Hold Fast arrived in my life at exactly the moment I needed it. As an executive coach who has spent decades helping leaders navigate uncertainty, I recognized immediately what Wendy Sarkissian has done here. She has taken the raw, wordless terrain of grief, personal and planetary, and given it a map. Wendy writes from the heart as a planner, an ethicist, and as a woman who has buried people she loved. She infuses every page with an authority that cannot be faked.
For anyone currently dealing with loss, whether of a person, a place, or a livable future, Hold Fast offers permission to grieve fully, and a way forward. I recommend it without reservation to every leader, coach, and human being who is trying to stay whole in a fracturing world.
Praise for Hold Fast
Yollana Shore
Executive Coach and Founder, Awakening Leadership, Australia
Wendy Sarkissian has done for grief what I have tried to do for overshoot: given us an honest measure of where we actually stand, without flinching, and without despair. Her courageous book, Hold Fast, names the truth of what we have lost, personally and planetarily, and dares to ask how we might live, fully and well, within that truth. It is a book our overshot world badly needs.
For decades I have tried to help people see the numbers behind our ecological overshoot. Wendy Sarkissian has done something harder: she has helped me feel them. Hold Fast is a rare gift, honest grief paired with genuine hope.
Mathis Wackernagel
PhD, co-founder, Global Footprint Network
Wendy Sarkissian connects our current fears about the destruction of our environment to experiences of personal loss and grief that we can all relate to, offering a genuinely original and far-reaching contribution to ecological thought.
The author's own experience of healing from a tragic loss through the four stages of acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, and service to others leads the reader to a deeper understanding of how to remain present to a world that is being lost.
Kevin Dale McKeown
Editor and Publisher, The West End Journal, Vancouver, Canada
Hold Fast is a deeply moving and practically useful exploration of personal and climate grief, grounded in Wendy's lived experience and rigorous therapeutic insight. It offers a clear, accessible framework for staying connected with our dead, and with all that we are losing to climate breakdown, without collapsing into despair. As a community engagement practitioner, I can see how the four-part model invites collective reflection, conversation, and action, rather than just private mourning.
I believe Hold Fast will become an essential companion for community facilitators and leaders who want to meet climate emotions with courage, tenderness, and integrity.
Becky Hirst
FRSA, engagement leader, consultant, strategist, and changemaker, Australia
This book testifies to a radical notion for contemporary societies: that grief helps us. The losses we face, in private and public life, may not be ethically acceptable, but grief itself is not the problem. Instead, grief can support us, as Wendy Sarkissian so eloquently and holistically shows. It helps us process change and appreciate what has been and what still is.
Sarkissian draws on both personal bereavement, the loss of her dear Karl, and grief over global losses. As a long-time scholar of eco-emotions and ecological grief, I warmly recommend this book.
Panu Pihkala
PhD, specialist in eco-anxiety and ecological emotions, University of Helsinki
Wendy Sarkissian is an expert on grief. She funnels what she's learned in decades of work as an environmental ethicist about our grief on a planet in crisis through her own intimate anguish. Her husband drowned beside her, trapped in their car, after it plunged into a river.
Sarkissian's concept of the Reconciled Ecological Self is the core clarity she collected and distills in Hold Fast.
Dr. Jane Munro
poet, writer, and educator, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
Wendy Sarkissian's original concept of The Reconciled Ecological Self is one of the most important psychological and ethical concepts to emerge in this century. Hold Fast is an incomparable gift to a grieving world. Perhaps it is even the Manual for Living with Defeat that Leonard Cohen would have written had his muse allowed.
John Seed
OAM, deep ecologist, founder of the Rainforest Information Centre, Australia
Hold Fast is a triumph of active acceptance over the toxicity of fear and debilitating despair in the face of both personal grief and planetary disintegration. It reveals a redemptive way of being while braving irreparable loss in a fractured world: a Reconciled Ecological Self. This compelling and courageous Self honestly acknowledges tragedy while simultaneously engaging in loving service to others, the "sacred work of sorrow." What a powerful, profound holding fast to connectedness and to love Wendy Sarkissian has gifted to all of us!"
Patsy Hallen
PhD, Associate Professor, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia
Wendy Sarkissian was my doctoral student thirty years ago, when she first asked whether planners could be encouraged to truly care for Nature. In Hold Fast, she asks a harder question still: whether we can grieve, honestly and together, both the people and the Earth we have lost. As someone who has spent a career showing how our cities themselves drive climate breakdown and have huge potential to regenerate our climate and our environment, I recognize in this book a necessary companion: one that recognizes the importance of climate grief yet never abandons hope."
Peter Newman
AO, John Curtin Distinguished Professor, Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, Perth, Western Australia; Lead Author for Transport, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
A Manual for Living Amidst the Great Unraveling, by John Seed OAM, 7 June 2026
In Hold Fast: Navigating Personal and Climate Grief with a Reconciled Heart, Dr. Wendy Sarkissian has crafted a profoundly moving and essential guide for our times. As a deep ecologist who has spent decades fighting for the Earth, I find this book to be a revelatory bridge between the intimate pain of human loss and the vast sorrow of ecological collapse.
John Seed OAM is a deep ecologist, rainforest activist, and co-creator (with Joanna Macy) of the Council of All Beings. He is the founder and director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia and a longtime collaborator of Joanna Macy.
Photo credit: Megan Wallace, used by permission.