Ecological grief is usually analyzed among people and communities whose lands, livelihoods, species relations, safety, cultural continuity, and place attachments are directly altered by environmental change. This Perspective extends that scholarship to scientific communities as research-mediated witnesses of ecological loss while maintaining a strict ethical distinction between direct lived harm and scientific distress. The article advances ecological grief science in five ways. First, it moves analysis beyond individual resilience, burnout, and communication failure by locating grief-like scientific distress within knowledge governance. Second, it connects ecological grief scholarship with Earth-system risk governance, including planetary boundaries, tipping points, cascading risk, resilience governance, and anticipatory governance. Third, it specifies a cross-level mechanism linking repeated ecological observation and actionability appraisal at the micro level, research-organizational and boundary mediation at the meso level, and governance mandates and authority structures at the macro level. Fourth, it converts the concept into propositions, boundary conditions, rival explanations, and observable indicators for empirical research. Fifth, it uses Sikkim in the Eastern Himalaya as an illustrative plausibility probe to show how evidence on alpine ecological change, spring decline and repair, hydropower contestation, Indigenous territorial authority, and South Lhonak glacial-lake hazard can accumulate while authority remains sectoral and fragmented.