These days, earthly coexistence often feels bad. As environmental crises amass, they cast a shadow over an imagined future and the promises of better—or at least predictable—days to come. In times of climate chaos, mass extinction, and rampant environmental injustice, it is easy to despair. But, here and there, a glimmer of joy or optimism shines forth and reminds us that it is possible—even necessary—to love and to hope amid the ruins. The contributors to this volume grapple with a plurality of interrelated ecological feelings: care, concern, contempt, empathy, fear, grief, hope, joy, numbness, optimism, possessiveness, regret, and saudades. Informed by a rhetorical perspective, the essays collected here reveal what sets our ecological feelings into motion. Crucially, they also uncover some of the rhetorical practices through which we might collectively feel our way into a more harmonious earthly coexistence.

Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.