This essay traces the concept of "coral grief" from the Victorian naturalist Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz's melancholic observations of collected coral specimens to the accelerating bleaching events of the present day, arguing that the decline of coral reefs functions as a synecdoche for the wider ecological crisis.

Drawing on the work of marine biologist Rachel Carson, legal scholar Irus Braverman, and feminist climate theorist Kate Wilkinson Cross, the essay examines how ecological grief is unevenly distributed across gender, race, geography, and class. It also examines how cinematic and cultural representations of grief have exploited this unevenness, placing the burden of ecological mourning on already-vulnerable bodies. Rather than allowing grief to remain passive, the essay proposes mobilising melancholy as a form of political attentiveness: one that holds perpetrators accountable, insists on the interdependency of human and more-than-human life, and refuses the blind optimism of technocratic solutions.

Written as an accompaniment to the experimental opera Once She Dries, it closes with a warning that without dismantling the structural conditions that injure both people and ecosystems, no solitary amelioration is possible.