IN JANUARY, I was in Greece researching the impacts of climate change on the olive harvests. Last year, on account of drought and record heat (too hot in the summer, and not enough cold in the winter), the European olive crop was so bad that some farmers didn’t even bother to harvest their olives, and the price of “liquid gold” nearly tripled at the supermarket. I met farmers whose families had grown olives for centuries; I met scientists who studied olives; I met people who had lost hectares of olive trees to forest fires; I even met a 4,000-year-old olive tree, which had helped propagate thousands of other trees throughout the region of Kalamata. As I crisscrossed Greece, the land of some of my ancestors, I got word of the Palisades fire, not so far away from where I live in Northern California, which generations of my other ancestors have called home.

The images from Los Angeles bent my brain. Here were panoramas of neighborhoods intact, followed by the same panoramas of them scorched to the ground. My little cousin had to evacuate, and so did many of my friends. Dozens upon dozens of Go-Fund-Me campaigns began to circulate, chronicling everything that families had lost. “We’re wondering if our kids should be wearing hazmat suits,” a friend messaged me upon returning home to a house — blessedly, still standing — but in a landscape rendered unrecognizable and potentially toxic from the blaze.

In our age of climate emergency, features of the world are disappearing so quickly ... that they risk being forgotten.

It was disorienting to be so present on the scene of one catastrophe while witnessing another from afar. But this is a regular condition, now. There are so many fossil-fueled disasters it can be hard to keep track. I remember a time when I’d know the name of the fire that had charred a particular landscape I’d pass through and the year it burned. Now there have been so many fires of such great proportion that the particulars have become something of a blur. This feels like its own catastrophe of forgetting.

In our age of climate emergency, features of the world are disappearing so quickly — homes, glaciers, entire towns and species and habitats — that they risk being forgotten. In 2024, over a million acres were burned by forest fires in California alone. How, in this era of transfiguration — and when the Trump administration is busy undermining climate progress and scraping websites of science and history and fact — do we both honor and remember what’s been lost? This is a question I’ve been grappling with in recent years, as the impacts of climate change hang heavy on my conscience. It’s impossible not to feel complicit.

Having spent the last two decades working in human rights (or covering their violations as a journalist), I have visited a lot of memorials. I’ve come to think of them as sanctified spaces that we build to mourn and remember. Generally, memorials are built in the aftermath of atrocities that humans have committed against one another: wars, genocides, bombings, massacres.

For all the political problems memorials can pose (Who designs them? Who decides to build them and where? How are they funded? What stories are left out?) I have always been drawn to the way a memorial makes meaning and elicits feeling among its visitors through immersion in a physical space.

I’m moved by a structure’s capacity to, with few or no words, tell a story. I’m thinking, here, for instance, of the elevated copper boxes of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, listing the names of the over 4,000 Black people who were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Or the hulking gates that mark the minutes between the last moments of peace, the moment of destruction, and the first moments of recovery from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Or the way the 2011 Oslo Bombing memorial includes a floor of broken glass to represent the destruction; or the poetry written on the walls of a former Nazi prison, now a Holocaust memorial, in Slovenia.

That’s the thing about memorials: They tell stories about the past but actually speak toward the future.

Where, I have long wondered, are the memorials to climate change? Spaces that allow us to grieve both what we’ve already lost and the vanishing future itself? A few years ago, I began looking in earnest out of some instinct that such spaces might offer a space not just to hold my grief, but transform it.

It turned out I didn’t have to look far.

IN 2021, MAYA Lin, the famed architect of the once-controversial Vietnam Veterans memorial, took a stand of 40 dead trees from the New Jersey Pine Barrens and installed them in New York’s Madison Square Park for all to see. She called the installation — a tribute to forests lost to climate-warming-induced saltwater intrusion — “Ghost Forest.”

A design called “Climate Chronograph” won the National Capital Planning Commission’s 2016 “Memorials to the Future” contest in Washington, DC. “The proposed memorial is a public record of rising sea levels,” the commission wrote. The artists planned to plant many neat rows of cherry trees at the edge of the East Potomac Park to track sea level rise as their root systems were overtaken. The death of four rows would mark an entire foot of sea level rise, and on and on. (After the 2016 election, the architects responsible for the project abandoned the idea of building the memorial in Washington, DC, and have been seeking a new site for their project.)

In “Ice Watch,” the Danish artists Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing took hunks of calved glaciers and installed them in public squares in cities like London, Paris, and Copenhagen, marking the United Nations IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2014 so people could come face-to-face with the vanishing.

“Songs of Disappearance” was the name of a 2021 album composed entirely of birdsong from extinct and endangered birds. In Australia, it beat Taylor Swift on the charts.

People in Iceland held a memorial for a glacier named Ok in 2019, the first in Iceland to lose its status as a glacier. “In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path,” reads the dedication on the mourning plaque written by Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason. “This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you will know if we did it.”

I loved these memorials — a term I’ll use broadly, here, since not all of these artists define their work as such — for the way they demand direct encounter with what was disappearing. They aren’t placards or a figurative monument to the dead. Instead, they engage with both the concrete and the ineffable at once: They make the stakes of climate change legible while also providing a container for vulnerability and grief.

I also admired these designs for the way they play with time: The ice installations melt before your very eyes; the ghost forest trees are standing among the living but are already long dead; the placard — “Only you will know if we did it” — is addressed to future generations. That’s the thing about memorials: They tell stories about the past but actually speak toward the future.

As a Californian living in a landscape of near-constant wildfire or threat thereof, I wondered what such memorials I might find closer to home.

IN 2022, I learned, the Sonoma County board of supervisors approved a plan to build a memorial to the 2017 Tubbs Fire, which was then the most destructive wildfire in our state’s recorded history. (Three other fires, including two of the recent fires in Los Angeles, have already beaten that designation.) Twenty-two people died as a result of the Tubbs Fire, and some 6,000 structures were destroyed.

“The 2017 wildfires forever changed Sonoma County,” Board Chair David Rabbitt proclaimed. “This memorial will serve as a lasting tribute to those who lost their lives, a testament to the enduring spirit of our community, and a space for reflection and healing.”

This is a lovely vision begging to be made concrete. What does it mean to build a space of remembrance? What, in actual terms, would this look like? This, of course, was a question for potential designers. The board of supervisors put out a call for proposals, with the general guidelines for designs that “create a place for acknowledgement, remembrance, gathering, and reflection, create opportunities for community healing that acknowledge the community’s individual and collective grief and sense of loss, [and] recognize that people have experienced and are processing grief and trauma in individual ways, and accommodate those differing paths as much as possible.”

Because memorials speak to the future as much as the past, they highlight the power of grief to move us.

Discussions of climate change, like these goals for the fire memorial, can veer quickly into abstract generalizations about loss, just as climate grief can easily become a tired platitude. It’s no one’s fault. We’re grief-stricken, after all, and tired, and at a loss for words. That’s why, in part, I’ve been drawn to memorials, places that invite us to step inside a physical space stripped of words, confront cataclysmic loss, and be transformed. Walking into a memorial space feels like visiting a sanctified land of the dead. When we leave a memorial, we are returning to the land of the living, carrying with us the counsel of the underworld. The question is: What do we do next?

Grief can be so overwhelming that, unharnessed, it can shut us down or convince us that we’re too late, that everything alive is as good as dead. But because memorials speak to the future as much as the past, they highlight the power of grief to move us, in both senses of the word: to induce deep feeling so that, from that feeling, we are propelled to act.

It turns out that even in this era of mass destruction and a global surge towards authoritarianism, when merely thinking about what lies ahead can plunge us into despair, planning for the future tends to make humans happy. A 2017 study showed that most people spend roughly three times more time thinking about the future than they do ruminating on the past, behavioral scientists Martin E. P. Seligman and John Tierney wrote in The New York Times. “When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence.” To plan toward the future is to believe that good memories lie in wait up ahead.

Some of the memorials that move me most are those made from the very material of what’s being grieved: the hunks of ice we watch vanish, the songs of birds we can no longer hear on Planet Earth. They speak to the idea that the source of grief can be a raw material for creation.

Last October, Sonoma’s memorial committee named six finalists. Sometime this year, I’m told, they’ll pick the winner — and get to building. Whatever is built will be the product of a human being reckoning with the past and the future, creating some dance with the landscape’s history, its vulnerability, its char, and its new growth. I can’t wait to see what’s made in that threshold space between all that’s been lost and what yet remains, between the past and the future.

Could memories of the vanishing world be not merely vessels for grief, but an alchemical force to transform that grief into something else? I think so. Grief isn’t a terminus, but a portal. Begging us to step on through.