What is ecological grief? | Psychology today

You probably remember wild bushfires raging across Australia in early 2020. Journalist Lorena Allam recalled bushwalking in her youth in the Yuin Nation and described the horror of watching everything go up in smoke: “For First Nations people, it also burns our memories, our sacred places, all the things that “make us up.” who we are. It is a special pain to forever lose what connects you to a place in the landscape.”

Environmental degradation is widespread. We hear more and more about the devastating effects of hurricanes, floods and wildfires, and many communities are affected by the slower but chronic effects of drought or melting sea ice. With all this destruction, lives and livelihoods are being lost immediately, but climate change also has serious mental health consequences that clinical psychologists are only beginning to unravel. These consequences include environmental degradation, which is closely linked to environmental damage.

In a landmark review, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis define ecological grief as grief felt in response to ecological loss. Existing studies have examined ecological suffering in contexts such as melting sea ice in the Arctic, rising temperatures in northeastern Siberia, long-term drought in the Australian wheat belt, or deforestation in rural Ghana.

But what is ecological grief? While the term ecological Sorrow may seem like an odd choice of words to you (for many, grief is usually limited to the loss of a loved one), there is a renewed focus in psychology on grief over non-fatal losses, such as separation, illness, pregnancy loss, etc., the loss of one’s pet.

Grief over non-death losses is often “disenfranchised,” meaning that it is not openly acknowledged or socially supported, but it is grief nonetheless, and the disenfranchisement exacerbates the difficulty of dealing with the emotion further. Of course, expanding the scope of grief makes the definition even more difficult because it raises the question of what is the common denominator that unites all these forms of grief.

Philosophers Matthew Ratcliffe and Louise Richardson argue that we can understand non-death loss if we define grief not as the loss of a person but as the loss of “life opportunities.” The idea is that the structure of our lives is a coherently organized arrangement of significant possibilities, such as our routines, expectations, projects, or pastimes.

Our loved ones are an essential part of our life structure. So when a loved one dies, our grief is the emotional process by which we come to understand the structural impact of the loss. However, not only our loved ones, but also our projects, our jobs or our pets can be, in different ways, integral to the fabric of our lives, and when we lose them we have to go through grief.

What ecological grief shows is that place can be equally integral to the fabric of our lives. Jeff Malpas, one of the most important thinkers on the nature of place, argues that the fabric of our lives, our sense of identity, is inextricably linked to the places “in and through which our lives take place—which means we cannot understand them . “We are independent of the places in which our lives unfold, even though those places may be complex and diverse.”

In Lawsuit for the landIn a community co-produced film about the impacts of climate change, Tony Andersen, the mayor of the Nain community in Labrador, clearly emphasizes the connection between place and identity as a central theme underlying ecological grief: “Inuit are people of that Sea ice. If there is no more sea ice, how can we be sea ice people? The places we live structure our life possibilities, using Ratcliffe and Richardson’s term. If sea ice melts too soon, river crossings, outdoor activities, hunting and festivals will be affected.

With the loss of these life opportunities, one’s own identity falls into crisis. This is a recurring element for people suffering from ecological grief. Speaking about the impact of deforestation in Ghana, a farmer laments that “hunting cattle was our nature, but that is no longer there.” Whether we overhunted them or the land became toxic to them [referring to bush burning and increased pesticide use]We don’t know.”

Similarly, a wildfire victim in Australia explains that it “completely changed everything about our house, not just the inside, not just the house, not just our stuff, but our entire history.” Our identity is tied to our community and intertwined with our projects and these are firmly anchored. So when the places we live in are undermined, our identity is destroyed.

Ecological grief shows how the very possibilities we normally experience are rooted and destroyed by environmental loss. Those most affected are those living on the front lines of climate change, whose voices are often ignored. Understanding that ecological grief is both a genuine form of mourning and a legitimate response to environmental damage is a necessary step in preventing those who suffer from it from being disenfranchised. But it is only a first step, and much more needs to be done to understand this particular grief, learn to deal with it and, most importantly, mobilize society to address its causes.