By Clare Celeste Börsch
I was washing dishes one gray evening during the pandemic when I did the math on my son’s age and the coral reefs. My husband and I, both avid scuba divers, had promised him a diving trip when he turned twelve. I stood at the counter, the water running, and counted forward—twelve years old, 2027—and then backward, toward the estimates of when coral bleaching would become irreversible. The years nearly overlapped. The realization came like a blow: the world I had wanted to show him—the abundance of life beneath the waves—might be gone. I broke down in tears, and I am not sure I’ve ever quite recovered.
How does one hold that much grief? An ocean of grief?
Our bodies are built to mourn intimate losses, but what of the loss of the world that holds us? Climate change is planetary, yet we will live it as personal tragedy: the last snowfall, the last frog song, the last summer spent outdoors, the last dive.
Ten years ago, I used to think I was simply making art inspired by nature—a love letter to the flora and fauna of my childhood home in Brazil. Over time, I realized I was making an elegy. My collages, assembled from hundreds of archival illustrations, depict dizzying abundance: tropical birds, coral reefs, orchids, insects. When I first confronted the scale of biodiversity loss—over 70% of wildlife destroyed in the last fifty years—I had heroic ambitions for my art and for raising awareness. Now I think I am simply saying: this once existed.
The pandemic stripped away distractions. During those long, suspended months, I walked daily through Berlin’s parks, noticing how nearly every tree bore the marks of drought or disease. The crisis had moved from headlines into the landscape. The awareness was unbearable; I cried daily and sank into an anxious depression.
I tried therapy, but most therapists weren’t climate-informed. When I said I despaired because the spring was too hot and dry, one therapist replied that they found the weather beautiful. In psychotherapy, the patient’s perception of the world is often treated as a reflection of their inner state—but what if the world is unraveling? My grief didn’t fit the paradigm. To mention that our grandchildren might never know winter was to disturb the delicate bubble of denial we all live inside. I watched the world go by as though nothing was wrong, even as science told us we were walking off a cliff. I understand the grief and outrage of the younger generation—the gut-wrenching experience of having your urgency unreflected in the world around you.
In search of grounding, I turned to books. Reading Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, I discovered Alexander von Humboldt’s vision of Earth as a single, breathing organism. Two centuries ago, he warned that human-made gases could change the climate. His theory of interconnection—his view of nature as a global system—resonated with my own creative practice.
Around that time, I began reading The Island of the Blue Dolphins to my son. As a child, that story of a girl surviving alone on an island gave me a lasting sense of kinship with the living world. Revisiting it, I realized that such kinship often begins not with experience but with imagination—with stories that make the nonhuman world feel alive and worthy of care.
The Amazon rainforest of my childhood still burns bright in my memory, while the real one is being pushed toward an irreversible tipping point. As the physical forest is ravaged, the one in my imagination grows more vivid. Perhaps my work—these lush collages of flora and fauna—is an act of preservation, keeping alive impressions from decades ago before they vanish completely. A love letter to the Holocene.
But as we destroy our planet’s delicate ecosystems, our cultural ties to nature are also fraying. A recent Grist article noted that words like “moss,” “raven,” and “acorn” are disappearing from children’s vocabularies. The use of nature-related words in English literature has declined by more than sixty percent since 1800. When nature disappears from language, the possibility of caring for it fades as well.
When my son and I finally take that diving trip, he will marvel at the ocean. But he will not know what has been lost—the coral before bleaching, the fish before overfishing, the abundance before collapse. For him, the diminished world will be the only world. Scientists call this the “shifting baseline”: each generation accepts a more impoverished world as normal.
And yet I believe art and storytelling can bridge that gap—helping future generations hold a vision of planetary abundance in their minds, even if they never directly experience it. If we cannot preserve the physical abundance of the past, perhaps we can keep it alive in our imagination. This is what some call “imagination rewilding”: restoring not only ecosystems but our capacity to envision thriving life.
The illustrations I use date from the pre-industrial era; the dazzling abundance they depict is gone. But the potential for a new geological period is there—and we could help midwife it into being. My work is a promise, not to restore the species we have lost forever, but of the possibility that life, endlessly adaptive and resilient, might flourish again, in another form.
My art is not nostalgic; I want it to be galvanizing. Look at what our planet has created—marvel at the diversity, the refracted colors on a hummingbird’s wing. Shake off our hubris: our technology cannot recreate even the most humble life-sustaining system, our soil, which remains less understood than our galaxy.
When the grief feels too heavy, I try to picture my son, grown, slipping beneath the surface of some future sea—warmer, but still alive. I imagine him swimming, discovering life that has found a way, against all odds, to persist.
Maybe that’s the work now: to hold both the beauty and the loss, to mourn without turning away, to imagine the abundance that might one day return. Because before we can restore the living world, we must first hold it bright in our minds.