The California artist Heidi Quante has spent her adulthood as an activist and community organizer, largely within the climate movement. The work, like much work that confronts systemic offenses, took its toll. When things felt bleak and smothering, she’d often jump into the Pacific Ocean. It would buoy her. But a few years back, she told me, when she plunged into the sea, she felt nothing.
“My depression didn’t lift,” she said. “I knew I was fucked.” A friend invited her up to the mountains. When she stepped into the Tuolumne River, she said she felt like “one of those animals who’d been living in a cage their whole life and was finally let loose in the snow.” She’s returned to the river a couple times a year ever since for a dose of this alchemy.
I found Quante because I’d gone looking for people who might be able to help me alchemize my own climate grief into something of use. In 2014, Quante and her artistic collaborator, Alicia Escott, launched a project that they alluringly named The Bureau of Linguistical Reality. The Bureau works with regular people like me to coin neologisms, creating an urgent new language for the age of climate catastrophe. They call this their Dictionary for the Future.
“Cartographers are redrawing maps to accommodate rising seas,” the Bureau’s mission statement reads, “psychologists are (counseling) people on climate change-related emotions, scientists are defining this as a new age or epoch. The Bureau was thus established as an interactive artwork to help fill the linguistical void in our rapidly changing world.”
When we first spoke, Quante was on her way up to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. She’d been working on a project related to the Tuolumne River, which, due to dams and drought, is on the verge of environmental collapse. She was recording various elements of the river to, as she puts it, “help bring the water back to the people.” In a future immersive exhibition, visitors will experience the healing power of rivers, and grief over their imperilment.
Quante and I spoke about the 2020 fires in Northern California, how those of us living in the Bay Area were trapped for weeks in a cauldron of toxic smoke. We taped up our doorways and windows, bought up all the air purifiers the stores had to offer, wore masks inside, nursed headaches that lasted for days. Then came the orange day. When my alarm went off, it was still dark outside. Dazed, I peered at the clock, then out the window, then at the clock again: 7:30 a.m., but dark as night — as if the sun simply hadn’t risen. In fact, the smoke had accumulated into a particular cloud cover, blocking the light of day. I biked to work, pedaling for miles beneath fragments of my beloved state now turned to black aerosol, haunting the sky above. It stayed dark, an eerie orange murk, all day long. I understood then, I told Quante, that my relationship to the future would never be the same.
I had spent years informally studying the art and architecture of memorials, those sanctified spaces we build to mourn the impacts of human atrocities. Where, I wondered, were the memorials to climate catastrophe — to all that we’ve already lost, and all that will soon be? It seemed to me we needed such spaces to attend to our grief over the planet, itself. But there was also an avoidant dimension of this instinct: In seeking a way to memorialize the causes of my climate grief, I was in part looking for a place to deposit the feeling so I could leave it behind. Cast your sorrows here…
I asked Quante if this resonated with her.
“Grief and sadness are not something to be edited out of life,” she cautioned. What tends to be missing for many of us, she offered, particularly those of us living in the U.S., are the rituals needed to metabolize our mourning emotions. She sees this best done in connection with the larger ecosystems in which we live. In creating a ceremony, she said, “you are holding a space for something to happen where someone can rest their bones or cry or reflect. For me, it’s a space — a moment, or a magical pocket of time, to be held in that reflection.” These grief spaces are necessarily ephemeral; time is not just the subject matter, but the canvas as well.
Immemorial
By Lauren Markham
236 pages, paperback: $17.95
Transit Books, 2025.
ONE OF THE DIFFICULTIES of being alive on earth in the age of climate catastrophe is that we find ourselves in the peculiar position of mourning the future.
It is often said that language is what separates humans — we foolish architects of climate catastrophe — from our fellow animals. But in fact, as psychologists Martin E.P. Seligman and John Tierney explain, “What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” Preparation for and imagination of a vague tomorrow is what first propelled our ancestors to plant crops, to build cities and apiaries and aqueducts and airplanes. Seligman and Tierney write that the future is a “jointly constructed” feature of our species. A future focus also serves the biological function of perpetuating the human race.
But in times of strife — and particularly during this era of ecological collapse and mass destruction — imagining the future can plunge a person, even entire communities, into a state of depression. This is a rational response, as Brit Wray explains in her book on climate anxiety, Generation Dread; however unknowable the particulars of the future, dependent as they are on the human action and decisions, what we do know is that, even in the best of circumstances, we can be certain that great devastation is to come. More fires will swallow up our hillsides, more sweltering summers will suffocate people in the fields and in their homes, more inches and even feet of sea-level rise will choke out ecosystems and drown houses, more tropical storms will ravage our landscapes, more droughts will leave people and animals gasping in thirst.
I’m familiar with such spirals of apocalyptic thought. But I also recognize in them the potential for an endless loop. In her book Not Too Late, co-edited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Rebecca Solnit makes the distinction between despair as an emotion versus despair as an analysis. “People often talk about the future as if it already exists,” she writes. As vivid as climate grief is for so many of us, an over-focus on grief at the expense of current and future positive change can serve as an immobilizer, and even a form of solipsism. It can become all about what’s already happened rather than what’s possible, and it can become all about me: my grief, my feelings — my world.
“We believe that the truths about the science, the justice-centered solutions, the growing strength of the climate movement and its achievements can help,” Solnit and Lutunatabua offer. “They can assuage the sorrow and despair, and they can help people see why it’s worth doing the work the climate crisis demands of us.” We have to learn to live with the sorrow and despair while also “tapping into them as fuel for personal and societal transformation.”
If we succeed in defeating the fossil fuel industry, Solnit writes elsewhere, “those who come after will look back on the age of fossil fuel as an age of corruption and poison. The grandchildren of those who are young now will hear horror stories about how people once burned great mountains of poisonous stuff dug up from deep underground that made children sick and birds die and the air filthy and the planet heat up.”
Grief, in other words, needn’t be a terminus. It can be a portal.
NEARLY A YEAR after first speaking with Quante, I drove through Yosemite, that magnificent granite moonscape, on the way to a friend’s wedding. Our route carried us through miles upon miles of charred trees. Between 2012 and 2021, 1 out of every 8 acres of California burned; by 2021, more than 4 million acres had been destroyed by fire. That spring, I did a lot of driving through California, from the parched wilds of Joshua Tree National Park to the snow-packed Sierras, from the traffic of Sacramento to the clog of Los Angeles, from Central Valley farmlands to the frothing Mendocino Coast. On every drive, I encountered a world disfigured by wildfire. I tried to invoke Quante’s counsel. My job was to feel the grief of these scars, not edit the feeling away.
We set up camp in the Owens Valley, where groundwater is famously sucked southward to sustain Los Angeles, causing the ground in the valley to sink. The next morning, with time before the wedding, we drove up to the Inyo National Forest to see what might just be the world’s oldest trees: the bristlecone pines, some nearly 5,000 years old.
It took nearly an hour to reach them from the valley floor, our Prius heaving with effort. The forest is situated about 11,000 feet above sea level; the air was thin up there, the earth dry. From the parking lot, we set off on a four-mile hiking loop that shot us eastward above another valley facing Nevada. And soon the fabled bristlecones, trunks twisting like gnarled hands, were everywhere.
Time, for many of us on Earth, seems to be speeding up. The habitat the bristlecones are best suited to live in is shifting; the days are becoming hotter, the soil too dry even for these trees built to survive with so little. There will come a time, not too long from now, when all of them will disappear. On our hike, then, we were walking through a miraculous landscape of the past and a ghost forest of the future.
It was hard not to see the bristlecones, so thick with memory, as living memorials to themselves.
Coast redwoods are magnificent for their towering heights, Joshua trees for their strange, subterranean forms, sequoias for their remarkable girth. But the bristlecones, old as they were, did not boast: They were short, given their age, 20 to 30 feet tall at most, and appeared more like sculpted artworks than living things, their branches buckled and reaching skyward like ragged bones, their bark rough and sturdy, like an elephant’s hide. Their stooped silhouettes recalled a slow dance in an old folks’ home, each step a conjuring of lost time.
I’d read of a burgeoning movement of ecological personhood — the notion, borrowed from both animistic traditions and the sly tactics of corporate personhood, that trees and rivers and mountains were beings that deserved rights and privileges under the letter of the law. In 2017, for instance, India granted the Ganges and Yamuna rivers the same legal standing as human beings. In 2018, the city council of Toledo, Ohio, drew up a Bill of Rights for Lake Erie. In 2022, Panama enacted a law ensuring the right of nature to “exist, persist and regenerate.” Shouldn’t the bristlecones enjoy the power of protection?
After a few miles, we came to what’s called the Grove of the Ancients, a cluster of bristlecones that have been determined to be over 4,000 years old. Somewhere in the grove stood the Methuselah tree — the oldest tree in the area, named for a biblical figure who lived for nearly a thousand years. There is no placard or sign announcing the Methuselah, though, since the rangers want to protect it against poaching or vandalism. It was hard not to see the bristlecones, so thick with memory, as physical testimony to the passage of thousands of years of ecological history, as living memorials to themselves. We sat in the Grove of the Ancients for a while in silence, enacting an informal ritual as we listened to our own breath and the nonhuman sounds amid the trees.
The trail wound back to the visitor’s center, where I bought a lip balm and a few postcards to send to friends far away. As I went to the register to pay, a ranger walked in the door carrying a stack of plastic flags, soil still clinging to the metal stakes that had fixed them in the ground. There were perhaps 20 in her hand, and she waved them toward her coworkers behind the register with a grimace.
“Oh,” the woman behind the register said.
“Yes,” the ranger replied.
“Oh, no,” the woman said again.
“None of them,” she said. “None of them made it.”
The flags had marked bristlecone seedlings planted the previous spring — hope for the perpetuation of this forest. But all there was to show of them were these uprooted flags of defeat.
WITH SO MUCH DISAPPEARING, we must mourn it, yes, but we must also imagine into it. How do we conceive of the future — what it looks like, and how it might be reconfigured to prioritize survival over plunder?
I found one answer at a design firm in San Francisco — then called the Future Cities Lab, now called Future Forms — which dreamed up a new vision for the San Francisco waterfront in an age of sea-level rise. The model was at once enchanting and practical. I liked its optimism for my home city: namely, that if my house becomes a permanent fixture of the bay floor, I don’t have to sink along with it — that there still might be a city, and that it could in fact be a lovely place to live in spite of its unsettling topographic revisions.
The Future Cities Lab was housed in a large postindustrial building in the southeastern swath of San Francisco. On the day I visited, 3D printers toiled away while human designers fit the robot-made pieces together and tested their mechanics on a large square table strewn with rulers and power tools. Above the entrance hung a model of the Bay Bridge, underneath which dangled lush airborne islands. Not too long from now, lab co-founder Jason Kelly Johnson explained, the west section of the Bay Bridge will need to be rebuilt. What if the bridge housed colonies of displaced people, who could farm and fish and self-sustain? Thick ribbons would raise and lower the small islands according to the time of day and the weather — lower if it’s too windy, higher to get better views or relief from the sun. The ribbons would also harvest fog, turning the vapor into water for agriculture and for drinking.
“It’s not about solving climate change anymore,” Johnson told me, “it’s about dealing with it.” “It’s really the idea that buildings can be more than living spaces or backdrops,” explained co-founder Nataly Gattegno. “That you could actually be living with the things that sustain you, instead of keeping things far away, as we do, growing all of our food in the valley.”
The environmental apocalypse — and our attendant grief — presents an opportunity to both accommodate the changing environment and create more symbiotic living arrangements, the sort that might have staved off some of this collapse in the first place. But such futures needn’t be purely utilitarian; the designs were compelling and smart, but what drew me to the Future Cities Lab was its vision of a new world of environmental cooperation that was also beautiful and moving. It depicted a place I would actually like to live. This was a new kind of language — a spatial one that didn’t rely entirely, or even at all, on words.
After visiting the Lab, I drove home across the west section of the Bay Bridge. I imagined living on one of those suspended pods of earth, hovering between the bridge and the water, between the obsolete product of man and the sustaining, threatening sea. That’s where we are now, isn’t it? Dangling between the landscape and human folly, deciding what to do about the future as it shapes and reshapes itself, and us, before our very eyes.
This essay is excerpted by permission from Immemorial (Transit Books, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Lauren Markham. A portion of the text appeared in an earlier form in Vice.
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