Ecological homelessness: towards a participatory praxis of grief and hope

Abstract Building on the continuing bonds paradigm, the existential tradition, and deep ecological thought, we propose a participatory praxis of grief and hope, which challenges the clinical pathologisation of grief and reinscribes the grieving process as a meaningful mode of participatory sense-making, a collective space that fosters the emergence of hope-based action.Ecological homelessness provokes a condition of existential groundlessness, made universal under the climate crisis. By considering ecological homelessness, what becomes evident is the generative manner grief discloses our intimate relation with the more-than-human world, and in this way serves to foster hope and life-continuity. It is precisely in grieving for a place that is dying that some sort of hope can emerge. It is through the resurgence and maintenance of community-based grieving practices that facilitate our sense of emplaced memory and shared acknowledgement of our existential precarity that we foster a continuing bond that can facilitate collective action. We may move from dialogical suppression of grief in all its expressions to hope-based action.Consideration of the archetypal significance of “orphanhood” serves to illustrate the human capacity for reinvention despite existential “homelessness”, illuminating the hopeful and redemptive dimension of ecological homelessness we conceptualise as “tomorrow sense-making”. Tomorrow sense-making articulates our transgenerational responsibility in a way that is resonant with the felt experience of the ecological homelessness associated with forced migration. The kind of hope we describe is a powerful source of life-continuity, as it resides at the heart of participatory processes of making sense of a liveable tomorrow.