In 2011, a friend of mine asked me to attend his one-person fringe theatre show, Sustainability the Musical. As one person fringe shows go, I admit I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. What I didn’t expect was my friend Michael working through – very publicly, and almost in real time – his climate grief.
During the play, Michael sang songs and gave monologues that laid out the science and the statistics of what we were doing to our planet, and in turn to ourselves. For the most part it was interesting, but nothing I wasn’t aware of.
Then the mood changed and Michael shared a story of growing up in a wild part of Ontario, and his encounter and connection with a wolf, and its eventual death that led him to keep that wolf’s canine with him wherever he went.
In processing the wolf’s death on stage, it felt like Michael was working through something much more profound: He was mourning our planet and our future.
Fast forward a decade to the summer of fire and floods, along with the latest IPCC report, and climate grief is becoming a bit of a buzzword. Before it, like so many environmental buzzwords before it, takes on a meaning completely removed from its original intent, it seems like a good idea to unpack the concept and explore what people are legitimately feeling.
As far back as 2008, psychologists have been exploring the connection between our changing climate and mental health. Authors Fritze, Blashki, Burke and Wiseman predicted at the time that
“understanding the full extent of the long term social and environmental challenges posed by climate change has the potential to create emotional distress and anxiety”
Psychologists have begun referring to this phenomenon as Climate Grief and Eco Anxiety. Although neither of these terms appear in the DSM yet, they are becoming more widely recognized, especially in young people.
Psychologists differentiate between climate grief, which is the sense that the planet is doomed and grieving its eventual loss, and eco-anxiety, which is a heightened sense of anxiety of the changes in climate that are to come, and a feeling of helplessness to stop them.
The causes of eco anxiety and climate grief however can be far greater than just a growing awareness of what we’re up against. They can also be fueled by homelessness or displacement from fires or floods, loss of income and loss of educational opportunities. Even things as simple as rising food costs and the increasing cost of basic utilities such as power and water can fuel eco-anxiety, along with unexpected outages of those services.
Earlier this year a neighbour who works in health care and has spent the past 18 month at the heart of the COVID response shared a story with me. She woke up to a power outage during the height of the first lockdown in Ontario. Her partner turned to her and asked, “Is that it for power? Is it ever coming back on again?” They laughed later about it, but the eco-anxiety he was expressing, though being fueled in part by the trauma of the COVID pandemic, was no less real.
In some places the impacts can be severe: In Australia, the social and economic impacts of the annual wildfire season have led to loss of economic security and an increase in stress, social isolation, relationship strain and even suicide.
Clearly this is a problem that will require a coordinated response sooner rather than later.
But in the meantime, and because as a society we love to push the solution for complex societal problems back on the individual, there are things we can do to fight back when eco-anxiety or climate grief start to loom.
Psychologists are almost universally agreed that the one thing we can do at the individual level is to take constructive action.
In a brilliant Twitter thread, award winning Fantasy and Science Fiction Author T. Kingfisher explained the value of action vs. brooding.
At the heart of Kingfisher’s comical suggestion is the psychological principle of using action to overcome feelings of despair. Rather than going and making a wholesale change in one’s life, small changes to a person’s daily routine to help save the planet can help reclaim a sense of power over what seems otherwise inevitable, and will grow steadily to the point where an individual feels they are making a significant impact. What seems to help the most, is the moment when one’s actions inspire others to take action themselves.
Or as Michael from the beginning of this article wrote me:
Overall, it's useful to take the overwhelmingly huge scale of the thing and break it up into smaller pieces. Take it one step at a time, one day at a time, one issue at a time, like recovering from addiction, until you get a handle on it enough to step back and consider a bigger scale again. And keep an eye out for upsides, because there are always upsides, hiding inside the crap, and sometimes you catch the glint of one and you can take it out and polish it and make it a touchstone that keeps you going. Those nuggets are crazy precious, because they're not only the things you need to wave in front of other people to motivate them (since negative motivations only go so far), but you start accumulating a litany of them for yourself as well and can count them in your head like a Catholic with a set of rosary beads when you feel disheartened.
Indeed, the one time I spoke to someone who had listened to an episode of The Environmental Urbanist radio show who was then inspired to start her own neighbourhood park clean up in Toronto was enough of a boost to take me through a serious low in my own climate grief. Michael is right – enough of these small wins pieced together can lead you to realize that there is a way forward, and we can make the best of a bad situation.
The little actions won’t necessarily solve the problem, because the solutions we need are huge and require strong government interventions.. Those small actions though, as Michael suggests, can inspire others, and lead to the kind of widespread awareness that puts enough pressure on political leaders that they feel they have no other choice but to do the right thing.
In the face of what already seem like overwhelming odds, it may be the best chance we have.
Time’s up for Uber
This week, Corey Doctorow shared a fascinating thread that looked into the business practices and balance sheet of ride hailing application Uber, and concluded that it will very soon be bankrupt.
Uber’s impact on cities has been considerable. By making a low cost, highly convenient travel option that externalized much of its costs onto cities and its drivers, Uber drove out investment in transit, made streets unsafe for cyclists, and clogged the streets with pollution emitting vehicles far in excess of what cities were prepared or had planned for. The service has never made a profit.
Now, according to Doctorow, both Uber’s cash and time are running out. I certainly hope that once it’s gone, we can go back to building the higher order rapid transit that our cities so desperately need in order to green themselves for the future.
The Biggest Fire of All
ABC news reported last week that the forest fires in the Northern Boreal Forest in Siberia are bigger than all the other fires currently burning in the world, combined.
In Yakutia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, the fire has been burning since last spring and is now the largest ever recorded.
In that region, the fire is currently 1.5 million Hectares and authorities have neither the staff nor resources to bring it under control.
The fires are being blamed on record heat and drought.
Partial Moratorium on Old Growth Forest Logging
The Tyee reported that the Pacheedaht, Ditidaht and Huu-ay-aht first nations, which had demanded a moratorium on logging in their territory, had been granted it by Premier John Horgan last week.
While the remaining First Nations whose territories also include old growth forests are suspicious of continued delays before the moratoriums they have demanded are announced, this appears to be the first sign that that Horgan government was willing to consider restricting the clear cutting of these vital, and extremely rare ecosystems.
Fewer than 3% of BC’s forests still contain trees that are classified as old growth. The fight to preserve them, centred around an area known and Fairy Creek, has been raging for months.
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