While the 2021 European floods were unfolding in mid-July, German minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer rebuked criticism about defunct prevention measures by stating: It is the character of natural disasters that they cannot be anticipated. (1) Hydrologists contradict him in case of the floods, and my interest lies with the commonplace distinction between natural disasters, which are cast as unpredictable, arbitrary, and, therefore, incomprehensible force majeure, and human-made disasters such as war or accidents, which are accessible to reasoning since they arise from human act, intent, or at least neglect. Disaster resilience research has dropped this distinction at least fifteen years ago. Jörn Birkmann points out:

Instead of defining disasters primarily as physical occurrences, […], disasters are better viewed as a result of the complex interaction between a potentially damaging event (e. g. floods […]) and the vulnerability of a society, its infrastructure, economy and environment, which are determined by human behaviour. Viewed in this light, natural disasters can and should be understood as “un-natural disasters” […]. (2)

The ecological crisis, which has been linked to extreme weather events such as floods, as well as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic can be viewed as “un-natural” disasters. Both are brought about by human behavior; in case of the pandemic by a close human-animal relation: “The majority of pathogen species causing disease in humans are zoonotic” (3), transmitted from animals onto humans. Ebola, Zika, HIV/AIDS, and salmonellosis are caused by a specie-jump ‒ “a viral zoonosis spillover” (4) ‒ and so are influenza, leprosy, and the plague. The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it can cause (Covid-19) are no exception. (5) What connects the virus to the ecological crisis is that human intervention in ecosystems fosters spillovers: The zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 has been linked to the destruction of biodiversity and the loss of habitats by logging, mining, road building, and urbanization, which creates the conditions for new pathogens to spill over onto humans. (6) Since the 1990ies, the emerging infectious disease (EID) preparedness approach in life sciences and politics noticed that “new viral illnesses ‘emerged’ as an evolutionary response to human-made changes in the environments of viruses.” (7) Three-quarters of EID are by-products of the destruction of ecosystems. (8) A pandemic had, therefore, actually been anticipated by virologists and public health officials. Why then, I wonder, is the notion of unpredictable natural disasters widely maintained? One reason is certainly that, as in case of the German minister, it serves the purpose of exculpation, and the sense of guilt is an important element of the ecological crisis that points out an uncanny feedback of the supposed human mastery of nature. (9) A further reason is that the anticipation of floods or pandemics as “un-natural” disasters challenges the usual outlook onto the future.

Anticipating disaster usually aims at identifying vulnerabilities to either prevent damage, to be prepared and quickly return to a pre-crisis state (10), or to adapt to threats ‒ depending on whether resilience is understood as resistance to vulnerability (11) or as coping-response building upon vulnerability. (12) In the EID preparedness approach, however, anticipation aims not at prevention by prediction, but at the preparedness for managing loss. Anthropology emphasizes the temporality of anticipation at work in the EID framework: Infection is regarded inevitable, thus, in a “shift from prevention towards preparedness”, the current “regime of biosecurity […] is based on the anticipation of an unavoidable pandemic catastrophe.”(13) The new or emerging infectious diseases preparedness paradigm anticipates future losses as given, on a scale and in scenarios of widespread emergency that differ profoundly from commonplace knowledge about mortality. Anticipating future losses as inevitable sets the paradoxical requirement of proleptic mourning. I want to look into anticipatory anxiety and proleptic mourning as a psychosocial link between the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the ecological crisis.

The First Mourning, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1888; Image Credit: Wikiart

Political, media, and popular discourses on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic rely largely on prediction, prognosis, and hypothetical scenarios focusing on likely human, social, and economic losses. And there is the anxious anticipation of a lasting psychosocial impact of the pandemic, such as in the Washington Post, headlining already on April 6, 2020: “The pandemic will pass. Our grief will endure.” (14) Pandemic anticipation undermines the conventional outlook onto the future in sociopolitical debates in two respects: First, the fictitious character of scientific models has disappointed popular expectations of exactitude in foreknowledge and manageability. Scientific precision is not unambiguous, and without interpretation, it bears no instructions for political action. Second, the focus on impending losses contradicts the approach to futurity shaped by the technology and the finance sector, where the time to come is perceived as one of progress and outstanding gains. In finance, dept is no past loss burdening the present, but an anticipation, a commitment to making future possible. (15) This approach to the future is paralleled with the quotidian notion of life as “perpetual departure” to out-do oneself that allows to negotiate, and to repress, transience. (16) The “new normal” often envisaged in the pandemic, however, lacks the nimbus of a departure to the ever-better, and I wonder why. Why does the anxiety arising in pandemic anticipation not succumb to the common repression of transience?

One reason might be that it appears hardly desirable to accept social isolation and immobility as a norm. A further reason might be that it is widely unknown what social, economic, cultural, and other losses will arise and will prove as irreversible as the losses of lives. In risk epistemology, this is categorized as unknown unknowns. Not knowing what one does not know is usually called uncertainty. And the sense of uncertainty over impending dangers is commonly called anxiety, or fear. (17) And if we were to believe phenomenology, fear enfolds the better the less is certain about the impending danger. (18) It is no overstatement that political and media debates about the pandemic (and about the ecological crisis) are shaped by fear. I am interested in the link between loss and fear in pandemic anticipation. My hypothesis is that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globalizes the loss of familiar customs and forms of life brought about by the ecological crisis, which has, so far, been largely repressed and denied. The link between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the ecological crisis has been drawn early in on in the pandemic, notably by the Guardian, asking “’Tip of the iceberg’: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?” (19) Curiously, the outline of impending catastrophes does not fold back on the Guardian’s rhetoric of anticipation: Icebergs, and hence also the “tip of the iceberg” as metaphor for uncertain dangers, might soon be among the losses of global warming. My hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globalizes loss brought about by the ecological crisis is based on the fact that they correlate not only in cause, but also in structure.

On the level of the individual, the link is psychophysical: In the ecological crisis, the loss of a “sense of control and autonomy, displacement, and feelings of stress, helplessness, fear, and fatalism are linked to physical ailments, such as a weakened immune system” (20) – and the same is true for pandemic grief. On the communal level, the psychosocial constitution of communities informs their response to the pandemic and to climate change. The pandemic that has left hardly any area of life unaffected equals the global scope of the ecological crisis that permeates all aspects of life. If the ecological crisis is “transnational and transcultural” while the responses to it are culturally distinct (21), the same holds true for the pandemic. The disruption of life with likely dire consequences for many equals the experience of “environmental violence” (22) as “a tale of destruction, discrimination, and resilience infused by, but exceeding, the experiences of every individual whose life it took or touched.” (23) To prevent the violent impact of the pandemic and the ecological crisis from becoming traumatic, both have been answered by expert-based governmentality that stirs away from classical democratic, discussion-based decision-making toward leadership models that easily foster populism and accommodate authoritarian forms of rule. And emotive responses to both crises are based on the same temporality of anticipation. The aforementioned Washington Post article anticipates: “That sense of fearful grief will be a persistent feature of our national politics moving forward.” (24) Anticipation in grief is also characteristic of ecological distress: “dread about the future combined with a feeling of powerlessness to do anything to shape that future.” (25) The “strange temporality of climate change” is such that a whole set of “anticipatory emotions – grief, shame, anger – appear to be required.” (26) This appears as an impasse, because fear is an eminent obstacle to proportional thinking (27), and grief is usually negotiated as look back onto a past loss. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the chorus mocks Kassandra’s warnings with the oxymoron προστένειν, “pre-bewailing,” and urges her to display the opposite, προχαίρειν, “rejoicing beforehand” (28) ‒ the outlook that, in the optimistic English language, is called anticipation. Since it is unusual to lament in foresight, ecocriticism wonders: “How can we grieve that which hasn’t yet been lost […]?”(29) – Assuming, furthermore, that there is no homogenous “we” on a national or global level.

Unfortunately, I cannot present an answer to this question. And I have wondered: why not? If epidemics and pandemics have been a shadow of civilization throughout history ‒ if, for instance, as Jan Assmann assumes, the traumatic experience of a 50-year epidemic in ancient Egypt was channelled into a religious antagonism that is a key source of antisemitism (30) ‒ why, then, are there no established cultural forms of coping with anticipatory anxiety? A coping that would prevent every new epi- or pandemic from becoming traumatic and inspiring enmity, such as the current reactivation of 19th-century anti-Asian resentment?

Double silver disaster, Andy Warhol, 1963; Image Credit: Wikiart

Maybe the answer is simple. Maybe the pandemic inspires fear because it is uncanny in Sigmund Freud’s sense that it is not at all new, but the recurrence of a well-repressed experience. (31) This is suggested by a narrative pattern in cultural histories of infectious diseases: Many of them oppose a grim past of pervasive mortality with “confidence in the power of biomedicine” that has overcome bacterial infections (32) and express optimism that EID will be overcome, too. (33) The HIV/AIDS pandemic raging since 1980 seems to be no counter-argument as its social and geographical epicentres can easily be shifted into remote realms, far away from the anticipated reader of cultural history books: to Africa and Eastern Europe, to the poor and drug addicts. Yet there is a further, structural complication in activating the cultural memory of epidemics for the current purpose: The cultural memory of, for instance, the plague or the 1918/19 influenza is paralleled with the experience of unprecedented singularity in individual lives and societies. This contrast is no mere effect of personal perspective. Every pandemic is novel because, as Christian McMillen points out, “[e]ach particular historical context is novel.” (34) This might seem trivial, but it has grave consequences with regard to the cultural memory on the basis of which humans conventionally judge and act: Political, scientific, artistic, spiritual, and other responses to previous epi- and pandemics can neither prevent the experience of a profound disruption of individual and social life, nor curb the anxiety it raises, because the respective conditions of life keep changing.

The “outbreak narrative” (35) of an impending disaster that features prominently in contemporary popular fiction, and visions of the undead that populate “pandemic culture” (36), point no way out of the impasse of anticipatory anxiety. “Pandemic prophecy” differs from traditional apocalyptic imagery as it pictures “destruction without purification, death without resurrection” (37) tying in with the post-Cold War and post-9/11 security politics assumption that there is no alternative. The “pandemic imaginary” portrays the present as the only possible form of a global community, and “the future either as what already is or as nothing.” (38) The impasse of not being able to imagine a future arises not only in pandemic anticipation, but also over the ecological crisis: Both appear as natural rebound, as responses to human interventions into ecosystems ending the assumed ontological exceptionalism of the human mastery of the human-nature-relation. This might be subsumed under the narcissistic insults of humanity, yet what appears more pressing is that the insistence on a status quo that can be altered only at the price of an apocalyptic catastrophe puts this very status quo at peril by propagating patterns of inequality: It lets the global South bear the main load of climate change. And in a “geography of blame” (39), pandemic anticipation reproduces colonialist exoticism by locating the origin of viruses at the supposed rim of modern western civilization. (40)

What might point a way out of the impasse of anticipatory anxiety are ecocritical concepts developed to comprehend the psychosocial consequences of climate change. These concepts appear appropriate to address the pandemic as they attempt to understand affectability not in terms of averting affectedness (such as the notions of immunity and often also resilience imply) but in terms of relationality based on the acknowledgement of vulnerability. Thinking affectability in terms of relationality would allow to perceive evolutionary responses to human interventions in ecosystems otherwise than as “extreme backlashes from nature” (41), otherwise than as a solipsistic phantasy of self-inflicted punishment. Next to “ecological grief” (42) and “climate anxiety” (43), the currently most prominent term addressing the psychosocial impact of the ecological crisis is “solastalgia,” a contraction of nostalgia and solace. Solastalgia denotes, Glenn A. Albrecht writes,

the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place. (44)

Solastalgic experience is no new phenomenon but a previously repressed and only just recently globalized one. Solastalgia has been linked to the historical trauma experienced by indigenous people due to land dispossession, forced resettlement, and social degradation. (45) The loss of home caused by invasive colonization, which often implied ecological damage, is a transgenerational trauma that corresponds to current ecological losses in that the loss of a place entails losing the knowledge and capability to interpret, and survive by means of, the inhabited landscape. (46) Solastalgia thus denotes the sense of having lost experience that provides guidance. This, I assume, characterizes pandemic losses, and the lacking enthusiasm about a “new normal,” as much as the ecological crisis. In both cases, the anticipated loss of familiar customs and forms of life does not only entail that things must be done otherwise from now on, but deprives of orientation and is, therefore, tantamount to a loss of agency. However, some conceptual criticism is necessary to understand pandemic anticipation in terms of solastalgia. Referring to the ecological crisis, Albrecht writes:

[W]e have now entered the “age of solastalgia,” where our emotional compass is pointing in the direction of chronic distress at the loss of loved “homes” and places at all scales. There is already a global pandemic of depression […] As global warming and other environmental disasters start to overwhelm residual terranascient places, we will mourn that which is passing. (47)

In view of SARS-CoV-2 inspired pandemic grief, this portrayal of communal loss requires differentiation:

First, what is lost is not only the “sense of place,” but a sense of self, a way of inhabiting the earth dominated by globalized consumer culture, a set of human “self-states.”(48) Key element of this way of life is understanding nature as resource and realm of mastery without the capability to respond to intervention.

Toward Disappearance III, Sam Francis, 1958; Image Credit: Wikiart

Second, ecocritical research tends to view the sociopolitical dimension of mourning very optimistically. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman write:

This “we-creating” capacity of mourning (Butler 2004) is what exposes our relations to and connections with others […] and where the potential for enhancing individual and collective resilience to loss through a shared capacity to grieve, to suffer, and to mourn [sic!]. […] Grief is also unique in its capacity to reach across cultures, languages, and differences. (49)

What by far not only Judith Butler points out, however, is that the community created by mourning is no global concord, but often shaped by national, religious, or other discord. Blaming loss on someone promises to facilitate grief, wherefore populisms favor unfinished mourning. Mourning is, moreover, compromized by the loss of communal forms. Appeals to communal expressions of sorrow over pandemic losses are defied by the abolishment of ritual forms, especially of mourning, in the West since reformation (50) that has been globalized with colonization, capitalism (51), and the mass death of World War One. (52) Modern consumer culture privileges the novelty of goods and of personal expressions as individual authenticity, dismisses ritual forms as insincere, and has thus silenced, repressed, and pathologized grief: individual post-traumatic stress disorder is a social symptom of the communal incapability to confront death. (53) And indeed, the Guardian, again, has warned of PTSD in Covid-19 survivors (54), and ecological anxiety has been negotiated as “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” (55)

Therefore, there is, third, a global “we”, a homogenous community, neither in facing the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, nor the ecological crisis as its underlying cause, but global economic and social dynamics that effect very different forms of affectedness. In April 2021, genocide scholars have warned that mass violence is a predictable consequence of the unequal distribution of ecological losses. (56) Yet is proleptic mourning even an appropriate response to this grim outlook? As all mourning, proleptic mourning is ambivalent: It might be tantamount to cynical resignation, regarding the ecological crisis as “a remarkable era in the evolution of human life on earth”(57), and solastalgia as the contemplation of “the fall of a world” displaying its beauty in decay. (58) But since non-mourning has equally destructive outcomes, it might be advisable to rely on the fact that ambivalence has a bright aspect, too, in the case of proleptic mourning summed up by Craps: “Mourning future losses proleptically in order for these losses not to come to pass.” (59) This is an agenda more than a psychological reality. Linking pandemic to ecological losses might be way to approach such proleptic mourning: Grieving the multifold losses of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that have already occurred might serve as a hermeneutical key to the ecological crisis which exceeds conventional terms of comprehension. That the extend of climate change and the complexity of ecosystems defies understanding has been described as temporal and spacial scaling effect. Grieving pandemic losses might allow to address relationality as a third fundamental aspect that limits comprehension of, and reaction to, the ecological crisis: It might allow to see, feel, and believe oneself and others affected by processes that are, for the most part, accessible only via complex scientific models.

NOTES

1. “Hochwasser-Ticker: Milliarden-Schäden bei Bahn und Straßen.” BR24, 19 July 2021, https://www.br.de/nachrichten/deutschland-welt/hochwasser-ticker-aktuelle-meldungen-zum-unwetter-in-deutschland,SdFZrEF. Accessed 31 August 2021.

2. Jörn Birkmann, Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. New York, NY: United Nations UP, 2006, 10.

3. Louise Taylor, Sophia Latham, and Mark Woolhouse, “Risk factors for human disease emergence.” Philosophical transactions. Biological sciences 356.1411 (2001): 983–989, here 986.

4. Sunit Singh, ed., Viral Infections and Global Change. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, 97.

5. Hassanin, Alexandre. “Coronavirus origins.” The Conversation, 18 March 2020, https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-origins-genome-analysis-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined-134059. Accessed 1 September 2021.

6. Francesco Da Pascale and Jean-Claude Roger, “Coronavirus: An Anthropocene’s hybrid?” AIMS Geosciences 6.1 (2020): 131–134.

7. Pete Washer, Emerging Infectious Diseases and Society. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010, 1.

8. Ibid., 3–9; Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven, CT et al.: Yale UP, 2012, 258; Singh, Viral Infections and Global Change 80–82; Christina Faust et al., “Pathogen Spillover during Land Conversion.” Ecology Letters 21.4 (2018): 471–483.

9. Juliane Prade-Weiss and Benjamin Lewis Robinson, eds., Schuld im Anthropozän. Special issue of The Germanic Review 96.2 (2021), https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vger20/96/2. Accessed 1 September 2021.

10. Karim Fathi, Resilienz im Spannungsfeld zwischen Entwicklung und Nachhaltigkeit – Anforderungen an gesellschaftliche Zukunftssicherung. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019.

11. Jörn Birkmann, Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. New York, NY: United Nations UP, 2006, 15; Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2014, 6.

12. Birkmann, Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards 52.

13. Christos Lynteris, “Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame.” Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors. Ed. Christos Lynteris. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. 1–25, here 8.

14. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The pandemic will pass. Our grief will endure.” Washington Post, 6 April 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/06/pandemic-will-pass-our-grief-will-endure/. Accessed 31 August 2021.

15. Philip Goodchild, “Creation, Sin, and Debt.” Environmental Humanities 8.2 (2016): 270–276, here 275.

16. Vera King, “Ewiger Aufbruch oder Einbruch einer Illusion.” Jenseits von Corona. Eds. Bernd Kortmann and Gunther Schulze. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. 117–126, here 123.

17. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric. Trans. John Henry Freese. London: Heinemann, 1947, B5.

18. Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. Robert Metcalf and Mark Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009, §21.

19. John Vidal, “‘Tip of the iceberg’: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?” The Guardian, 18 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe. Accessed 31 August 2021.

20. Sarah Jaquette Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Oakland, CA: U of California P, 2020, 21.

21. Gabriele Dürbeck et al., eds. Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Lanham: Lexington, 2017, xiii.

22. Timothy Clark, “Ecologial Grief and Anthropocene Horror.” American Imago 77.1 (2020): 61–80, here 69.

23. Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje, Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016.

24. Goodchild, “Creation, Sin, and Debt” 275.

25. Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety 19.

26. Greg Garrard, “Conciliation and Consilience.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 295–312, here 297.

27. Sally Weintrobe, “The Difficult Problem of Anxiety in Thinking about Climate Change.” Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Sally Weintrobe. Abingdon, Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2012. 33–55, here 46.

28. Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Libation Bearers. Eumenides.Trans. Herbert Weir Smyth. London and New York, NY: Heinemann, 1926, I.251–2.

29. Allyse Knox-Russell, “Futurity Without Optimism.” Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene. Eds. Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino. Lincoln, NE and London: U of Nebraska P, 2018. 213–232, here 213–214.

30. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

31. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XVII. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955. 217–252, here 241.

32. Christian McMillen, Pandemics: A Very Short Introduction. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2016, 3; cf. Alfred Bollet, Plagues & Poxes: The Impact of Human History on Epidemic Disease. New York, NY: Demos, 2004.

33. J. N. Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impact on Human History. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford, England: ABC-Clio, 2005. Few studies note that climate change causes the spread of infectious diseases (Harrison, Contagion 258; McMillen, Pandemics 120).

34. McMillen, Pandemics 2.

35. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Culture, Carriers, And the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008, 2.

36. Lynteris, “Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame” 2.

37. Carlo Caduff, The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger. Oakland, CA: U of California P, 2015, 7.

38. Lynteris, “Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame” 13.

39. Caduff, The Pandemic Perhaps 2.

40. Wald, Contagious 8; Séverine Thys, “Contesting the (Super)Natural Origins of Ebola in Macenta, Guinea.” Framing Animals as Epidemic Villains: Histories of Non-Human Disease Vectors. Ed. Christos Lynteris. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019. 177–199, here 181; Lynteris, “Infectious Animals and Epidemic Blame” 62–64; Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2001, 1–8. A recurrent theme are “wet markets” as spillover zones (Lynteris; Thys).

41. David Morens and Anthony Fauci, “Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got COVID-19.” Cell 182 (2020): 1077–1092, here 1089.

42. Lindsay Galway et al., “Mapping the Solastalgia Literature: A Scoping Review Study.” Environmental Research and Public Health 16 (2019): 2662, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6696016/. Accessed 1 September 2021.

43. Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety.

44. Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2019, 32.

45. Ibid., 13, 27–29; Karina Walters et al., “Dis-Placement and Dis-ease: Land, Place, and Health Among American Indians and Alaska Natives.” Communities, Neighborhoods, and Health. Eds. Linda Burton et al. New York, NY: Springer, 2011. 163–199.

46. Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, & Social Imagination. Vancouver et al.: U of British Columbia P, 2005.

47. Albrecht, Earth Emotions 10–11.

48. Renee Lertzman, Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Engagement. London et al.: Routledge, 2015, 95.

49. Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss. Montreal and Kingston: Mc-Gill-Queen’s UP, 2017, 12. Cf. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London et al.: Verso, 2004.

50. Tobias Döring, Performance of Mourning in Shakespearean Theatre and Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.

51. James M. Wilce, Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 71–138.

52. Juliane Prade-Weiss, Language of Ruin and Consumption: On Lamenting and Complaining. New York et al.: Bloomsbury, 2020, 245–260.

53. Ibid., 81–127, 243–260.

54. Denis Campbell, “Screen survivors of Covid-19 for PTSD, say mental health experts.” The Guardian, 28 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/28/screen-survivors-of-covid-19-for-ptsd-say-mental-health-experts. Accessed 1 September 2021.

55. Stef Craps, “Climate Trauma.” The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Eds. Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. 275–284, here 277–278.

56. Mark Levene and Taner Akçam, “The Climate Emergency: A Statement from Genocide Scholars on the Necessity for a Paradigm Shift.” Journal of Genocide Research 23.2 (2021): 1–4.

57. Leslie Davenport, Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change. London: Kingsley, 2017, 66.

58. Johannes Schneider, “Der Schmerz an der Landschaft.” Zeit online, 30 August 2020, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2020-08/klimawandel-folgen-psychischer-stress-solastalgia-landschaft-reisen?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F. Accessed 1 September 2021. Trans. J. P-W.

59. Stef Craps, “Climate Change and the Art of Anticipatory Memory.” Parallax 23.4 (2017): 479–492, here 489.