“Unveiling Grief: Eiren Caffall Reveals the Hidden Wisdom in ‘The Mourner’s Bestiary'”
Religion, for all its faults, does that in a beautiful way, as a part of climate justice. So do small connections—you gardening in your own back backyard as an act of climate justice, joining a committee that is working to stop an AI facility in your hometown from being built as a part of climate justice. That siloing of, “Well, there’s an environmental movement over here, and then there’s everybody else.” Or “I can’t join the environmental movement because I can’t go hiking because I’m a wheelchair user.” We have to combat that. One of my favorite nature writers a couple of years ago, saw some of my hiking photos and said, “I really love that you love the woods. I don’t like the woods.” And she wrote one of my favorite books about living in environmental collapse! I think it’s important to push away those categories that pretend that we can identify what it means to be a person fighting for the survival of the planet anymore. That’s a big part of why I chose to write about animals. We have this idea that if it’s not human we don’t have to empathize with it.
