This review essay reflects on Renee Lertzman’s Environmental Melancholia (2015), which understands human engagement with ongoing ecological crises as predominantly defined by loss, melancholy and ambivalence. The book provides a psychoanalytic and psychosocial analysis of engagement and non-engagement with environmental issues, based on in-depth interviews with respondents who live in close proximity to ‘ecologically beleaguered’ places. This review provides a brief overview of Lertzman’s rationale, methodology and analysis. It then offers some critical reflections on the dimensions of engagement Lertzman offers, in terms of her understanding of the nature of loss, the salience of unconscious dynamics and her utilisation of the psychosocial.