Collaging our way through eco-grief
By Risa Aria Schnebly
This blog post covers a recent Revive-sponsored interactive session at the 2026 NACCR conference, titled “Memorializing the More-than-Human: An eco-grief ritual for the Anthropocene.”
I was nervous no one would show up. The conference was huge, and that afternoon was stacked with one interesting session after the next. Who would want to step away from all of that to come talk about ecological grief?
Kelly Guilbeau – Revive’s Vice President and one of the smartest and kindest people around – helped me set up the room anyways. We scattered our craft materials across the round tables in the giant room, and waited for people to show. Luckily, they did.
It was a small turnout, but a warm one. After our brief presentation, which, in classic Revive fashion, included a poem to get everyone grounded, we walked our crowd of about 15 people through the steps to make a panel for our “memorial quilt,” which was meant to honor the lives of creatures, species, and places we love. Participants chose an ecological entity they wanted to memorialize, wrote a letter to that entity explaining why they chose it, and then drew and collaged to decorate their panel before attaching it to the larger memorial where their panel sat alongside everyone else’s: a testament to our community’s love and grief.
I came up with the idea of facilitating the creation of these memorials after interviewing a variety of wildlife conservationists about ecological grief for my PhD research. Those interviews helped me understand and name the sources of eco-grief, but they also made it clear how few chances conservationists had to talk about grief in professional spaces. So, I wanted to try creating one. Revive was kind enough to sponsor that effort.
“It was calming,” one participant told me after going through the process. She chose to memorialize the Great Blue Heron, a creature that symbolized hope to her. “It gave me a chance to think about the things that matter.”
Another participant said the experience helped her process a recent experience at her job, where she had no choice but to complicit in the destruction of a section of old growth forest.
“We all do this work, and pretend it’s not depressing,” she said. “I think this was a really neat way to get people to connect with their emotions. So I really appreciate it.”
Everyone seemed to have a different takeaway: some processed the loss of ecosystems they cared for, some remembered a specific tree that held them through a hard time, others simply expressed gratitude for creatures and places that they have always loved and will continue to. Whatever the experience though, everyone hung their panel up on the quilt with pride and took time to carefully look at what others contributed.
Yes, the turnout was small – it’s hard to get people to talk about their emotions. But as we watched our participants lovingly write letters, cut out images, and attach their panels to a larger memorial, it felt clear that there’s a huge want and a need for what Revive has to offer.
Want to try making a memorial panel on your own?
Follow these steps, or pick and choose among them to try out different reflective exercises.
Choose a single non-human entity, (e.g. an individual, species, or place) to dedicate the memorial panel to. Write down their name on the front of a sheet of a paper, which will be the base of your panel.
In the second person, write a letter on the back of your panel to the entity saying why you chose to memorialize them, starting with the prompt “I choose to memorialize you because…”
Trace or draw an outline of the more-than-human entity (or emblematic elements of it) onto a separate sheet of tracing paper
Decorate the front of the panel around the entity’s name using collage materials. In decorating the panel, attempt to find an abstract way to represent your answer to the question: “In losing this entity, what else is lost that we cannot see?” Glue the collage materials as well as the drawing/tracing of your entity onto the panel as you wish.
If you want to share what you’ve made, send a picture of the front and back of your panel to rschnebl@asu.edu.
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