In a quiet corner of the Arctic, caribou tread paths etched over generations—routes passed not with the help of maps or GPS, but through memory. When the ice melts earlier, when the rivers swell differently, they still return, drawn by something older than the mind. Sometimes what they seek is gone.

The climate crisis is often framed in the language of data: rising sea levels, heatwaves, parts per million. But beneath these measurable shifts lies something more elusive, memory. Not just the memories we hold as individuals, but the collective memory of species, landscapes, and cultures. As the planet warms, memory itself is becoming unstable.

Humans are notoriously poor at remembering environmental change. A psychological phenomenon known as “shifting baseline syndrome” explains how each generation comes to accept a diminished natural world as normal. The forests our grandparents remember seem exaggerated, the seasons they describe suspect in their consistency. In cities, we forget that the air once smelled different, that the birdsong was louder. We adapt with remarkable speed, and in that adaptation, we lose perspective.

Yet, memory is not just a human faculty. Salmon remember the streams where they were born. Monarch butterflies trace migratory paths across continents. Coral polyps respond to seasonal cues laid down through millennia. The climate crisis disrupts these rhythms.

These layers of memory, across species, places, and time, form what we might call memoryscapes: emotional and ecological geographies where remembrance and identity are deeply entangled. When these places vanish or transform beyond recognition, memory itself is displaced.

And still, within this erosion lies hope. Memory is fragile, but it’s also regenerative. Stories, when shared, expand our sense of time. The memory of a mangrove forest, passed through song in Pacific Island communities, carries ecological knowledge modern science is only beginning to understand. In recent years, ecological restoration has emerged as an act of memory, a form of remembering forward. Projects to rewild meadows, reconnect rivers, and restore keystone species are not merely about reparation, they’re about recovering relationships, reestablishing a continuity with the past that climate change threatens to sever.

Hope, in this context, is not naïveté. It is a form of resistance. To remember, truly remember, what the world once was is to refuse the normalization of loss. If caribou still walk ancient paths, perhaps we can too.