This is one of many articles in the Mercury’s 2026 Climate Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
With a loud crack, a slab of ice fractured and fell, the sound echoing across Iceland’s Jökulsárlón lake. Every tourist’s phone rose to capture a few seconds of the frozen chunk as it sank and waves rushed against the blue shore. It was thrilling. Then, another sensation washed over me: sadness.
A month later, back in the Pacific Northwest, I couldn’t stop wondering what we’re supposed to do with moments like that. The crack itself wasn’t that unusual. Icebergs split and shift constantly. But it was difficult to separate a lagoon filled with ice from one of the planet’s fastest-retreating glaciers from the story floating around it.
Was the sadness I felt a kind of grief for the planet? If so, what does that grief ask of us?
Climate grief is real and goes by many names. In Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving, Portland ecopsychologist Dr. Thomas Doherty defines eco-distress as “troubled feelings of anxiety, sorrow, or pain related to problems or threats in our human relationship to nature.”
“The saying in therapy is ‘we hurt where we care,’” Doherty explained via phone interview.
Eco-distress, or climate grief, overlaps with disenfranchised grief—when we “lose something, but can’t mourn it because it’s not recognized by the community”—and anticipatory grief. “We’re asked to build capacity to carry the knowledge of future losses,” said Doherty.
In Surviving Climate Anxiety, Doherty has already accepted the science of climate change. His work is focused on how we can live with it.
“I start with the emotions themselves,” Doherty explained. “Validate the emotion, elevate it, and get creative about it. Feelings often process themselves if you talk about them. When climate grief feels new to people, it’s the most challenging—the grief is easily transformed into guilt, shame, and self-criticism.”
Doherty’s book describes two models for approaching climate grief: One draws from environmental activist Joanna Macy’s despair and empowerment framework, in which people gather to speak deeply about the emotional experience of environmental loss. The other borrows from positive psychology to cultivate joy, creativity, and growth. He sees these approaches as complementary.
“Grief toggles between dealing with loss and disorganization and the rebuilding of life,” he said.
The book also emphasized that art can help articulate grief. Portland artist and writer Daniela Molnar’s creative practice exemplifies that idea.
Molnar has spent years exploring the relationships between ecology, memory, and grief. Her poetry collection Chorus won the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and her forthcoming collection, Memory of a Larger Mind, is an elegiac selection of glacier-inspired poems.
In Molnar’s studio, tucked along the southeastern edge of Forest Park, silk cocoons, glass bottles, and bones become art supplies. She grinds plants, rocks, and animal remains into pigments. The materials are gathered from sacrifice zones: areas, like Superfund sites, that Molnar describes as damaged beyond repair.
Molnar traces her earliest understanding of loss to the memories of her grandparents—all four of whom, she says, survived concentration camps. Years later, while she was founding the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s (PNCA) Art and Ecology program and navigating personal losses, Molnar immersed herself in climate science. “I was digging into the worst of those facts,” she said. “At the same time, I became more sensitized to the loss I’d inherited. Then, something went boom. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m experiencing really intense grief.’”
Molnar’s practice of making natural pigments evolved as a way of working with that grief. “But I’m not just shifting rock or flower to pigment,” she noted. “I’m also shifting emotions in myself, which feels cathartic. [My] poetry has a similar alchemy. I start with this medium—language—that we use to order a coffee, and it turns into something crystalline and precise.”
“I think a lot of climate denialism is actually a form of grief,” Molnar explained. “It’s not wanting to engage with a reality that we can all feel in our bodies… We have irrevocably changed the entire planet. We tend as a culture to be action-oriented; like, how do we fix this? That train of thought is necessary, but there’s also a receptivity we’ve forgotten. There’s a sense of being held—reciprocal love that’s available.”
Although making art is one pathway toward feeling that receptivity, an embodied approach to working with climate grief can begin with simply paying attention. “A 10-minute daily walk is a creative act,” Molnar says. “What appears or doesn’t appear? It’s a way to notice loss, but it’s also a way to notice regeneration. Try not to talk yourself out of the painfulness of it, but note that adaptation is inherent to how life works.”
Synthesizing Doherty and Molnar’s ideas, it occurred to me that I was less interested in how to overcome climate grief and more interested in how to live in relationship with it. Climate grief isn’t simply an emotion to manage. It’s evidence that we still feel deeply connected to place. Grief is a sign of love.
Shaken loose by the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier, these emotions were not entirely new to me. And while some framings of climate grief portray it as a relatively new phenomenon, that portrait deemphasizes those who have been experiencing the sorrow for much longer. In the 2018 Yes! Magazine essay “White Allies, Let’s Be Honest About Decolonialization,” Indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte writes: “For many Indigenous people in North America, we are already living in what our ancestors would have understood as dystopian or post-apocalyptic times.”
Standing at the edge of Jökulsárlón, I witnessed just one moment inside a much older story. The ice cracked and, eventually, the lagoon quieted again. Grief remained, but my attention held. I kept looking.
Dr. Thomas Doherty’s Surviving Climate Anxiety: A Guide to Coping, Healing, and Thriving was published in 2025 by Little, Brown Spark and is available in bookstores now. Daniela Molnar’s Memory of a Larger Mind will be released in October by Omnidawn Publishing.
