A Review of Immemorial

Flying over the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps, Lauren Markham found herself searching for a word to describe the experience. The ice was melting, and the damage irreversible. “I wanted a space to remember and mourn the vanishing future,” she writes in Immemorial, her new book-length essay on the climate crisis, memorials, and language.

When I read the book, I had already been thinking a lot about grief and where to place it. My father died in September 2024, but I had mourned him for years before. Like Markham, I asked myself: How do you mourn something you are in the process of losing?

A novice in climate literature, I eagerly took up Markham’s text. From within the confines of grief, my mind yearned to go wide, craving insights into the immeasurable problem of environmental catastrophe. Instead, I encountered uncertainty and exploration. In Markham’s approach to abstracted loss, I found salves for my own personal grief.

Immemorial takes a loving last look at the dying world. Shores of rotting fish. Extinct birdsong. Fading whistling languages. California fires. Sinking cities. Packed with luminous sentences and piercing examples, from floating islands under California’s Bay Bridge to miniature cities made of mud, the text becomes something you want to reach out and touch. The physicality of Markham’s language gives shape to that amorphous loss, a temporary holding place for ineffable feelings.

Though it is a slim volume, Immemorial catalogs a decades-long conversation between artists, writers, and designers about how to memorialize a declining planet. The book establishes a conduit between private and global grief. Markham sees her grandmother’s face in the pale bark of expiring Atlantic white cedars. In a Copenhagen plaza, people hug a hunk of melting glacier “like one might a dying friend.”

Markham maintains that how we remember is just as important as what we mourn. “Memorials are the battlegrounds of truth,” she writes. Drawing from Maurice Halbwachs’s philosophy of memory, she positions collective mourning as a form of critical thinking, a way to reinterpret both the past and the future. She warns against the violence of nostalgia—for a person, for a totalizing national identity, for racialized power—and its whitewashing of oppression. She asks us to think about what we are making as we grieve. As we memorialize, can we form new futures amid the ruins?

These questions gesture toward the...