Climate Grief – Grief Is The Word

Posted on January 12, 2020April 3, 2021 by Alison H

Australia is burning

Something unimaginably horrific is taking place across Australia at this moment. It is impossible to avoid the terrible news of the unstoppable fires sweeping across the country, too big to be controlled, too big to be stopped.

People have died; many more have lost their homes. Important ecosystems have been destroyed, and millions and millions of animals have been killed. It has been estimated that this fire season will kill around 1 billion animals. That estimate is creeping up all the time – I’ve heard it may be as many as 1.25 billion.

How can we even begin to imagine that number, that much suffering and pain and fear? The mind doesn’t seem able to stretch far enough to imagine something so huge. How can we take it in?

Those who are directly affected by these fires are suffering greatly at the moment, with ongoing trauma, raw grief at the loss of loved ones, homes, livelihoods, communities, ways of life, as well as the animals and the trees. Fear for their futures – when will it happen again? This is going to take a lot to recover from, for Australia as a country.

For those of us watching from afar, who are not dealing with the immediate impacts of it, we are still very much affected; there is something particularly horrific about the scale of loss of wildlife and ecosystems here, that is hitting home more deeply than anything has before. I know I’m not alone in feeling this – many of us across the world are feeling the same way. It feels like as a planet we have suffered a deep wound with this loss. We may not be grieving a personal loss, but we are grieving a collective one. And the knowledge that humanity has caused this great harm to so many other species is very hard to bear.

One element of the tragedy of it is that what we are seeing now in Australia has been predicted for years. We’ve known where we were heading, and we haven’t managed to take enough steps to avoid our fate. And the most frightening fact is that this is only the beginning. This is climate breakdown in action; it has started, but what will come next?

It was Cassandra in Ancient Greek mythology, who always struck me as the most tragic figure of all. She was gifted with the ability to know the future but cursed never to be believed. I can’t avoid making the comparison with many in today’s world – many of us have been shouting increasingly loudly for years, for decades. But the truth, the science, hasn’t been believed or attended to; at least not by those with the power to take action to save us.

And how should we be responding to this? How can we adequately respond to death and suffering on such a scale? It is almost too hard to look at, but I think we must look at it. We must look at the terrible images of burned and injured or dead animals that are coming out now. We must allow ourselves to open up to feeling the magnitude of this catastrophe. If we block this out or forget that it is unprecedented in its awfulness, then it will become normalised – and that must not happen.

This is unbearable and we owe it to those creatures who lived and died to recognise that it has happened. Anger is an appropriate response; rage and fury, frustration and despair.

Sorrow and sadness are what many of us are feeling; let us weep together. I have read that it is likely that some species have been totally destroyed by this fire; a sudden wiping out of existence. More extinctions; and again, our fault. How can we bear the shame and guilt of this? That is also something to weep for. How could we do this to the other creatures that we share the planet with? What right do we have to destroy everyone’s world? It is sickening; how could we knowingly head down this path and not manage to stop ourselves in time? What have we done?

The Kangaroo Island Dunnart, a tiny population of endangered mouse-like marsupials, is feared lost after fire swept through its entire known habitat range in a couple of days.

The survival of the endangered Glossy Black Cockatoo is also in doubt as its entire habitat has been destroyed on Kangaroo Island.

Koalas were also in trouble before these terrible fires; their populations have fallen by almost a half since 1990. They are now an endangered species, at risk of extinction.

It is terrifying – watching the dreadful images and hearing stories about the millions of people breathing toxic air. What have we done to our home and our future? What legacy are we leaving to the next generation? If you aren’t terrified by this, then you probably have your head in the sand. Fear is a very reasonable thing to be feeling right now.

How do we cope with all of this, these emotions demanding to be felt?

Let’s feel our grief, let’s speak of it and cry together, support each other’s pain, and recognise the magnitude of our own.

We can do the following: take in the individual stories of tragedy, of heroism, of loss and pain and despair and fear. We can read the stories and view the images and feel the loss, alongside those who are there. Let us feel all of it; let us not drown it out with business as usual, with entertainment, distraction, life as usual.

We can do what we can to let our fellow humans in Australia know that they are not alone, that we are watching and caring and grieving with them. And we can do what we can to help in practical ways; there are now so many appeals to donate money to, if we can spare anything.

And then let us direct our fear and our anger into protest; let’s stand up and say, ‘we refuse to tolerate this; this must be prevented from happening again.’ This is climate breakdown in action, and we must do all we can to prevent it from getting worse.

We must keep shouting, and protesting, and trying everything possible to get those in power to take action. We do have power as individuals, when we gather collectively and refuse to be ignored. Life these days is not ‘business as usual’, so we must stop pretending that the old rules apply. The rules have changed, so we need to change.

If we do not manage to get real change accomplished now, this will surely happen again. It will get worse and more will be lost, until there is nothing left.

Finally, we honour those who are lost; the people who lost their lives, the cows and the sheep and the horses and the pigs and the dogs and the cats and the koalas and the kangaroos and the birds and the small mammals and the rodents and the marsupials and the reptiles and the insects and the trees and the plants. So many gone, so much pain and so much fear. Our hearts are broken for you all. The whole world is watching and the world weeps with you.

We will not forget.

Posted on September 29, 2019April 3, 2021 by Alison H · 2 Comments

Sometimes it won’t be ok

I used to have a safety net. It was just a feeling, but it was very real. And the funny thing is that I didn’t notice it was there until it disappeared.

It has gone now, but I remember it well. It was a sort of confidence in the universe, a sort of faith or certainty that everything would somehow work out alright in the end. Not very logical, I agree, but it was absolute and unwavering and always there. It didn’t really matter what I did or didn’t do in life, or whether things were tough at times, because eventually, when it really mattered, things would just work out. It would be ok in the end. There would be a balance of good luck to counteract the bad luck, happy times to outweigh the sad ones. And the general order of things would be maintained. The things that were supposed to happen would happen. My life milestones would be reached without any difficulty.

There was never any awareness of exactly how it would work out, just that it would.

For example, I always took it completely for granted that my life would turn out to have the same kind of shape as my parents’ life did, or my friends’, or the life of everyone else I saw around me, or the way novels, films and TV showed life to me. At some point in my twenties I would meet a man and we would fall in love with each other and then get married and then have several children. And, indeed, this is what has happened to almost everyone I know. Maybe not in their twenties – things have changed; but certainly at some point in their thirties. But it didn’t work out that way for me – not through lack of wanting it or trying to find it, or wishing or praying for it, or doing everything I could to achieve that outcome. And gradually my confidence that ‘things would just work out’ started to diminish. I knew by my late thirties that I was cutting it a little fine, but things would somehow work out ok, because they just had to. Any other outcome was inconceivable and I couldn’t allow myself to go there.

By my early forties I was really frightened because I couldn’t see how the universe was going to manage to work everything out in the way it had to be, but I still had some hope left that somehow, miraculously, it would.

But it didn’t.

Around the age of 44, I got real and my hope left me. And with it, this safety net, this feeling of the universe having my best interests at heart. A security blanket of reassurance to wrap around you when scary things happened. “It will be alright in the end”: I’ve woken up to the fact that this is the story I have been soothing myself with my whole life. It worked really well when I was a child, but I have learnt that it is a lie. Of course the universe doesn’t have my back – why should it? Terrible, unfair and undeserved things happen to good people all the time. I’m not special, so why should things miraculously work out the way I want them to? Sometimes, in low moments, I feel like the universe is actually trying to torture me (for unknown reasons), such as when I need a moment of peace and a heavily pregnant woman or someone with a newborn baby comes and sits down next to me on a train or in a café, or when someone at work asks me if I ever wanted children or why I don’t just adopt, or when my heart feels so broken that I’m surprised I am still alive.

But most of the time I realise that it is all completely random and that there is no reason why things didn’t work out the way I desperately wanted. It isn’t my fault, and it isn’t the fault of god or the universe. It is just that I had it wrong all along – and sometimes things just do not work out in the end. Sometimes things just are not ok and will never be ok. Sometimes our worst nightmares do come true. And we have to learn how to live without that treacherous safety net – it was never real anyway.

When my hopes of becoming a mother left me, all of my other hopes departed at the same time – it seems that they were all interconnected. When I ceased to believe that things would be ok, I found my eyes opened to a much clearer view of our shared future on this planet. I stopped believing that things would work out ok, in terms of humans waking up to the damage that we have caused to the climate and to our biodiversity. I had been hopeful for the previous couple of decades, and had been trying to change things in every way I could think of, knowing that somehow, eventually, we would all wake up and fix the problems we had caused on this planet, and that everything would be ok. But when I stopped kidding myself in one area, I couldn’t continue to delude myself in other areas. So all of my hope went. I now no longer feel any sense of denial that we are heading for very dark times – it seems impossible to avoid the future we have driven ourselves towards and I don’t believe that everything is going to work out ok in the end.

It makes the world a lot scarier, I can tell you. Living without hope or expectation is very hard and I don’t quite know how I’m doing it, but I can tell you that it is possible. Things like resilience, determination, integrity, and respect are what keep you going when you reach this place, instead of hope and faith. I no longer expect things to be ok in the future, even if the alternative is unimaginable. I do feel that hope is a kind of denial and is perhaps no longer helpful for us. Maybe the world needs more of us to live without that kind of denial, in these dark times. If we can bear to face head-on towards our likely future, then maybe we can mitigate some of the worst of it before it arrives. But if we continue to stick our fingers in our ears and lie to ourselves that ‘surely it’ll work out alright’, then I truly think we are in trouble.

Unlike the random chance of whether or not somebody will get to have children, there are actually things that can be done to change our future on this planet; we don’t have very much of a chance left, it is true, but we do know that if we continue not to act it will be much worse for us than if we start to act now. So I think we should act now, not in hope, but in determination to do the best we can in a terrible situation. We can grieve for what we know is lost and what we’ll lose in the future, while also working to preserve whatever we can of life on this planet. And we must do this hard work ourselves, because I don’t think the universe has our backs anymore.

Posted on June 6, 2019July 5, 2019 by Alison H

Extinction Grief, Climate Grief

We are in a unique position as human beings: to be alive right now, at this precise point in the earth’s history. Never before have we knowingly faced the possibility of our own extinction, and never have we known that we have brought this situation on ourselves. Human actions have caused climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.

Our powerlessness to halt our own destructive stupidity should be the trademark of our species, rather than our intelligence.

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

Not only that, but, knowing that our actions were leading to the destruction of our world, we have continued, even accelerated, down the same path through ignorance, avoidance, denial, greed, or short-term gain. Our powerlessness to halt our own destructive stupidity should be the trademark of our species, rather than our intelligence.

Is it any wonder that these realisations are causing us to recognise a new kind of affliction which is facing so many of us? Feelings of grief, anger, desolation, hopelessness, guilt, fear, frustration, anxiety, depression, emptiness, and denial are rife in the world today. It may well be that our existential concerns about Earth and humanity’s future are what are underlying the mental health epidemic which is facing Western society today. This ‘climate grief’ is a newly recognised phenomenon, but one which is increasingly being talked about and taken seriously.

And it isn’t just our own future destruction that we are grieving. We have created a situation in which we are facing a massive extinction on this planet, through loss of habitats, the introduction of invasive species, and climate disruption. We are losing so many species, the most since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and we know that we are causing this mass extinction phase ourselves. Currently we are losing around 200 species every day (1,000 times the ‘natural’ rate), and are facing a potential loss of 50% of all species on the planet within the next 30 years. According to the IUCN, more than 27,000 species are threatened with extinction; and that is just the species we know about.

We are causing the loss of well-known animals such as rhinos and tigers and polar bears, as well as those we have never had the chance to see, or to name. Many have been destroyed before we had the chance to see them. Not just animals, but plants and trees and other organisms. They are disappearing forever, these unique beings who are the final results of millions of years of evolution. Gone. Because of us. They are impossible to replace and our ecosystem, what survives of it, will be immensely poorer for their loss. Every creature had a place in this system, and the system is diminished without them.

This kind of grief is almost the opposite of a death loss. This is the absence of a birth, any birth, ever again. It is almost unimaginably vast, as a loss.

As Joanna Macy says, “This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.”