Social Change, Collective Loss, Planet Earth

Change, even if positive, usually also entails loss. Modernity constantly generates change and hence loss: capitalism and technology regularly make occupational groups and even classes redundant, not to mention appropriating ancestral land and destroying ecosystems; nationalism and communism have often undermined or eradicated minority groups; there are losers in both the rise and fall of empires; winners as well as losers in war can experience loss; urbanisation and globalisation underlie epidemics and pandemics. Across history, however, communal loss and/or grief following pandemics (such as the Black Death), disaster (such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami), economic depression (e.g., the 1930s) or war (not least, World War II) have sometimes driven new political, cultural, social and economic formations. But under what conditions? And under what conditions do we see reactionary attempts to hang on to a world that is lost, or even total societal collapse? What implications are there for how societies might organise themselves as global warming and species extinctions cause mass death and render increasing numbers of societies unviable? The chapter invites sociology to include grief and loss in its analysis of social change, invites bereavement studies to consider socio-economic as well as individual loss and invites climate activism to confront the personal, economic, social and cultural losses entailed in addressing global warming and ecological degradation.