Thursday, May 14, 2015
The Great Grief: How
To Cope with Losing Our World
In order to respond
adequately, first we may need to mourn
'To cope with losing
our world,' writes Stoknes, 'requires us to descend through the anger into
mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism
bandwagon or escape into indifference.' (Photo: Nikola Jones/flickr/cc)
Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we
will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists,
just like you or I, struggle with
the emotions that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My
children—who are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in
the previous 3 million years,
and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate, and in
many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up in. How do we
relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?
Across different
populations, psychological
researchers have documented a long list of mental health consequences
of climate change: trauma, shock, stress, anxiety, depression, complicated
grief, strains on social relationships, substance abuse, sense of hopelessness,
fatalism, resignation, loss of autonomy and sense of control, as well as a loss
of personal and occupational identity.
This
more-than-personal sadness is what I call the “Great Grief”—a feeling that
rises in us as if from the Earth itself. Perhaps bears and dolphins, clear-cut
forests, fouled rivers, and the acidifying, plastic-laden oceans bear grief
inside them, too, just as we do. Every piece of climate news increasingly comes
with a sense of dread: is it too late to turn around? The notion that our
individual grief and emotional loss can actually be a reaction to the decline
of our air, water, and ecology rarely appears in conversation or the media. It
may crop up as fears about what kind of world our sons or daughters will face.
But where do we bring it? Some bring it privately to a therapist. It is as if
this topic is not supposed to be publicly discussed.
This Great Grief
recently re-surfaced for me upon reading news about the corals on the brink of
death due to warming oceans as well as overfishing of Patagonian toothfish in
plastic laden oceans. Is this a surging wave of grief arriving from the deep
seas, from the ruthlessness and sadness of the ongoing destruction? Or is it
just a personal whim? As a psychologist I’ve learned not to scoff at such
reactions, or movements in the soul, but to honor them.
A growing body of
research has brought evidence from focus groups and interviews with people
affected by droughts, floods, and coastal erosion. When elicited, participants
express deep distress over losses that climate disruptions are bringing. It is
also aggravated by what they perceive as inadequate and fragmented local,
national and global responses. In a study by researcher Susanne Moser on
coastal communities, one typical participant reports: “And it really sets in,
the reality of what we're trying to hold back here. And it does seem almost
futile, with all the government agencies that get in the way, the sheer cost of
doing something like that – it seems hopeless. And that's kind of depressing,
because I love this area.” In another study by sociologist Kari Norgaard, one
participant living by a river exclaims: “It’s like, you want to be a proud
person and if you draw your identity from the river and when the river is
degraded, that reflects on you.” Another informant experiencing extended
drought explained to professor Glenn Albrecht’s team that even if “you’ve got a
pool there – but you don’t really want to go outside, it’s really yucky
outside, you don’t want to go out.”
A recent climate
survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason
University Center for Climate Change Communication had this startling
statistic: “Most Americans (74%) say they only ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ discuss
global warming with family and friends, a number that has grown
substantially since 2008 (60%).” Emphasis mine.
These quotes and
statistics underscore the reality that many prefer to avoid or not dwell
in—this Mordor-esque land of eco-anxiety, anger, despair, and depression. One
of denial’s essential life-enhancing functions is to keep us more comfortable
by blotting out this inner, wintry darkness.
The climate survey,
however, also has this encouraging finding: “Americans are nine times more
likely to lean toward the view that it is people’s responsibility to care for
the Earth and its resources (62%) than toward the belief that it is our right
to use the Earth and its resources for our own benefit (7%).”
So, what if instead of
continuing to avoid this hurt and grief and despair, or only blaming them—the
corporations, politicians, agrobusinesses, loggers, or corrupt bureaucrats—for
it, we could try to lean into, and accept such feelings. We could acknowledge
them for what they are rather than dismissing them as wrong, as a personal
weakness or somebody else’s fault. It seems, somehow, important to persist and
get in touch with the despair itself, as it arises from the degradation of the
natural world. As a culture we may uncover some truths hinted at by feelings we
tend to discredit as depressive. These truths include that they accurately
reflect the state of ecology in our world. More than half of all animals
gone in the last forty years, according to the Living Planet Index. Most
ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably, according to Millennium
Assessment Report. We’re living inside a mass extinction event, says many biologists,
but without hardly consciously noticing.
In order to respond
adequately, we may need to mourn these losses. Insufficient mourning keeps us
numb or stuck in anger at them, which only feeds the cultural
polarization. But for this to happen, the presence of supportive voices and
models are needed. It is far harder to get acceptance of our difficulty and
despair, and to mourn without someone else’s explicit affirmation and empathy.
Contact with the pain
of the world, however, does not only bring grief but can also open the heart to
reach out to all things still living. It holds the potential to break open the
psychic numbing. Maybe there is also community to be found among like-hearted
people, among those who also can admit they’ve been touched by this “Great
Grief,” feeling the Earth’s sorrow, each in their own way. Not just individual
mourning is needed, but a shared process that leads onwards to public
re-engagement in cultural solutions. Working out our own answers as honestly as
we can, as individuals and as communities, is rapidly becoming a requirement
for psychological health.
To cope with losing
our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness,
not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into
indifference. And with this deepening, an extended caring and gratitude may
open us to what is still here, and finally, to acting accordingly.
This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be
sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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