examples enact slightly distinct theories and modalities of grief, which differ in meaning, form, and practice. Letters to the Earth and Lament with Earth enact a theory of grief as collective and political, aligning with Judith Butler’s framing of grievability (2003) and Ashlee Cunsolo’s framing of eco-grief as a practice of public recognition, solidarity, and resistance (2017). These participatory projects invite audiences into communal witnessing, where grief becomes a form of ethical relation and an invitation to act. Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying and Augury: Elegy foreground grief as ecological and more-than-human, drawing from posthuman and relational ontologies. Here, grief extends beyond the human subject, offering an expanded sense of empathy and entanglement with multispecies loss. Portage and Schools of Sustainability embody a temporal and pedagogical theory of grief – one that acknowledges grief as nonlinear, anticipatory, and intergenerational (Head, Verlie). These works use co-creative methods to engage young people and equity-denied communities in climate preparedness and speculative thinking. They demonstrate grief as a space of creative agency and future-making, rather than paralysis.

By examining these five works, we have explored how participatory and speculative artistic practices not only provide space for witnessing and processing grief but also serve as catalysts for collective action and the reimagining of alternative futures. These projects mobilise emotional and embodied ways of knowing, encouraging communities to move beyond despair and into modes of engagement that recognise interdependence, care, and justice.

In doing so, these projects propose a vital form of hope that extends beyond an empty call for positivity, echoing instead Macy and Johnstone’s notion of active hope (2012). That is, rather than passive optimism, active hope emerges from knowing that things need to be done, that we are capable of action, and that our actions can be meaningful. Here, hope aims to empower and mobilise distress for social change, framing a feeling of hopefulness as a result rather than a prerequisite for action.

Through diverse mediums – performance, storytelling, participatory writing, and site-specific engagement – these artworks also illustrate the potentialities of creative practices to reshape our understanding of crisis and responsibility. They cultivate empathy by inviting audiences to feel the weight of ecological loss, positioning them not just as observers but as co-creators in the unfolding climate narrative. In doing so, they also disrupt dominant discourses of climate fatalism, demonstrating how artistic expression can generate agency and instigate meaningful dialogue about resilience and transformation.

Indeed, as Rae and Coleman (2023) remind us, in the climate emergency context, as we become overwhelmed or numbed by recurrent difficult news, “there is a role for arts and culture to lean into the tensions, to tell the unpalpable stories along with the rousing, and to ensure we have skin in the long game” (p. 71). With the choice of these five examples, we aim to open up the speculative and collective imagining towards what counts as climate action, climate education, and social transformation at a time of increased climate urgency.

6 Conclusion: Creative Protocols for Speculative Climate Futures

The urgent need for productive ways of activating public grief and mourning into social transformation and visions of more hopeful futures is undeniable at this stage. In this article, we argue that this shift requires innovative and speculative methods, techniques, and tools, to engage grieving publics and stimulate collective, co-created, creative responses to the planetary climate emergency. As Barr suggests earlier in this text, the real work of this grief is to make knowable – viscerally, emotionally and affectively – the magnitude of loss so that a more hopeful future emerges through a symbiotic collaboration and cooperation (2017, p. 221).

The creative responses discussed in this article provide vital ways of engaging with the growing ecological distress and grief experienced globally. These responses embrace the potentiality of artistic and creative practices to not only address the emotional and psychological impact of climate change but also to activate feelings and responses that move us beyond nihilism, numbness, and denial. These projects offer a collective, speculative approach to ecogrief, urging audiences to break free from conventional, anthropocentric perspectives and explore more-than-human relationships, thereby cultivating empathy, care, and action in the face of ecological degradation.

A common thread running through these projects is the transformation of ecogrief into creative, collective action. Creative practices, like those we have discussed, not only help individuals process their emotional responses to climate change but also offer new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in response to the crisis. They encourage empathy, solidarity, and community, drawing on the collective power of art to spark social transformation. The speculative, imaginative nature of these projects invites us to reimagine what climate justice and action can look like, moving beyond despair and apathy to a future where hope, care, and resilience are actively cultivated.

While these creative works collectively foreground grief as a vital, relational, and often transformative force, they do not all align in their assumptions, forms, or desired outcomes. Some projects, such as Letters to the Earth and Schools of Sustainability, emphasise participatory, youth- and community-driven approaches that seek to activate hope through civic dialogue and collective expression. Others, like Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying or Augury: Elegy, lean more toward aesthetic and affective disruption, using performance and installation to elicit visceral, sometimes ambiguous emotional responses that resist resolution. While Lament with Earth integrates spirituality and ritual to scaffold collective lament, Portage centres resilience and preparedness in equity-denied communities, uniquely drawing on First Nations knowledges. These differences in cultural grounding, affective tone, and mode of expression help reveal that ecological grief is not a singular experience but a plural and contested terrain. This heterogeneity is important because it cautions against romanticising grief as universal and unifying and instead invites reflection on how grief is differently shaped by intersecting sociocultural forces.

Ultimately, these projects remind us that the arts have a crucial role to play in climate education, social transformation, and collective healing. They offer a space for difficult emotions to be expressed, witnessed, and transformed, providing a means for individuals and communities to navigate the complexities of climate grief while simultaneously working towards a more just and sustainable future. Through creative practice, we are invited to reframe our relationship with more-than-human worlds, with one another, and with the future, fostering a collective vision of a more hopeful and equitable world in the face of the climate crisis.

We propose arts and creative practice as one of the methods that opens a space for relational, affective, and imaginative feeling, being and becoming with the crisis. We suggest that learning from the “deep collective histories” (Whyte, 2017, p. 154) of global Indigenous communities and their adaptation to environmental change can ground us towards ways in which we may navigate a much-needed change. This is a work of regeneration – regenerative thinking, being, and making – that invites respectful, world-building, community-based responses. We argue that creativity and art present essential mediums for visceral and empathetic understanding of the magnitude and implications of crisis, leading to eventual, sometimes speculative, sometimes hopeful, action-taking.

7 Limitations

Our discussion aims to explore the affective, relational, and meaning-making dimensions of eco-grief through diverse creative practice. Yet, we acknowledge that the absence of systematic assessment methods – such as participant feedback or longitudinal follow-up – limits our ability to speak to the sustained effects of these projects across contexts. This is particularly relevant given the situated and culturally specific nature of grief. Further research could address these gaps, including studies on the quality and duration of interventions, cross-cultural adaptations, and the challenges faced by practitioners and funders. These are all vital next steps in understanding not just how eco-grief is expressed creatively, but how such expressions can be supported, scaled, and sustained over time.