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: even two drawings from the 1990s that disappeared for nearly thirty years before finding their way home. 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. It has been a busy few years. I am also 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 that has nothing but delights inside it. 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.
About Wendy
Breanna Dunbar, Melbourne Breannadunbar.com
Wendy Sarkissian PhD
Environmental ethicist, community planner, author, and activist.
Holder of a Master of Town Planning (University of Adelaide, 1975) and a PhD in environmental ethics (Murdoch University, 1996).
Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia, recipient of over 40 professional awards, and author of 12 books.
Ethicist at Adler University, Vancouver, and publisher under her own imprint, Twilight River Press.
I am an award-winning planner, environmental ethicist, speaker, workshop trainer, thesis coach, and award-winning author. My work spans community engagement, housing, environmental ethics, and personal and climate grief.
For many decades, I was a speaker on the Australian and international speaking circuit, managed by Renegade Management in Melbourne. I was a regular speaker at the Woodford Folk Festival. After the traumatic death of my husband in early 2016 (and my forced retirement due to injury), I turned to daily practices of connection and reflection that inform my climate-grief memoir, Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues-A Memoir (Tellwell Talent, revised edition, 2026) and have shaped my new Hold Fast book and its companion workbook, Opening to Climate Grief.
Longer background
PhD in professional ethics with a focus on environmental ethics and caring for Nature. Supervised by Professor Peter Newman, AO, a Member of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Decades working closely with governments and local communities in housing, community engagement, and participatory planning in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada
Lead author/co-author of three award-winning professional books published by Earthscan/Routledge: Kitchen Table Sustainability, SpeakOut, and Creative Community Planning
Dissertation and thesis coach and editor for Master’s and PhD students
Awards and honors
Over 40 professional awards for community planning, research, and advocacy.
2026 Seniors Leadership Award for Ourstanding Service and Community Education, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 2026
Life Fellow, Planning Institute of Australia.
Being a Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) is the highest professional honor that PIA can bestow. This honor recognizes planners who have created a legacy of lasting positive change in planning and provided distinguished service to both the Institute and the profession. My fellowship reflects more than five decades of work in community planning, community engagement, and ethical practice, and long service to PIA itself. For clients and collaborators, this designation signals deep experience, trusted leadership and a proven commitment to advancing planning in the public interest.
Wendy Sarkissian PhD is an environmental ethicist, community planner, author, and educator whose work over more than fifty years has helped shape how communities engage with Nature, with each other, and with the realities of climate breakdown. After moving to Australia at twenty-six, Wendy became one of the country’s most influential community planners: the first woman admitted to planning study in South Australia. She holds a PhD in environmental ethics and is a Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia. Wendy has received more than forty professional awards, including the 2026 Senior Leadership Award from Simon Fraser University, and works as an ethicist at Adler University in Vancouver.
She has published more than a dozen books with the University of California Press, Earthscan/Routledge, New Village Press (forthcoming May 2027), and her own imprint, Twilight River Press. In 2026 alone, she completed five new books centred on personal and climate grief and recollections of her career as a community planner. Wendy’s recent work focuses on personal and climate grief, deep ecology, and what an ethic of caring for Nature asks of us in a time of climate breakdown. She lives and writes in Vancouver’s West End.
SFU 2026 Seniors Leadership Award
I received Simon Fraser University’s Gerontology Research Centre Seniors Leadership Award in 2026, recognizing her 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, she has spent decades working at the intersection of housing, community participation, environmental justice, and aging, earning numerous national and international awards for her 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 her 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 of award ceremony
With my mentor from the Forum mentorship program, Sandra Nomoto
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 Newman
Founder and Executive Director, Climate Mental Health Network
