As the earth transitions into a more industrial world, it is becoming less green, diverse and resilient. Scientists around the world are researching how humans have sped up climate change and harmed the earth’s vitality. Because of these well-researched effects, we are seeing an increase in the development of Ecogrief. Ecogrief is defined by many as the process in which a person experiences powerful feelings of loss in response to a world affected by climate change. While this article speaks of a lot of loss, it is crucial to understand that the world is not beyond saving, that there is much space for growing awareness of our feelings and for reviving a healthy relationship with our planet.
What is Ecogrief?
Ecogrief is a response within our emotional selves that represents our fear, sadness and anger at the sight and knowledge of climate change, which comes in many forms. We see climate change every day, regardless of whether we know it or not (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). Perhaps we’ve noticed that our favorite parks are more polluted, or we’ve seen how changing ocean temperatures have affected fishing in our small towns, or the increase in hurricane or wildfire frequencies worldwide has impacted us. Climate change is in the news all the time. Those malnourished polar bears in all those documentaries… Yes, that's climate change. In addition to this, we see it in the faces of others. We see it as poverty, induced by the strains of finite resources and increasing labor demands without realistic or livable wage. We see it in climate refugees, people impacted so negatively by climate change that they must move from their homes.
We are constantly aware of these pains in our lives and there is a common cause. It’s no wonder we are feeling grief. But there truly is so much to learn from this grief, and by feeling it and learning from it, it can take less hold on our lives. Psychologists define the effects of grief in the following forms:
Grief can cause us to deny the thing that is inciting sadness.
Grief can make us feel lethargic and make it difficult to physically and socially move through our lives.
Unresolved grief can feel very uncomfortable in the body, even painful at times.
Unresolved and misunderstood grief can change our worldview in negative ways or begin to produce insecurities within us.
In attempts to cope with grief (instead of healing through it), we might become emotionally numb, which negatively affects relationships.
Research suggests that when resolved, processed grief can help us become healthier, psychologically stronger and more resilient individuals. (Neimeyer, 2016). However, access to mental health resources are not available to all. Especially for an issue like ecogrief, there are not enough professionals that can delve into the ecological, psychological, economic, sociological and therapeutic knowledge that it takes to truly learn and heal through this grief! So it makes sense why we feel we are at a loss or alone in this grief.
As research increases studying ecogrief and its underlying ecological, psychological, economic, and sociological phenomena, we come to understand better and better the different ways in which we can heal from it. And the good news is, when we really begin to heal ourselves of our ecogrief, we also grow our capacities to heal the earth.
For this purpose, we can explore some perspectives on how to move through ecogrief as it shows up in our lives.
How to Deal/Process Ecogrief
Action / Get Involved! Because ecogrief is a deep form of loss, we can challenge the loss with action. There is a common fear we have that climate change is irreversible and that the earth is unsalvageable. However, it is not! We are at a crucial place in our lives to be able to change the ultimate outcome of our actions. Much of the knowledge and technology we need to be able to improve the negative effects we have had also exists. It is now up to all of us to change our individual actions by becoming more involved in our communities (Jordan & Hinds, 2016). This may show up as:
Learning about your carbon imprint and making changes in your lifestyle to decrease it (being zero waste?)
Joining volunteer groups to remove invasive species or plant native species
Planting a garden in your home
Volunteering with an local eco organization
What this means is getting involved! OC Habitats, for those reading here in Orange County, is a great place to volunteer. Here, we build community and talk about our feelings regarding the earth. Real change and impact starts small. A lot of these things start at home. By directly positively affecting the roots of our ecogrief, by reversing what we are losing, we begin to let go of that grief.
Build Community. Although many of us lead busy lives, we all require a support system to lean on. Speaking about grief and explaining our feelings to people we can be vulnerable with, can very much help us move through these negative emotions. While therapy is expensive, ecotherapy also exists. See OCH’s blog for an article on Ecotherapy to learn more. And all people, regardless of access to therapy or ecotherapy, have the right to feel and process negative emotions. Negative emotions are healthy and inform us about what we care about in the world. Not only does sadness teach us in that moment how much the earth means to us, it also makes a deep connection between our outer and inner realities, grounding us in the experiences that make us so deeply human.
Consumption Literacy. Consumption literacy means understanding how climate change is produced by capitalism and industrialization. Learning about industries that use unethical practices and doing our best to avoid them can greatly reduce the amount of negative influence we individually have. The trick here is not to try and negate the negative effects we have, but to minimize them in a way that makes sense for our individual lives. Researching which products negatively harm the environment may influence how you support businesses. For example, this may show up as:
Learning about the palm oil industry’s role in deforestation which prompts you to buy different kinds of similarly-priced, but responsibly sourced candy.
Investing in reusable lunch bags instead of buying ziploc bags
It’s about ethically sourcing your products and goods. When we make tiny actions to care for the Earth, we heal our grief and ourselves.
Media awareness. Tuning out media fear-mongering can be really helpful in our quest to understand and heal ecogrief. Here, the goal is not to eliminate the cause of the feelings we have, but instead to tune it to a personal level in which we can deal with the feelings more effectively. For example, it doesn't make sense to scroll through hundreds of social media posts where we see many new sad facts about animals or the earth, only to feel hopeless at the end of the day and fall asleep feeling lethargic and melancholy. Perhaps a healthier balance looks like doing intentional research once a week, keeping up with what’s going on in the world and learning how to make a difference. Perhaps it’s reading an article like this once a week. There are no limits to the rules we can set for ourselves for how much information we take in.
This goes for positive messaging as well! Perhaps a healthier balance for those who have struggled with this issue, might involve researching positive news for an hour and then balancing it with thirty minutes of reading the sad, cold facts. Remember as well, that sadness is not a bad thing. In fact, feeling it and learning from it is not only good, but also healthy and can propel us into deeper relationships and more profound senses of selves.
Hope. By understanding that the earth and nature are not lost, we feel hopeful for the future. Developing a positive sense of self around ecogrief has greatly helped many to enact beliefs about helping others and the earth. So the last perspective we will share is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea behind a self-fulfilling prophecy is that a person believes a certain outcome will occur, leading them to act in a way that increases the likelihood that it will. Then the outcome they believed would happen… does happen. Thus, a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the world of therapy, there is much talk about how our self-sabotaging and self-defeating beliefs go on to produce the outcomes we very much fear. However, we can flip this idea on its head.Positive beliefs can produce the positive changes we want as well! To illustrate the importance of this, we provide this example:
If one person believes the world is going onto end, they might carry out harmful actions thinking these actions don’t matter. If another person believes a healthier world is possible, they might carry out actions that protect it.
What we believe about the world directly fosters the kind of outcomes we see in it. One prolific author, Adrienne Maree Brown describes the idea of “small is all,” which describes her belief that our small actions ripple out into the larger world every day, changing it. By understanding our small actions, we can improve our mental health and environment by decreasing complacency. We can and should believe in many good things because many good things are happening. The world is struggling. However, it is savable. We can reduce the negative things we have done and increase the positive. And by challenging the capitalism that runs the show and advocating for systems that honor human needs by not marketing them, we can fundamentally change long-term effects to become positive. Additionally, with multiple strategies for healing, we can learn from and heal our ecogrief at the same time that we heal nature.
Works Cited
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2
Friedlingstein, P., Jackson, R. B., Jones, M. W., Smith, A. J., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R. M., ... & Peters, G. P. (2022). Global Carbon Budget 2021. Earth System Science Data, 14(4), 1917-2005. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-1917-2022
Hickel, J. (2019). Is capitalism compatible with climate stability? Economy and Society, 48(1), 89–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2019.1564057
IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
Jevons, W. S. (1865). The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan.
Jordan, M., & Hinds, J. (2016). Ecotherapy: Theory, research and practice. Ecopsychology, 8(4), 208–216. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2016.0037
Kallis, G., Kostakis, V., Lange, S., & Muraca, B. (2020). The economic case for degrowth. Ecological Economics, 152, 236–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.03.026
Le Quéré, C., Jackson, R. B., Jones, M. W., Smith, A. J., Abernethy, S., Andrew, R. M., & Peters, G. P. (2020). Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement. Nature Climate Change, 10(7), 647–653. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0797-x
Neimeyer, R. A. (2016). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. Psychology Press.
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