Wendy Sarkissian PhD
Author, environmental ethicist, community planner, and activist
Scholar, witness, and voice: Listener at the heart of personal and climate grief
LAUNCH OF THE THREE TWILIGHT RIVER TRILOGY BOOKS, 21 NOVEMBER 2026
Creeksong: One Woman Sings
The Climate Blues
A poetic exploration of climate grief, featuring a powerful midlife initiatory journey in rural Australia. Weaves song, story, and ethical reflection into an invitation to feel, witness, and respond to the losses of climate breakdown.
Creeksong Audiobook
Hold Fast:
Navigating Personal
and Climate Grief
with a Reconciled Heart
A memoir and healing guide that draws on the sudden death of Wendy’s husband in 2016 and her decades of environmental ethics work to offer a model for navigating and reconciling both personal and climate grief.
Opening to
Climate Grief:
A Workbook
Companion
to Hold Fast
A spacious, structured workbook companion to Hold Fast that guides readers through embodied practices, reflective prompts, and creative invitations for opening to the many aspects of the pain of climate breakdown and helping the reader settle a broken heart.
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. 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).
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. This book, 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.
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I write about personal grief, climate grief and climate breakdown, and the long work of holding fast. Please subscribe below to receive my newsletter. It’s free.
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