ABSTRACT
In August 2019, a procession of mourners hiked to the top of Iceland’s Ok mountain to say goodbye to Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change. Soon after, what began as a small Icelandic event snowballed into a global outpouring of grief as media outlets around the world reported on the event. The Okjökull funeral is just one example of public ecological grief that has resonated across the public sphere and brought awareness to climate change on a global scale. This chapter argues that media discourse and representations of the Okjökull funeral amplified an Icelandic public sentiment that characterized Ok glacier as a grievable life. A critical discourse analysis of newspaper articles illustrates how mediations of the funeral functioned both to acknowledge the loss of Okjökull and to draw attention to other precarious lives—both human and non-human—disproportionately impacted by “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011). The chapter concludes by reflecting on how mediations of ecological grief may bring attention to and make visible an increasingly climate-vulnerable world.
