Climate grief, like all grief, is a deep well of emotion, flowing between anger and sorrow, and often leading to hopelessness or activism. Specifically, climate grief is the feeling of loss associated with the constant destruction of the planet and all the non-human life that suffers because of human intervention.  

While this tree was in my care, I realized I was not unlike a mortician; acknowledging the death, cleaning the corpse, dressing it up, and putting it on display for other people to grieve. I snatched this cottonwood tree from its natural resting place, robbing the soil of its fertilizer. The trunk, like a skeleton, has been erected onto a steel stand. The bark has been skinned but a few pieces remain suspended from the corpse. The branches and twigs have been broken and re-articulated, they reach for the gallery ceiling where the sky used to be. The brass wire, valued and revered, attempts to repair the tree in the places it has been broken, to bind the limbs back to the body. In the process, however, each piece is held individually, forever separate from the whole of what it once was: a cottonwood tree whose roots create viable soil out of sand for other plants to grow, a cottonwood tree whose species is dying because drought and dams prevent natural water cycles from reaching the offspring. I alone cannot undo what we have done, we cannot bring it back to life. It is time to ask, “What have we lost?”