The Necessity of Ecological Grief

Ecological grief is the feeling of profound loss one experiences when a landscape, species, or ecosystem changes significantly or is destroyed. (See also solastalgia.)  

As we continue to move out of the relatively stable environment of the Holocene and further into the climatic chaos of the Anthropocene, we will experience ecological grief more and more.

And it’s so important that we don’t avoid it.

When I first started researching and writing about the climate crisis, I didn’t initially recognize my emotional response to this work as grief; I wrote it off as fear and rage. But I felt heavy and slow. My work was stagnant, and I tried to rationalize my feelings with factual information. The more evidence and data the better. This data dump kept me busy and filled me to the brim with self-righteous intellectualism. But it didn’t do anything to acknowledge or curb my grief.

Ecophilosopher Timothy Morton describes this information-dump avoidance perfectly in their book Being Ecological: 

“It’s as if we are waiting for just the right kind of data, then we can start living in accord with it. But this data will never arrive because it’s [overwhelming] delivery mode is designed to prevent the appropriate reaction. [In the meantime] we find ourselves in the midst of horribly confusing, traumatic events such as global warming and mass extinction, and we don’t have much of an idea of how to live that.”

Morton was right. When I first started this work, I kept myself busy with grim statistics and talking points about climate change without facing the heartbreak all of this information caused me. And until I faced the heartbreak of living in a collapsing climate, my work went nowhere.

Most of us understand the value of grief within certain contexts like losing loved ones or when we’re forced to part with the wholeness of our health or identities. But our understanding of grief stops short when it comes to the natural world. 

I blame some of this disconnect on rationalism and how it steers science towards an undemonstrative and clinical objectivity. When scientists do get emotional about their research, they are deemed unprofessional and untrustworthy. (Once again, if I could travel back in time, I would visit the 17th century, find René Descartes, and slap him around a bit.)

Avoiding ecological grief is also a self-defense maneuver. Many of us already practice this self-defense while avoiding the more familiar griefs in our lives–even while understanding the value of that grief.

But I suspect that most of us realize ecological grief is different–more complicated. Every breaking and unprecedented news cycle is a reminder that this grief will not shrink or follow a five-stage trajectory. As these horrifying disasters pile up, ecological grief will likely get bigger and sharper in the coming years.

Unfortunately ecological grief is here to stay whether or not we acknowledge it. Even if we stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today–which is something we should absolutely be trying to do despite the billion dollar messaging of groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council–we still have to deal with the catastrophic effects of the 1.5° C of warming that has already happened in the Industrialized world. 

Everyone alive today will be dealing with the effects of climate change for the rest of our lives–either through a screen or through our own windows. 

If you want to be truly engaged with the work that will stop climate change for future generations, you have to first accept and grieve that reality.

Before starting this work, thinking about climate change caused me to experience complete existential panic. These thoughts gave me what I call the big empties–those nihilistic flashes when I’m suddenly and hyper aware of my own mortality, an existential wave reminding me that one day my thinking brain will no longer think. 

Yikes.

After years of holding space for ecological grief on a daily basis, that panic feels less like a scream that drowns out everything else and more like a low buzz. Some days it’s more noticeable than others, but it rarely keeps me from doing this work.

Grieving climate collapse isn’t comfortable and it isn’t easy. It won’t stop these disasters from coming. But the more time you spend engaging with the ecological grief that you’re likely feeling, the less overwhelming that grief becomes.

In the book Bereavement: Grief in the Adult Life, grief is described as “the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers, which leaves us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our lives and unprepared to help others to cope with the losses in theirs” (Parkes and Prigerson, 6).

Ecological grief is a commitment. But if we want a chance of disrupting the systems that generate this misery while driving our environment towards total collapse, we have to first deal with our ecological grief–individually and collectively.