Panu’s previous work as a pastor has provided him skills and experience for meeting grieving people and organizing mourning rituals. He has led ecological grief rituals for clear-cut forests, for the nonfinite losses brought by climate change, and for lost species. He is inspired by many forerunners, such as the Work that Reconnects, the methods developed by Trebbe Johnson, and the Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

Panu has written several research articles about ecological grief and climate grief. He argues that the framework of “meaning reconstruction”, developed by Robert A. Neimeyer and colleagues in grief research, is highly relevant for ecological grief. The vast ecological crisis causes the need to re-evaluate earlier meanings in life, and re-tell our stories of who we are. Panu’s widely read 2020 essay for the BBC, “Climate Grief: How we Mourn a Changing Planet”, gives an introduction to these dynamics.

In 2024, Panu published a wide-ranging exploration of types of loss and grief in ecological sorrow. 

Later in 2024, Panu applied this framework to animal ethical mourning together with moral philosopher Elisa Aaltola. He also published an exploration of “eco-spiritual grief”, pointing out that people may experience both ecological grief and grief about their spiritual community at the same time.

Several articles and book chapters by Panu explore dynamics of ecological grief, such as the following:

* Pihkala, P. (2024). Climate Sorrow: Discerning Various Forms of Climate Grief and Responding to Them as a Therapist. In J. Anderson, T. Staunton, J. O’Gorman, & C. Hickman (Eds.), Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown (pp. 157–166). Routledge & CRC Press.

* Pihkala, P. (2020). Ritualizing Grief. In H. Malcolm (Ed.), Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church (pp. 167–172). SCM Press.

* Pihkala, P. (2024). Climate anxiety, maturational loss and adversarial growth. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 77(1), 369–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2023.2287382