Eco Grief is a Real Thing

Author’s note: an expanded version of this article was published in the journal Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice (January 2022) and can be read here.

Awake uncharacteristically early, I open my eyes to the dawn.  My chest is tight.  I can’t take a full breath.  There is a heavy weight on my ribcage.  I’ve done enough somatic work to know this is stress manifesting.  The wisdom of my body tells me the wildfire smoke has rolled in before I even open the blinds or the news.  Eco grief alighted, yet again.

For the last month I’d been on a long awaited, deeply needed, working vacation to rejuvenate around coastal British Columbia.  Graciously, and somewhat guiltily, I was breathing fresh air while my community of humans back home in the southern Interior navigated evacuation orders, relentless smoke, and the inevitable fallout of mental and physical stress from wildfires..

World on Fire

British Columbia is on fire.  Again.  What little is left of the ancient trees regulating our climate are being cut down.  The waters are drying up, and too hot for the fish.  The heat is causing significant casualties, in our human and animal families.  The town of Lytton burned down.  My goodness, the list is endless and sometimes it doesn’t feel helpful or trauma informed to detail it.  We can all see it, we can feel it, if our eyes are the least bit open.

We’ve just come out of the latest lockdown in a global pandemic, and people want to play, socialize and regain some semblance of normalcy, in the midst of the climate crisis around them. I don’t blame them (I do, however, have zero patience for the people knowingly driving boats the water bombers have to dodge).  The thing is, there is no normal anymore.  The cycles of our earth as we know it are changing, and it’s impacting every one of us.  I just hope it doesn’t take  an absence of coffee on grocery store shelves for everyone to fully wake to this truth.  

So where does this leave us?  Here, let’s raise the concept of eco grief.

As a child of the 80s, I grew up listening to tapes of David Suzuki talking about the beauty of our planet, and that it needed help.  I was fed from a young age at the kitchen table with talk of recycling programs, acid rain, waste management, clean drinking water and protection acts with my bureaucrat parents.  Bless them.  Armed with the knowledge of what was happening in our planet, and a deeply cultivated, loving, personal relationship with the lands and waters, it was inevitable that my life, personally and professionally, has centered around advocating for creating spaces where we can heal - ourselves, our communities and the land - and fold us back into the web of connection.

This connection has also meant a lifetime of experiencing eco grief.  Maybe a new concept to some, it’s important to name and explore what it can look like in our lives.

Pictured: Sarah crouching on a stump in front of a clearcut in British Columbia.

Photo Credit: Mina Hiebert at Moon Made Studios

Eco Grief Is a Real Thing

Firstly, let’s start with… eco grief is a real thing.  Sometimes nebulous, sometimes brazen, certainly existential.  And if you’re the least bit awakened as to what’s going on with our earth, you’ve probably had a taste of it.  The very world that we depend on for life is stressed beyond anything we’ve seen before, and it makes sense that we inevitably respond in-kind, whether consciously or unconsciously.

As I wrote about in my thesis (West, 2020) eco grief, or climate change grief, is considered a “disenfranchised grief,” where there is no socially allocated measures for acknowledging losses and sorrow related to the environment (Davenport, 2017, p.58). The softening required to ask, listen and reciprocate with oneself and the land can open one up to experiencing grief which may be present in the land itself or our own grief of what’s been done to it.  

For a deep and hope-inducing dive on this, I highly recommend reading Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow (2015), Leslie Davenport’s Emotional Resiliency in the Era of Climate Change (2017), and Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s Coming Back to Life (2014).  

Manifestation of Eco Grief

Eco grief can manifest in many ways.  It can register as literal pain in our bodies.  Sometimes it feels like low grade, ongoing anxiety with nothing to really pin it to. It can turn our minds to the existential… “what can we do?”  “Where can we go?”  It can look like depression, anger, frustration and despair as our plans and way of life shifts.  

For me, eco grief once manifested as out-of-nowhere pain so severe, I landed in hospital.  Once the pain subsided, perplexed doctors shrugged and sent me home.  It took me some time to piece it together myself.  Immediately prior to the pain, I had been writing about eco grief, walking the land, feeling deep in my bones what trauma we’ve done to the earth, and having night terrors when I camped near the Old Growth forests being cut down at Fairy Creek (you can learn more about that here).  Ah yes, the body needed to purge its eco grief, and no test the doctors performed could identify this. 

Pictured: A recent clearcut in the interior of British Columbia in a second growth forest.

Photo credit: Sarah West

What Can Be Done?

So let’s circle back around to “what can we do?”

First and foremost, we grieve… for ourselves, and the earth.  In the same way we grieve our other losses.  We feel and honour our emotions.  Cry when we need to.  Rage safely.  Do whatever you can to nurture yourself.  Talk about it.  And do this for as long as you need to, in the face of grief’s ongoing presence.  Something like creating a grief and gratitude altar with my clients has shown to be incredibly powerful (West, 2020).  Denial and escapism may seem like desirable options, but in the long run, grief left unhonoured can have negative repercussions. 

We can also cultivate a spirit of reciprocation with the earth.  This part is so essential, reciprocity forms the third arm of my Triple Spiral Framework.  You can read more about that here. Reciprocity is a crucial element in growing relationships, between humans and the land itself. Receiving without an element of giving back in some way is a one-sided venture. Often, we can look to the land to find support or extract its resources for our use, without offering anything back in return (West, 2020).  We can do something about our grief, and the state of our planet.  We each have our own unique giftings and position in the world.  Find some way to make a change in your life and shift what you can to help our planet, whatever that may look like.  The possibilities are endless.  Get creative.

Pictured: A bridge of connection to the waters, made of stones leading from an eroded bank to a post in a river.

Photo credit: Sarah West

Pictured: An example of an altar, made in an environmental arts therapy session made of natural materials.

Photo credit: Sarah West

Standing At the Great Turning

And finally, take heart!  Joanna Macy and Molly Brown (2014), amongst many others, speak about how we, as humans, are on the precipice of the “Great Turning” (p.5). This is a precipice where we can choose to go either way – towards a dire end of life as we know it on this planet, or, to do what we can for the earth through a collective paradigm shift. This “Turning,” Macy and Brown describe, is a process of creating new ways of relating and solutions, leaving behind current behaviours premised on unsustainable practices. With this shift we, as humans, can change our perspective and relationship with the earth through reconnective work that imagines new, sustainable realities premised on hope.  This shift includes a thawing of numbness by feeling our interconnectedness with a planet that is indeed hurting. In awakening to the grief and deadening that may flow from our melting, there we can find new life (Macy & Brown, 2014; Weller, 2015; West, 2020). 

Grief is love manifest.  Connect with the earth, fight the deadening, warm the numbness. 

Take heart.  We’re in this together.

• Please feel free to connect with Sarah if you’d like to explore how eco grief may present itself in your life, ways of connecting creatively with the land, and identifying your own personal resources. One on one sessions and related workshops are available online and in person in Nelson, British Columbia.

References

Davenport, L. (2017). Emotional resiliency in the era of climate change: A clinician’s guide. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Macy, J. & Brown, M. (2014). Coming back to life. New Society Publishers. 

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.

West, S. (2020). Creative Collaborations: The value of environmental arts therapy and the triple spiral framework in land-based decision making [Unpublished capstone project]. Kutenai Art Therapy Institute.