Who Gets to Mourn? Class Divides in Ecological Experience, Loss, and Grief

by Samual Evangelista WTA Labs resident biologist

Firefly light trails in the Cordilleras. The most fireflies I have ever seen in one place, estimated to be more than 200 fireflies flying all at the same time.

Over the past decade, news and popular science outlets have increasingly warned that fireflies may vanish from everyday life within a generation. Philippine reporting, including features in SunStar (2025), has echoed this concern, citing scientists and long-time residents who note that fireflies have become far rarer than they were in previous decades. While more research is needed to determine whether these insects are truly on the brink of local disappearance, what is certain is that fireflies were once a quiet constant in many Filipino childhoods: tiny lanterns blinking in backyard grasses, flickering at forest edges, or glowing along rural creeks. For many children today, these memories persist only through stories or photographs. Fewer still may ever experience them firsthand. The disappearance of fireflies is not only a biological concern; it marks the loss of an ordinary, intimate encounter with the living world.

The Extinction of Experience

In 1993, ecologist Robert Pyle introduced the concept of the extinction of experience to describe the decline of everyday, direct interactions with nature. This loss extends beyond species extinction to include ordinary environments and commonplace encounters like climbing trees, wading in streams, hearing insects at night—that once grounded people in their ecological surroundings. These repeated, sensory moments foster familiarity and attachment; when they disappear, nature becomes distant, abstract, or episodic rather than lived.

The erosion of everyday ecological contact has emotional consequences. Environmental change can provoke solastalgia, or ecological grief, a form of distress experienced when familiar ecosystems that provide meaning and continuity begin to degrade or vanish (Albrecht et al., 2007). Grief does not arise only from dramatic catastrophes but also from the slow unravelling of landscapes that once structured daily life. When ordinary nature recedes, the capacity to mourn its loss becomes uneven, fragmented, or deferred.

Each generation inherits a different ecological baseline, a phenomenon marine ecologist Daniel Pauly termed the shifting baseline syndrome, wherein degraded environments come to be perceived as normal simply because earlier conditions are no longer remembered by next generations (Pauly, 1995). In the Philippines, these shifting baselines are sharply stratified. A child raised amid concrete floodwalls and polluted waterways may grow up believing rivers are inherently foul and dangerous, while another raised near farms or forest edges may still expect abundance. Over time, diminished encounters produce diminished expectations, quietly normalizing loss.

Unequal Ecological Histories

Globally, the decline of everyday ecological experience is driven by urbanization, indoor and digital lifestyles, pollution, and accelerating biodiversity loss. In the Philippines, despite extraordinary ecological richness, many people no longer have sustained contact with living landscapes. This pattern is not uniform. Access to nature, exposure to risk, and opportunities to form ecological memory vary widely across social groups, shaping distinct experiences of loss and grief. 

These uneven encounters are rooted in long histories of land dispossession and spatial reorganization. Under Spanish colonial rule, communal and Indigenous land-use systems were progressively dismantled through the encomienda and hacienda systems, transforming shared forests, fields, and waterways into private, export-oriented estates. Landscapes were reorganized to serve colonial extraction rather than local subsistence. American colonial governance deepened this transformation through land titling, infrastructure expansion, and urban planning that rendered land legible as property and resource rather than as a lived environment (Scott, 1998).

In the postwar period, rapid urbanization intensified these patterns. Wetlands were reclaimed, rivers channelized, floodplains converted into residential and commercial zones. Middle- and upper-class neighborhoods were buffered by gated subdivisions, landscaped green spaces, and environmental services, while poorer communities were pushed toward riverbanks, esteros, coastal margins, and other ecologically precarious spaces. Forests were logged in the name of development, rural livelihoods destabilized, and environmental risk unevenly distributed. These processes produced not only ecological degradation but also a classed geography of experience, in which some encountered nature primarily as amenity, others as hazard, and others as a vanishing foundation of livelihood (Pulido, 2017).

Filipino fishermen around reclaimed areas in Manila. ©Reuters

Class, Grief, and Barriers to Experience

The extinction of experience in the Philippines is not accidental, nor is it evenly felt. It is historically produced through centuries of decisions about who is allowed proximity to land, water, and ecological stability, and who bears the costs of extraction, pollution, and climate vulnerability. Among these forces, resource extraction has been especially consequential in reshaping everyday ecological experience. Large-scale logging in upland forests, mining in mineral-rich provinces, quarrying along river systems, and the conversion of mangroves into fishponds have transformed once-familiar landscapes into sites of depletion and risk. These activities do more than degrade ecosystems; they disrupt daily relationships between people and places. Forest paths become off-limits or dangerous, rivers turn turbid or toxic, and coastal waters lose the species that once sustained both livelihoods and memory. In this way, ecological loss is unevenly lived, and ecological grief becomes stratified. Some mourn the disappearance of landscapes remembered from childhood, others grieve the erosion of livelihoods and ancestral knowledge, and many grow up without the opportunity to form ecological memories at all. Class does not determine whether grief exists, but it powerfully shapes how and whether people are able to experience the living world in the first place.

Among wealthier Filipinos, nature is often encountered in curated and controlled forms. Daily life unfolds in air-conditioned malls, gated subdivisions, and high-rise buildings, with greenery appearing as ornamental landscapes or recreational escapes. Grief over ecological loss may emerge through reports, documentaries, or global climate narratives rather than through personal memories of local ecosystems. This grief is genuine, but it is often mediated by distance and insulation.

For the urban poor, natural environments frequently appear as sources of danger rather than refuge. Informal settlements cluster along polluted esteros, flood-prone rivers, and reclaimed land. Here, ecological loss is experienced alongside persistent risk: contaminated water, flooding, disease, and displacement. In such contexts, grief is entangled with survival, exhaustion, and fear. It may be misread as indifference, yet it reflects a deeply embodied awareness of environmental precarity.

Rural communities maintain the most intimate relationships with nature. Livelihoods, identities, and generational knowledge are tied to rivers, forests, and fields. Ecological grief in these communities is visceral, arising from declining fisheries, eroding soils, deforested hillsides, and shifting seasons that disrupt ancestral practices. Despite this knowledge, rural communities are often excluded from decision-making processes that determine the fate of their landscapes, compounding loss with disempowerment.

Language, Memory, and Cultural Silence

As ecological experiences fade, so too does the language that once described them. Local names for insects, seasonal winds, soil conditions, and flowering cycles fall out of everyday use. Children who have never seen fireflies have little need for words that once distinguished their rhythms or habitats. This erosion of ecological vocabulary weakens memory, making loss harder to articulate and easier to overlook.

Evidence from cultural products reflects this shift. An analysis of twentieth-century fiction, song lyrics, and film narratives shows a steady decline in references to nature beginning in the 1950s, alongside a rise in references to human-made environments, signaling a broader cultural turn away from the natural world (Kesebir & Kesebir, 2017). In many Philippine languages, nature was historically embedded in metaphor, proverb, and place names, encoding ecological knowledge through everyday speech. When lived encounters disappear, these linguistic traces persist only as relics. Ecological grief is thus compounded by a loss of words, a silence that mirrors the quieting of landscapes themselves (Nixon, 2011).

Use of nature-related words in literature pieces and media over the years. ©Kesebir & Kesebir

Why Experience Matters

Firsthand interactions with nature cultivate emotional bonds that often inform environmental values. People are more likely to defend ecosystems they have personally engaged with, whether through childhood exploration, subsistence farming, or communal traditions. When those encounters fade, nature ceases to be a relational anchor, becoming instead an abstract concept. Without the memory of touching soil, hearing rain, or watching insects dance in the dark, ecological concern often remains intellectual rather than heartfelt. Inequitable access to natural spaces thus leads to unequal motivation for environmental governance. Those with rich ecological memories (even if shaped by privilege) may channel grief into advocacy. 

People who lack formative experiences may view environmental issues as remote, irrelevant, or beyond their influence. Over time, this divide undermines collective environmental responsibility and institutional capacity for meaningful conservation.

A Nation of Uneven Losses

The extinction of experience in the Philippines is not simply a story of disappearing species. It is a story of unequal touch, memory, and opportunity. The wealthy grow up amid curated greenery that rarely deepens ecological understanding. The urban poor live beside nature primarily in its most hazardous forms. Rural communities carry the deepest ecological memories, yet their landscapes are eroding rapidly under the pressures of extraction, development, and climate change. Each group loses something different, and each grieves in a different way.

Yet this loss is not irreversible. Community-led river cleanups, urban gardens, mangrove rehabilitation projects, and Indigenous land defense movements are rebuilding everyday relationships with nature. These efforts do not romanticize landscapes; they restore familiarity. They create spaces where children can touch soil, elders can share knowledge, and communities can remember that ecosystems still respond to care.

This raises a final ethical question: who gets to mourn ecological loss, and whose grief is recognized as legitimate? 

To deny people safe, meaningful contact with nature is also to deny them the right to miss it when it is gone. Environmental justice, therefore, is not only about protecting ecosystems but about restoring the conditions under which people can form relationships with the living world. A country cannot protect what its people cannot love, and people cannot love what they have never been allowed to experience.

If we are to avoid a future in which fireflies vanish entirely from collective memory, the task is not only to conserve species. It is to rebuild everyday encounters with the living world, so that ecological grief becomes not a burden borne by a few, but a shared force capable of shaping a more just and caring future.

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References:

Albrecht, G., Sartore, G. M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., … & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(S1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288

Kesebir, S., & Kesebir, P. (2017). A growing disconnection from nature is evident in cultural products. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(2), 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616662473

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Pauly, D. (1995). Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 10(10), 430. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89171-5

Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism, and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524–533. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516646495

Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.

SunStar Pampanga. (2025, June 19). Goodbye fireflies? SunStar. https://www.sunstar.com.ph/pampanga/goodbye-fireflies