Ecological Grief and the Moral Considerability of the Non-Human: Towards a Post-Human Concept of Personhood

Abstract

The accelerating phenomena of species extinction, ecosystem collapse, and landscape alteration characteristic of the Anthropocene are generating a pervasive but often philosophically unaccounted-for experience: ecological grief. This paper argues that the profound sorrow attendant upon these losses reveals a critical lacuna in mainstream environmental ethics—the lack of a robust ethical framework for mourning the non-human. Prevailing anthropocentric conceptions of personhood, which link moral considerability to capacities such as rationality or self-consciousness, render the death of a forest, a river, or a species a matter of instrumental resource loss, rather than the passing of a legitimate subject-of-a-life. This paper challenges this narrow ontology by synthesizing insights from the environmental humanities, post-humanist philosophy, and Indigenous thought. It posits that ecological grief is not a pathological sentimentality but a testifying response to the loss of relational, more-than-human persons. The analysis proceeds by first delineating the phenomenon of ecological grief and its current marginalization. It then critically deconstructs the anthropocentric boundaries of personhood in Western philosophy, arguing that this framework is ecologically and ethically untenable. Through case studies of “glacier death” in Iceland and the extinction of the Bramble Cay melomys, the paper articulates a post-human concept of personhood grounded in relationality, historical presence, and complex agency. Finally, it contends that recognizing the personhood of non-human entities is an ethical imperative, transforming ecological grief from a private affliction into a public, moral duty of remembrance and a powerful motivation for a more responsive and resilient environmental ethic in the face of escalating loss.