What the international community insists on treating as a distant future has long since become a reality in our present: The victims of the climate crisis and the ongoing mass extinction have become too numerous to count in recent years. In 2019, Iceland officially mourned the loss of the Okjökull Glacier. In 2022, the Southern Snowfield will lose its glacier status and will henceforth be called “dead ice”. Species are also disappearing: the dodo was wiped out in 1690, the great auk in 1844, and in 2025, a shrew, several marsupial species, and a sea snail vanished forever. Commemorating the dead is one of the origins of human culture: we become who we are because we know what came before us. But if this assumption applies not only to humans but also to our natural environment – how, then, are we to mourn all those we have “let go”? And how do we find our way back from mourning to action?
Drawing on observations of new rituals, critical reflections, and personal experience, Simon Probst weaves an essay that asks how the culture of remembrance responds to the planetary crises of the present – and how we can strive to bring justice to their victims.
Essay
Simon Probst, born in 1993, is a scholar of literature and cultural studies. He conducts research on the ecological crises of our time and is currently working on the research project “Nature-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene” at the University of Vechta. His dissertation on narratives of the Anthropocene was awarded the OLB Science Prize. His most recent publication is Meaning in the Climate Crisis. On a Planetary Theory of Literature (2024).
