Wendy Sarkissian PhD is one of Australia's most decorated environmental ethicists and community planners, and co-author of the landmark Housing as if People Mattered (University of California Press, revised 2023) and Creative Community Planning (Earthscan/Routledge, 2010), Life Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia, and recipient of more than forty professional awards. She has spent fifty years listening to what communities and the living world need.
Hold Fast: Navigating Personal and Climate Grief with a Reconciled Heart is what that lifetime of listening produced when loss arrived in its most shattering personal form: the sudden death of her husband Karl in a car accident, leaving her to navigate personal grief and climate grief simultaneously, in the same broken-open heart.
Wendy does not come to grief as a bystander. She had spent decades in the field of environmental ethics, working with communities across Australia and beyond to name and honour what is lost when the Earth is damaged. When Karl died, she discovered that the grief she had learned to hold for the living world was the same grief that now held her. The two could not be separated. Hold Fast is the account of learning to carry both.
Drawing on the wisdom of Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Sharon Blackie, and the deep ecology tradition, Hold Fast maps a path through four Stopping Places: Acceptance, Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Service. This book is for the climate-aware griever who loves the Earth as fiercely as she loves a person.
Hold Fast offers what almost no grief book dares: a framework that holds personal loss and ecological grief in the same compassionate gaze, written by a woman with the credentials, the courage, and the lived experience to do so.
Book 2 of the Twilight River Trilogy. Also available: Creeksong (Book 1) and Opening to Climate Grief (Book 3).
For readers of Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Sharon Blackie, and Mary Oliver.
