I am eager to introduce myself and my new website
In recent years, my life has undergone a huge amount of consolidation and metamorphosis. And still, I am that same community planner, that same activist fascinated by all things to do with planning: with how we live together and how we might live better. Now, in the long evening of my life, my focus has shifted toward climate grief and personal grief, as I process enormous loss in my own life. This feels exactly right for this stage.
In this website, I am sharing all my selves. I am a poet. I am an ethicist. I am an essayist. I am deeply concerned about the global ecological crisis. I am an activist. I am an Earth citizen. And I am an old woman who walks with a limp.
I am sharing essays, poems, and stories, as well as four new books. I am even sharing two drawings from the 1990s that disappeared for nearly thirty years before finding their way home.
The last few years have been busy. I am aging, and my dear ones are, too, and you will hear their voices from me more than occasionally.
There is a grocery store near my home in Vancouver’s West End with nothing but delights inside. It is tiny and packed with goodness: old favorites alongside exotic treats, something unexpected around every corner. I want this website and my Substack to feel that way to you. One delight after another. One temptation, one new inspiration, one goodie we can share.
I have had a huge life. I nearly lost it ten years ago, but I was miraculously given it back. I want to share it all.
Welcome. Enjoy.
The Marvelous Grocery Store.
About Wendy Sarkissian
Environmental ethicist, community planner, author, and activist
PhD in environmental ethics (Murdoch University, 1996)
Master of Town Planning (University of Adelaide, 1975)
Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia
Recipient of over 40 professional awards
Author of 12 books
Ethicist with Adler University Research Ethics Board, Vancouver
Publisher under own imprint, Twilight River Press
Simon Fraser University 2026 Seniors Leadership Award
I received Simon Fraser University’s Gerontology Research Center Seniors Leadership Award for Outstanding Service and Community Education in 2026.
This Award recognized my lifelong leadership in advocacy, community engagement, and justice-focused work with and for older adults.
An internationally recognized author, community planner, and educator with a PhD in environmental ethics, I have spent decades working at the intersection of housing, community participation, environmental justice, and aging, earning numerous national and international awards for my contributions.
At SFU, this award especially honors my role on the Older Adult Advisory Board for the COPE (heat preparedness) project, where I have consistently championed the voices, rights, and lived realities of elders in climate and health research.
Colleagues highlight my capacity to bring care, courage, and clarity to complex issues such as climate-related heat risk, insisting that older adults be treated not just as research subjects but as active partners and leaders in creating more just, climate-resilient communities.
Photos and Videos of the SFU award ceremony
Photo and Video Credit: Sandra Nomoto, my mentor
With my mentor, Sandra Nomoto
Video of Wendy’s speech at the SFU Awards ceremony
Advance Praise for Hold Fast
Hold Fast is a fierce and tender book that refuses easy comfort. It teaches us how to face both personal loss and planetary grief without looking away and still choose love. This is not a book about “getting through” grief but about learning how to live inside it: honestly, courageously, and with a heart that refuses to close. Wendy Sarkissian writes what many of us feel but struggle to name: that our personal grief and our climate grief are, in many ways, the same wound, and the same call to care. What emerges is an unflinching, deeply humane work that shows grief is not something to overcome, but something to reorient us toward what matters most.
Both deeply personal and profoundly relevant, Hold Fast bridges private and planetary loss with remarkable clarity, offering not easy answers but something far more meaningful: a language, and a stance for those who have stopped pretending everything will be okay. Quietly radical, the book insists that acceptance is not resignation, but the beginning of real care and meaningful action. And that may be its most powerful gift.
- Theresa Pauly PhD, Assistant Professor, Canada Research Chair in Social Relationships, Health, and Aging, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver
The ecological self connects seamlessly to Wendy’s writing. When we mourn ecological losses, we are at the same time mourning parts of ourselves, part of the inter-relational web of which we are a part. This process can lead to profound meaning amid all the joys and sorrows of living in times like these. As a long-time scholar of eco-emotions and ecological grief, I warmly recommend this book.
- Panu Pihkala PhD, Adjunct Professor of Environmental Theology
specialist in eco-anxiety and ecological emotions, University of Helsinki
Wendy’s book is an essential, honest read about grief that doesn’t spiral into despair. Rather, it’s a powerful book about personal and planetary loss, offering practical steps to turn toward, not away from, processing these with love and hope.
- Sarah Newmanounder and Executive Director, Climate Mental Health Network