Why is grief absolutely essential if we are to turn things around? In contrast to climate change, extinction shifts our awareness away from ourselves and onto the suffering and loss of other species. Our sense of the crisis widens to include the entire evolutionary arc of life on Earth and the epic tragedy that humanity is authoring within this astounding story.

Humanity has a pressing need to acknowledge, remember, and honor the thousands of species now meeting their untimely deaths at its hands. The great dying off now hovers only at the edge of our collective consciousness, yet it is a fundamental truth of our time and on some level we reverberate to its rumblings.

By mourning extinction we directly experience our interconnection with the rest of life, for there is no way to be fully in touch with nature at this point in time without feeling its ongoing agony.

I think it *is* hard to think about all the living thing and the planet suffering so much; worse yet, of our own making, for our daily comforts. It is easier not to think about it. It is easier to push it all away. And it is so scary. And painful. And futile.