Cecilia was an embodiment of compassion, her quiet gaze falling on what others overlooked: the elm tree in the yard, the “othered” boy at a party, species facing extinction. In her presence, small details grew unbearably heavy, as if she carried the grief of the world before she had even lived much of it.
To be a compassionate person living through the sixth mass extinction and the rise of fascism is to feel that same weight—a witness to a civilization numbed by capitalism and distraction, yet burdened with knowledge.
Cecilia’s attention to suffering is not merely sensitivity: it is radical witness. She refuses to let the decline of the natural world or the pain of the vulnerable fade into the background hum of everyday life.
Watching The Virgin Suicides now, what lingers is not its pastel suburban nostalgia but the undercurrent of warning woven into every frame. The film feels like a mirror, revealing the mundane ways our own world ignores cries for help until monumental tragedy erupts.
“The Brazilian turbot frog was added to the endangered species list today. That’s the third animal this year.”
As scientific consensus declares our world is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction, society insists we carry on as though nothing has changed. Capitalism numbs us with relentless demands, leaving little room for mourning. Extinction becomes something to scroll past, something someone else will fix. It hums behind commutes and the tired sigh at the end of a shift. The weight of it is carried silently by those who still feel it, those whose compassion refuses to shut down.
In The Virgin Suicides, this dynamic is captured in miniature. Cecilia speaks with clarity, her words sharpened by her reserved demeanor, but her mother is distracted—hands busy performing unpaid domestic labor, mind splintered across endless obligations. It is not cruelty that keeps her from actively engaging, but exhaustion, the kind that dulls empathy. The Lisbon household becomes a metaphor for our society at large: a place where care exists but isn’t given the attention it deserves, where voices of warning are muffled by the ceaseless clatter of survival, societal expectations, and maintaining the status quo.
Unlike the five mass extinctions that came before—driven by meteors or volcanic eruptions—this one is driven by humans. Greenhouse gases emitted in the process of manufacturing unnecessary goods raise global temperatures, land-use change devours habitats to grow crops for animals that were bred purely for the sale of their dead bodies, and synthetic chemicals permeate ecosystems. Species are vanishing at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate with nearly 40% of amphibians and a third of all assessed species now standing on the brink of existence.
To feel this devastation while living under the very system that creates it is infuriating. Capitalism steals our time and mental energy even as it drives pollution and ecological collapse. Simultaneously, our political and economic systems block climate solutions because they are not immediately profitable. Life on Earth is sacrificed for quarterly earnings reports.
During the Trump administration, this unraveling only accelerated. The EPA pursued the largest deregulatory campaign in U.S. history, rolling back more than thirty protections on clean air, water, and climate. Efforts were made to revoke the endangerment finding—the scientific foundation for regulating greenhouse gases—effectively stripping federal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy expanded oil and gas leasing and expedited approvals for liquefied natural gas. By allowing for increased, unregulated emissions as scientists warn of irreversible tipping points, the administration made its position clear: profit will be protected, even if it means sacrificing life itself.
Meanwhile, the National Environmental Policy Act was hollowed out, cutting public input and oversight, giving corporations unprecedented access to public lands with minimal accountability. The Endangered Species Act was revised so that only direct killing of a species counted as “harm,” allowing habitat destruction from mining, logging, and development even in areas where species are facing extinction.
The result: expanded drilling and logging in once-protected areas, collapsing protection of land and wildlife, and increasing threats to species from the lynx to the cutthroat trout.
This is the disease that will kill the planet, the relentless prioritization of corporations and profit over living beings. Entire species were written off as collateral damage for short-term profit. It is the same logic that underpins patriarchy and fascism: that life—human or nonhuman—can be measured, exploited, and discarded when inconvenient.
Under U.S. law, corporations are granted personhood, giving businesses more rights than entire species of animals that are capable of feeling grief and pain as their food supply and habitats are destroyed.
Just as entire species are erased for profit, so too are people devalued when their existence doesn’t serve the dominant order.
“Everyone, look! His ears wiggle if you scratch his chin!”
At Cecilia’s party, a boy with Down syndrome named Joe becomes the target of thoughtless amusement. The guests chant for Joe to “sing [his] song,” laugh as they scratch under his chin to make his ears wiggle, and reduce him to a spectacle. Cecilia’s expression grows doleful before she quietly excuses herself to her room, for the last time.
The cruelty at this party echoes forward into our own time, where governments stage wars against those who deviate from the dominant mold. Fascist systems rely on this dehumanization—reducing entire populations to caricatures or burdens—to justify harm.
I do not blame the boys mocking Joe; they are children shaped by a society that rewards cruelty and punishes difference. In this world, vulnerability is branded as weakness, and to stand out is to invite ridicule. Cecilia, by contrast, represents those who refuse to fall under the spell of apathy—the ones who can recognize injustice without needing it explained and feel it too heavily to ever partake in being part of the status quo that upholds it.
The Trump administration echoed this mockery with severe, targeted campaigns against marginalized groups, including disabled people. It slashed workplace protections, undermined housing rights, cut critical disability services like Medicaid, and weakened equity in education—each policy signaling that disabled people were obstacles to profit rather than humans deserving dignity.
Executive orders called for forced institutionalization of people with mental health disabilities and the unhoused, while funding was cut from community-based, evidence-backed programs. Simultaneously, decades of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts were unraveled, rolling back protections for women, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and minority-owned businesses.
Dehumanization, once embedded in law, normalizes violence against the most marginalized. This has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since the founding of our nation, enabling systemic oppression of marginalized groups for centuries.
To stand with Cecilia is to know the ache of compassion. To witness systemic cruelty with an open heart is to carry grief, to refuse numbness, and to choose solidarity over convenience, even when it hurts. It binds us to one another, insisting that we recognize injustice rather than look away.
“Elm trees. How many pages can you write about dying trees?”
As the boys sift through Cecilia’s journal, they dismiss her many entries on the elm trees in their neighborhood as boring. Yet her attention to the ordinary is a radical act.
Throughout the film, the dying elm trees stand as a symbol of decline—a slow disease spreading through the neighborhood, mirroring the suffocation inside the Lisbon home. The neighborhood’s impulse to cut them down reflects the desire to sanitize decay, to maintain a façade of suburban stability by erasing what feels uncomfortable.
Cecilia’s devotion to protecting the elms is her refusal to turn away from truth and suffering. She embodies what it means to remain present with loss in a culture that prefers distraction, denial, forgetting, and toxic positivity. To mourn openly, to name tragedy, to refuse normalization is itself resistance.
In our own time, being able to grieve climate and humanitarian crises is resistance: it breaks through the capitalist logic that tells us to keep working, keep consuming, keep scrolling. The girls’ ability to be present with the dying trees mirrors those who understand the magnitude of loss our planet is currently experiencing, yet continue trying to heal it.
Climate optimism divorced from grief is blind ignorance. To pretend that the reversal of climate protections and the acceleration of planetary damage under Trump’s policies are anything less than devastating is dishonest. But grief need not paralyze us.
When we allow ourselves to feel the weight of what has been lost, we clear the ground for informed action—organizing, advocating, voting, defending the vulnerable, and demanding policies that restore life and dignity.
“Given Lux’s failure to make curfew, everyone expected a crackdown. But few expected it would be so drastic.”
When Lux breaks curfew on the night of the homecoming dance, all the sisters are punished. Their brief taste of freedom collapses into total isolation. Lux is forced to destroy her rock records—ritualistically cutting off rebellion and self-expression.
This scene reflects a broader political truth: freedoms granted to women under patriarchy are always conditional. When women step too far outside the lines, those freedoms are swiftly revoked.
The Lisbon sisters’ confinement reflects the powerful backlash against feminist gains over recent decades. Throughout the 2010s, feminist activism surged globally: #MeToo exposed pervasive sexual harassment, more women entered parliaments and leadership positions, and advances in reproductive rights, education, and workplace protections expanded possibilities for women worldwide. Intersectional approaches linked gender justice to racial, economic, and environmental struggles, increasing visibility and solidarity.
However, the early 2020s witnessed a wrenching rollback. The Trump administration catalyzed a rapid erosion of women’s rights: abortion access was severely restricted in multiple states, federal funding for women’s health and family planning was slashed by billions, and research on women’s health was defunded. These efforts often weaponized “gender ideology” rhetoric to justify aggressive anti-rights campaigns, fueling a broader resurgence of fascist and ultraconservative forces globally.
The persistence of this backlash reveals a grim truth: women’s freedoms remain fragile, granted only on patriarchal terms. The Lisbon sisters’ punishment after their brief glimpse of freedom is a stark metaphor for our moment—reminding us that the struggle for bodily autonomy, justice, and liberation from patriarchal control is far from over.
“If the boats didn’t bring the fungus from Europe, none of this would have happened.”
As the landscapers prepare to tear down Cecilia’s beloved elm, the sisters cry out in protest. Bonnie reminds us that Dutch elm disease was not some inevitable act of nature but a byproduct of human trade and carelessness—fungus carried across oceans on ships, entwined with commerce. The landscapers’ solution, cutting the tree at its base, is cruelly ironic: it attacks the symptom while leaving the deeper systems of circulation and extraction that enabled the disease in the first place untouched.
Likewise, mainstream visions of “green growth” treat ecological collapse as a technical glitch to be patched with electric cars and renewable technologies—solutions often accessible only to the privileged—while ignoring the extractive capitalist, colonial, and industrial systems that drive ongoing environmental devastation.
The logic of infinite growth, heralded as progress, clashes fundamentally with the reality of a finite Earth. Humanity currently consumes natural resources at a rate equivalent to 1.7 Earths annually, outpacing the planet’s ability to regenerate.
Efficiency gains boasted about by green growth advocates often provoke more consumption rather than less, and “decoupling” growth from extraction remains illusory at the scale our survival demands. Overreliance on technological solutions and market-driven approaches risks perpetuating exploitation and inequality rather than remedying them.
True repair requires a reimagining of how we live with the land and with one another. A holistic response sees ecological, social, technological and economic systems as bound together, demanding solutions that honor planetary limits while centering justice and care. It means dismantling the conditions that created the climate crisis, and building systems rooted in reciprocity, not profit.
“Our daughter showed us an article. It’s a less aggressive therapy.”
While the sisters continue to protect Cecilia’s elm tree, their father recalls her suggestion of a less aggressive therapy than cutting them down and offers it to the landscapers.
The treatment Cecilia proposed echoes the values of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism critiques patriarchal systems that dominate and exploit both women and the natural world, offering instead an ethic of holistic care, reciprocity, and regeneration. It emphasizes that nurturing and healing are not sentimental choices but ethical necessities.
Cecilia’s quiet advocacy for regeneration over destruction mirrors this ethos. She resists the reflex toward violence and control, choosing repair and restoration instead.
Yet the suggestion is brushed aside, dismissed as impractical. The landscaper embodies the worldview of patriarchal capitalism: one that trusts only in domination and quick fixes, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the need for deeper transformation. From this vantage, technological solutions are enough, while the roots of exploitation—patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism—remain invisible, untouched.
This denial exposes the obstacle at the heart of our ecological crisis. The same system that isolates the girls and destroys the elms is the one that devours the earth’s resources and rescinds women’s rights when our presence threatens its control.
Without confronting the systems that train us to treat life as disposable, attempts at “repair” will replicate the same harm. True healing demands more: a commitment to regenerative ways of living grounded in justice, care, and respect—the very principles ecofeminism offers, and the wisdom the Lisbon sisters carried in their refusal to turn destruction into inevitability.
“It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them… and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time.”
After the sisters’ deaths, the neighborhood boys turn them into myth, stitching together fragments and half-memories.
This is how collapse is so often met: we romanticize what is gone rather than fight for what remains. We write elegies for species we failed to save. Memory becomes a poor substitute for justice.
The Lisbon girls did not need elegy; they needed to be heard. The same is true of our burning forests, our poisoned rivers, our sisters who are having their rights revoked and our neighbors who are treated as disposable by systems of profit and control.
The tragedy of The Virgin Suicides is not only the girls’ deaths but the silence that surrounded them—the refusal to recognize despair until it was too late. The greater tragedy would be to repeat that mistake now—to ignore grief, to dismiss the calls for change—until it is too late.
