Climate Grief
When we see that the condition of our living planet deteriorating, we feel called to action, and yet, the immensity of the planet and its problems simultaneously paralyzes us. This is the conundrum of climate grief.
Grieving for a dying friend or family member is difficult enough. How can we grieve for a dying planet? This episode explores the boundaries of the scale of human emotion with the planet-sized climate grief, featuring the voices of Betti Rooted Lionheart, Shannon Haskins, Eleni Poulous, Ian Williams, John Pabon, and Todd Saddler.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that reflects upon the diversity of emotions from the perspectives of people who experience them. My name is Jonathan Cook. The research of emotions has been my work since the 1990s.
You might ask me what that means. What is an emotion anyway? It may sound evasive for me to say this, but the answer depends on who you ask. There is no scientific or cultural consensus about how to define what emotion is, much less agreement about how to distinguish one emotion from another.
The category of emotion has amorphous boundaries, promiscuously overlapping with other conceptual territories. Consider, for example, the difference between emotion and opinion. We could consult a dictionary to try to grasp the distinction, but dictionary definitions are not as definite as they first seem to be. Dictionaries are reference books of the most prevalent uses of words, not rulebooks that determine how language must be used. A dictionary might tell us that an emotion is a subjective aspect of consciousness, and that an opinion is an attitude held in the mind that is a matter of personal preference rather than objectively defined facts. Those two definitions aren’t exactly the same, but they’re pretty close. They both privilege internal priorities and perceptions over data about external reality.
It’s telling that people use the word “feel” to describe both emotions and opinions. As we discuss how we feel, we often shift back and forth between talking about our opinions and our emotions. Our opinions and emotions influence each other, and both in turn influence the external facts that we choose to notice.
There are certain kinds of emotions that are especially entangled with matters of opinion. These emotions tend to be related to the social choices available to us. Among the most prevalent of these emotions in our own time are the emotions related to climate change.
Psychologists have identified many distinct emotions that color our outlook on ecological matters. Biophilia, for example, is the feeling of connection to other living things. Solastalgia is an emotional pain felt upon noticing significant and apparently irreversible changes in the world around us. Topoaversion is the feeling of devastation experienced upon realizing that one can no longer visit a beloved natural place that has been destroyed.
There are varying degrees of overlap between these emotions, just as there are ambiguous boundaries around the category of emotion in general. We may come back to these other specific ecological emotions at another date, but for today, the focus of this podcast is the emotion of climate grief, an experience of mourning of the passing of Planet Earth’s climate out of a stable natural equilibrium into a disintegration caused by large-scale human activities.
During this episode, you’ll hear people share their opinions about anthropogenic climate change. Those opinions are important, but for the purpose of this podcast, I’m interested in what these people have to say about the emotional impact of climate change.
I’ll begin this exploration with the words of Betti Rooted Lionheart. Listeners may remember Betti from her contributions to the first season of this podcast, in episodes about the emotions of love and dadirri, the experience of deep listening. I met Betti earlier this year when I came across one of her fliers, advertising services for coping with climate grief. Betti is a minister of the Church of Earth Healing. When we met, she explained her earliest inklings of climate disruption.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
When I first started being aware it wasn't climate. “Climate change” wasn't even a term yet. I was born in 1978, and so my awareness began at seven. The story that helps me pinpoint it at seven, going on a camping trip in a motorhome with my mom's sister and my uncle and my three cousins, and one of the cousins is my age, and we would sit on the top bunk in the back of the motorhome. My uncle was a amateur photographer. He would literally stop every few miles of driving this camper and take pictures. So we were playing with jewelry boxes with a little sticker on the top and pretending these were cameras. My cousin had a deck of endangered species cards, and those cards were the pictures that we took. I'm a lifelong cat person, and there was a card for the ocelot, a very small central South American wild cat, and that was the moment of me understanding, oh, this animal is endangered, and what does that mean? It means that there might at some point be no more of this particular kind of animal. That somehow is what opened my awareness to what we're doing. What I can now point to as climate grief or climate despair wasn't at that time connected to climate.
Jonathan Cook:
Of course, Betti’s understanding of the threat of climate change has deepened since her young childhood, as her own sophistication has developed alongside the remarkable body of scientific evidence that has firmly established that human activities are the primary cause of accelerating, destructive, global climate change.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
We have no control over the things that have already been set in motion by our actions. We could, as a humanity, have control over what our actions going forward are. We don't seem to be taking a lot of forward thinking, next-seven-generations-thinking action around climate.
As a humanity, we are facing the fact that we might no longer exist and that we will have created the conditions for that outcome ourselves. In the farther away past, humans had hardship and death and disease and starvation and all these normal things, but the species, the culture, the tribe, whatever, itself could survive that and carry on and have continuity. What we're facing is whether one thinks of it as sudden and calamitous or long and drawn out, a definite end to the human species.
At a certain point, the globalized systems that we rely on for our daily lives are going to come apart and again, you know what that means is no gas at the pump, no food in the grocery store.
Jonathan Cook:
Betti is aware of the ecological and economic implications of the climate crisis. However, her response to climate change isn’t just a matter of education. Betti has experienced a strong emotional reaction of grief and despair from the destruction of our planet’s climate equilibrium. She has struggled over the years to restore her own equilibrium.
Betti Rooted Lionheart:
For a good 30 years of my life, I lived in that despair state, and I also lived with a ridiculous and laughable idea that the weight of the world was on my shoulders, that I somehow needed to come up with a solution. I needed to save the world by myself, which, of course, is not possible. But that was very much a burden that I carried, and I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. I think other people experience that as well. For me, living in that state of despair was living in a state of paralysis and inaction for the most part.
I no longer live the day to day in that state of grief and despair, and I should add that a big part of that is that I do not listen to the news. If I listen to the news, that will suck me straight into despair and paralysis. So, I just don't, I can't do it. I am aware of the greater arcs of what is going on, and I live with the feeling in my gut, but I can't live with all the all the details.
Jonathan Cook:
Listening to Betti, I was struck by her sense of a close relationship with the world, and her intuitive sense of responsibility for it, despite the vast difference in scale between her individual power and the mass of the world.
There’s a great deal about the relationship implied by the emotion of climate grief that ought to be obvious, and yet often eludes our everyday awareness. One overlooked aspect of this relationship is the consequence of our vital dependence upon the ecological integrity of Planet Earth. We feel an urgent need not just for nature in the abstract, but for the air, water, and food that only an ecologically sustainable Earth can provide to us. When we see that the condition of our living planet is deteriorating, we feel called to action, and yet, the immensity of the planet, and of the problems that are sickening it, simultaneously paralyzes us, overwhelming us with dread at the task that faces us.
Paralysis, as Betti puts it, can sometimes feel like the only available response to news of the climate crisis. Nonetheless, there are times when avoidance of the crisis becomes impossible. So it was one month ago, when immense clouds of smoke covered thousands of square miles of the northeastern United States for days on end. The smoke was so thick and so toxic that health alerts went beyond Code Red all the way into Code Purple, meaning that merely going outside became a serious health risk even to adults without any underlying medical condition. The source of the smoke was wildfires in subarctic Canada, where unusually hot and dry conditions made the remote forests a tinderbox in a season when the region has historically remained under a blanket of cold, wet snow. These conditions were made more likely and more extreme by climate change.
The small city in which I live was at the center of the wildfire smoke. The skies turned Martian orange during the middle of the day. I have lived in this area for most of my life, and never before had I ever seen such a thing. Even inside my house, I couldn’t escape the smoke.
Just a few miles up the road, Shannon Haskins experienced the same conditions.
Shannon Haskins:
That Tuesday, I didn't really think much about it until it started kind of getting worse in the day. You know, I opened the doors and windows. I smelled a little smoke, but I just thought it was like the neighbors burning something or whatever. But then as the day went on, it progressively got worse and the news was out and it was more aware of what it was. And we were at that sort of that air quality index. It said unhealthy for everybody at that point. But it was the next day, which I think was Wednesday, when we woke up and it was even worse. And I think we were at like hazardous or something like that. It was the word on the air quality index. You could really smell it. I could feel it.
We had this weird yellow haze at that point, and it felt like it really wasn't safe to go outside. And I think that's what it kind of hit me was just this, I guess the word I used was apocalyptic dread. I don't know how to describe it. It was just this intense, like sudden wall of realizing like. I couldn't go outside and feel safe, at least not without wearing a mask. And then I was like, well hey, we've done this before. I've got some KN95 still around.
So, I stayed in more than usual, but then eventually I was getting kind of stir crazy because at this time of the year I like to be outdoors. This is my favorite time of year, late spring heading toward the solstice with these beautiful long days, going for a walk, walking the dog, gardening, and I suddenly felt trapped. I think that's kind of what this wall felt like. I felt trapped, and there was some recollection of that. The early days of the pandemic where we were told, you know, it wasn't safe to be around people, but it was a little reverse or something, like this time it was it's not safe to be outdoors without a mask on. There was some lingering feelings from that experience that popped up, but in a sort of twisted way. But yeah, for me it's like not being able to go outdoors felt worse for me. That's what we did in the pandemic. And so that just hit me like a brick.
Jonathan Cook:
The intensity and unexpected nature of the smokestorm reminded Shannon of the disorientation of the COVID pandemic, forcing abrupt changes that also brought to mind a frightening movie from the 1980s.
Shannon Haskins:
I think the apocalyptic part came up for me because of two things. I think it. Suddenly, that yellow haze weirdly reminded me of. A movie from my childhood and anyone of my generation remembers. There was this movie that came out of the late seventies, early eighties called The Day After. It was about the nuclear holocaust. I remember at that time it was like a big deal when that movie came out. Like parents were advised, like, talk about your doctor children about this movie and, you know, and let them watch it alone. Like this is what it would look like if we had a nuclear holocaust. And so, it reminded me of that movie, oddly, which obviously is not what we're facing or what we were facing, you know, with the smoke. But it definitely, that haze reminded me of, like, scenes from that movie of people like waking up the day after and walking around and like, is anybody alive kind of thing? So, first of all, that came up for me.
Then, just that weird memory, and then also just thinking about what this means, like for us, like here in the Northeast, we're not used to this level of smoke from wildfires. Right. This is like a first. Sometimes we get haze from California or Colorado fires, but not like this. And I think we've always at least I've always felt like we're relatively safe here from the big leagues, right? The hurricanes, the. Tornadoes or wildfires. I mean, these things can't happen, but they're few and far between compared to some parts of the country, and this is caused by climate change.
This is what we're facing more of in the future, or maybe it's not. I don't know, but those kind of thoughts and stuff started coming up as well. So, I think that was the other piece about the apocalyptic part was like yeah, this is just kind of where we're headed, right?
It’s funny because I haven't thought about that, not in a long time, but I think clearly must have had an emotional reaction. I remember being scared, not, I don't think I was so much scared about the movie or the content, but I was scared from all the hype. Again, it was like everyone was like, this is such a serious movie, not that a nuclear holocaust wouldn't be serious, obviously, but there was so much hype around the film and all these parental advisories and, you know, really sit down and talk to your children about this. I think it was all that that stirred up the fear more than the actual movie itself. So, yeah, I guess that's still kind of lingering somewhere inside of me.
I think it totally is a different thing, but maybe it's like the new thing we're afraid of or the newer thing we're afraid of, right? The same emotion, that feeling of not being in control of this bigger thing that could impact all of us, and I think that's where that dread came in for me again, was similar to the beginning of the pandemic, where so much is out of our control, things we couldn't do. It felt like, okay, here's this thing: I can't go outside now and feel safe.
Jonathan Cook:
Shannon’s reaction to the undeniable presence of the climate crisis all around her evoked a frightening future of massive destruction, but it also evoked a skeptical frame of mind, wary of the fears that seem amplified by public attention to the alarming event. The TV movie The Day After dramatized a real threat, but the threat it displayed was beyond the scale of anything Shannon felt she could address as a child. As a result, its warnings about nuclear war created a feeling of fear that was beyond her control.
When we talk about climate grief, the obvious parallel is personal grief in reaction to the death of a loved one. There are some similarities, but there’s a more complex emotional dynamic with climate grief because of the scale of loss and fear associated with it. Grieving for a dying friend or family member is difficult enough. How can we grieve for a dying planet? We know the Earth, but we don’t have a personal relationship with it. As a species, humanity is capable of destroying the biosphere, but as individuals, humans are completely incapable of confronting the problems that endanger life on Earth.
When we grieve people we know, we retreat into solitude to reflect and to heal. The response of withdrawal is a part of climate grief as well, but we cannot withdraw so effectively from the problems of the world. The smoke, the heat, the flooding arrive whether we’re ready to deal with them or not, and with every passing year, the extreme weather is coming with less time in between for recovery.
So, we do what grieving people often do. We seek out the relative calm of silence. We can’t control the climate, but we can control our exposure to the news about it.
Shannon Haskins:
I don't watch a lot of news on TV anymore because I think we're bombarded. I get enough from what time has been on the Internet, but we are just so bombarded with all the negative stuff, and again, not that a nuclear holocaust wouldn't have been horrible or that climate change isn't a real thing or a serious thing. Just the constant bombardment of it, I think, is what impacts me in my nervous system.
I really think that there are some people who just look at the land and they feel something or see something's changed and feel that grief of like, you know, whether it's a clearcut forest, or an area maybe where some wildlife used to roam and it's a highway now. I think sometimes that stirs up some grief for people who are thinking deeply about those things.
Jonathan Cook:
Shannon’s description of her response to the climate disaster of massive Canadian wildfires reveals the gulf between knowing about climate change and coping with the emotional impact of climate change. Shannon doesn’t question that climate change is real and serious. What’s at question for her is whether she’s emotionally capable of engaging with the problem day after day. News about the crisis feels like a bombardment to her, because the issue is both serious and out of her individual control. So, like Betti, she has chosen to pull back from news about the problem, because it doesn’t feel like learning more about the gravity of the issue will empower her to take action to deal with it in an impactful way.
When I last spoke with Eleni Poulous, she was living in Sydney, Australia, and had recently left her position as Director of the National Justice Policy and Advocacy Unit of the Uniting Church in Australia. Eleni is now a visiting fellow at Harris Manchester College in the University of Oxford. She has a PhD in politics, and focuses on the intersection of religion and politics.
Eleni Poulous:
I live a five-minute walk from part of the inner harbor of Sydney, so I don't have to walk very far before I get a glimpse of water and boats and beautiful trees and things. I live a five minute drive from the heart of the city in the CBD of Sydney.
I had spent 15 years directing the National Justice Policy and Advocacy Unit of the Uniting Church in Australia, and the Uniting Church is the third largest Protestant denomination in Australia, a Christian church and for 15 years, I had done media, a lot of media work. I'd done a lot of advocacy and lobbying, meetings with politicians and a lot of public speaking. So, I was in a leadership role and I was always out there. Every time that I would do a media interview or meet with a politician, I was representing the church, so it was the church that was being carried through the words that I used. I always felt a deep sense of responsibility for that.
Jonathan Cook:
Eleni is both a professionally accomplished and deeply thoughtful person. She is accustomed to organizing people to deal with big issues. When the issue of climate change came up in our conversation, though, Eleni admitted to feeling the urge to turn away from the global problem, to focus on the natural nourishment of a garden while she still can.
Even with all of her experience dealing with public communications about the intersection of religion and politics, there’s something about climate change that’s especially challenging for Eleni. She remains engaged, but the scale of the climate crisis sometimes makes Eleni feel hopeless.
Eleni Poulous:
That’s where I connected with the climate grief emotion that you put up there, and that's that sense of responsibility that I had carried around for so long and I just hadn't realized how much it had worn me down, I think.
I guess that it just makes me feel like what's happening in the world and what's happening in politics, it just makes me feel hopeless. I'm generally a pretty hopeful and positive person, and I've spent most of my adult life working, because I think we can all make a difference. I still believe that, and I believe individuals can make a difference, and I believe community is where we actually change the world. But, yeah, things are so dark in the world at the moment, and I just, I just feel a bit hopeless, and it makes me think maybe what maybe the next thing I need to do is just go and grow tomatoes and lemons on the Tuscan hillside.
What would be better about growing tomatoes and lemons on a Tuscan hillside? Maybe it's about this, imagining that I have that it would remove me and take me to a place where the rest of the world didn't matter. I'm not going to make a difference anyway. I'm just going to enjoy life and get in touch with the Earth and be in a local community where people grow their own food.
Jonathan Cook:
What Eleni, Shannon, and Betti are dealing with is the limit of the human intellect. We can know in the abstract all about the urgency of the climate crisis, and yet, if we can’t see the impact of our environmental activism, that activism is difficult to maintain without experiencing despair. It’s like going to a gym and getting exhausted without ever seeing any improvements in strength or endurance. The news tells us about the problems we face without giving us anything to do in response to the dread we feel.
In comparison, growing tomatoes in a garden yields concrete results. Once the heat of summer begins, the growth of tomato plants and their fruits is easy to see. We have opinions about global issues. Opinions are easy to have. Emotions about global issues have difficulty developing beyond outrage or sadness, however, because global issues are always at a distance, provoking us, but always seeming beyond our ability to address.
This frustration impacts even those people who have built careers out of their climate activism. Ian Williams, for example, is a professional consultant who specializes in helping organizations that have an environmental mission. He’s written a book about climate activism. Nonetheless, there have been times when he has felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the climate crisis, and fallen into depression as a result.
Ian Williams:
I'm working as an organizational consultant with a wonderful small team, working with organizations who are mission driven. Obviously, many organizations define themselves as mission driven, but we're particularly interested in working with organizations who are mission driven in the sense of social or environmental justice, climate justice focused. We see ourselves as capacity builders, so we take a systematic approach to creating context, specific solutions, and we can dive deeper into what that looks like, but we're really interested in helping people who are focused on addressing big challenges, help them building their capacity and their impact in addressing those challenges. So professionally, that's kind of what I'm doing during the day. Outside of that space, writing, speaking, teaching. I just released a book, Soil and Spirit. So that's kind of a two halves of my professional world: Author, speaker, business advisor/consultant.
The subtitle is Seeds of Purpose, Nature's Insight and the Deep Work of Transformational Change. One of the lessons that I feel emerged out of my own self study, which continues, of course, is this notion that really the greatest gift we can give the world is saving ourselves. As I was moving through adolescence, young adulthood. I was really consumed with. What I would call existential challenges. Right. What are we going to do about the climate as a collective? What are we going to do about social justice as a collective? That led to a lot of overwhelm. Quite often, you know, resulted in debilitating depression. You know, how do I, as an individual have some sort of substantial impact on the world? And so, I spent a lot of time reflecting on that. It’s naturally led me to now, you know, how I express myself personally and professionally.
I think the time in life, the period in life when that grief oriented around climate or eco anxiety is another term that I've heard, and I’ve experienced both, was most prevalent for me was at a time in life where I was just coming of age in young adulthood.
Let's call it 2005 to 2010. A lot of the climate narratives that I was hearing, right, this is just after An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, right? So, the climate narrative was very, at least the climate narrative that I was exposed to was structured in a way it was worded in a way that was very fatalistic. It felt at least that's what I internalized emotionally. And so, you know, as someone who was already struggling with underlying anxiety and depression. Learning about how the natural world, something I care about so deeply, is in peril because of our own doing, was a really challenging thing to navigate emotionally. Socially, mentally, and, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it became debilitating at times. Complete and total overwhelmed. What do I do? What can I do? What can one person do?
Ultimately, I experienced that emotion, and enough where I just realized, you know, this is not, not only is it not conducive to my well-being, but I have a limited number of years in this life, and I'd like to do something about this, something more constructive about this. So, accepting that truth right again and ties back to this notion of emotional experience. Along the way, I was suffering, for lack of a better term, and I wanted to do something about that suffering. I wanted to be more constructive in my approach to it.
Jonathan Cook:
Perhaps we don’t have to think of climate grief as just a static emotion. Perhaps, like personal grief, climate grief can be a process of dealing with emotionally devastating circumstances. It seems to me that’s what Ian Williams is working toward.
It’s ironic that climate activists can be deeply educated about and committed to principles of ecological sustainability when it comes to the natural world, and yet pursue paths of activism that are emotionally unsustainable. When climate activism is framed as a grueling struggle that requires sacrifice of a sort to match the scale of the crisis, it’s designed to grind people down and burn them out. Ian Williams suggests as an alternative that climate activists take care of themselves in the same way that they would like to take care of the planet.
John Pabon is another professional climate activist. He’s got a new book out, and one that directly confronts the sense of powerlessness that gathers around news of climate change.
John Pabon:
I've lived all over the world, so originally from Los Angeles, I've lived in New York, Shanghai for quite a long time, which really honed my chops when it came to sustainability on the ground, which is a bit of a different perspective, I think, than a lot of people and maybe the U.S. or the EU have, because it's very much get your hands dirty, you're in factories, you're on fields. So it's a little bit of a different take on sustainability. I've lived in Seoul and now I'm currently calling in from Melbourne, Australia. So a bit of a bit of wanderlust if you couldn't tell in terms of my professional life.
I have one book out. I have one book coming out in in May. The first book is all around sustainability. It's called Sustainability for the Rest of Us. It was based on this idea that a lot of the conversation in sustainability is very scientific. It's very doomy. It's very scary and it's not very practical in a lot of ways. I would consider myself a pragmatic altruist. I'm not a greenie hugging the trees, saving the polar bears. That's amazing. I love the people that do it. It's not my thing. I am very much pragmatic around what I do to save the world, and I feel that I'm not the only one. In writing the book, I wanted to help others understand that there are very practical things you can do in your day-to-day life that don't require you to go live off the grid. It doesn't require you to go live in the dark ages. There are plenty of things that we can do here and now to really help save the planet. So that's the first book. It's a very practical guide to saving the world.
The upcoming book, which will be out in May, is all about greenwashing. This is a relatively new term. Some people may have heard of it, some may have not, but it's definitely happening. It's essentially when companies are wrapping themselves and cloaking themselves in this idea of being sustainable, being good for the earth, when in reality they're just using it to make a quick dollar. Now, I'm fine with the idea of companies making money and saving the earth. I think that marriage is a great way forward, but it's when they're doing it unscrupulously, it's when they're purposely lying and not walking their talk. This book will walk through all the ways corporations do that. But it'll also talk about how governments are doing that. It will talk about how groups like the UN, FIFA, these COP conferences, everybody hears about, how that's all greenwashing. Then I'll also get into the individual influencers, celebrities, influencers and even point the mirror back at the reader to see if there's areas of their life where they're greenwashing as well.
Jonathan Cook:
John’s work in confronting greenwashing brings a new dimension to the emotion of climate grief. Grief, after all, isn’t just about feeling sad, or powerless, or lost. Grief involves a complex array of emotional responses to loss, including anger.
John Pabon:
I find it a very hard pill to swallow when corporations who make and I'm going to wax altruistic care corporations that make billions of dollars in money hand over fist think it's okay to lie to a consumer that maybe has to make very tough decisions about what they're making, what they're purchasing at the store. That's definitely a hard pill to swallow and that they're doing it in such a way that most consumers don't even know it's happening makes it even worse.
There's definite anger in there, but also it goes back to that, too, that sense of responsibility that I have. I try not to get angry. I think if people in my profession, in my line of work, got angry all the time, we wouldn't get anything done because there's plenty to be angry about. There's plenty to be despondent about. There’s what we call climate doomism, which is the idea that the die is cast, you know, we're screwed. There's no sense that there needs to be anything done at all, so people sit back and do nothing, and we've run with that now for close to 40 or 50 years. You know, you have these commercials of there's the polar bear on the ice cap and it's melting and she's helpless. There's the Mad Max dystopian future hellscape dessert image that we all have, and that doesn't really help anybody make strong decisions. It just scares us into inaction. What I want to do is flip that on its head.
Jonthan Cook:
In flipping climate activism on its head, John rejects the emotional frame of climate grief.
John Pabon:
Ecoanxiety was one of the emotions that I don't ascribe to that I don't feel anxious about the end of the world quickly looming. I think there's like I mentioned, plenty of things that we can do. I also don't ascribe to this idea of climate grief, so mourning the Earth's loss prematurely, I don't think we're quite there yet. I think there's plenty of, I don't think I know there's plenty of work going on from governments and from the private sector and from individuals that is really putting us on the right trajectory.
Jonathan Cook:
As I listen to John’s ideas, I think back to what Betti had to say at the beginning of this episode. She talked about how confronting climate change directly leads quickly to despair and paralysis. John suggests that indulging in grief can prevent people from taking action.
Is it true, though, that climate grief and inaction are inevitable partners?
When I spoke with Todd Saddler, a long-term climate activism leader, I heard a different interpretation.
Todd Saddler:
My name is Todd Sadler. I'm an activist with Extinction Rebellion here in Ithaca, New York.
Extinction Rebellion is a worldwide movement for climate action based on the premise that climate change is real. We are causing it, and collectively we are not doing what we need to do to address the situation. It's got four demands: Tell the truth, act now, the third one I call participatory democracy or citizen's assemblies, and the fourth one is climate justice. It's a nonviolent movement, but we do use nonviolent direct action to try to make things change.
I think I've been paying attention to the earth and environmental issues and situations and problems and the beauty of nature for almost all of my life. Year by year, the story gets a little bleaker. When I was in high school, my biology teacher, Mr. Barker, taught us about the greenhouse effect that comes from burning fossil fuels, and if we don't do something different, it's going to be a problem some day. And then I lived in Haiti for seven years and moved back here in 1999. I saw the negative impact of deforestation and drought that people were suffering in Haiti, and that was the first place I was ever in where I really prayed for rain along with my neighbors. And then when I came back here, we started hearing about peak oil was one of them. And then a little bit after that, Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, came out and I was like, Whoa! Okay, some day we're going to have a problem with this greenhouse effect. Turns out to be now. And so, since then, every scientific description of what's going on makes it seem that it's worse than we thought, and it's getting worse faster than we thought. I was in Washington for an event organized by people versed in fossil fuels, where they brought people from all over the country to talk about the negative impacts of climate change and fossil fuel development on the fossil fuel economy on them directly. And it was really overwhelming as I began to realize there's fewer and fewer people who have not been directly harmed by climate change. The denial phase is sort of winding down.
The forests, the streams, the lakes, we're going to have some ecological breakdown, and that tied together with, you know, some images I had in my mind of places that were ecologically devastated Haiti with the deforestation and the drought. When I was younger, I lived in Tennessee and I remember being up on Roan Mountain, this beautiful mountain wilderness area. But I went to one place. It was a sort of an overlook, and all across the horizon, all the pine trees were dead from acid rain and pine beetles. It was like, Whoa! So, some of these images of devastation kind of overwhelmed me and yeah, they're still in there. I remember these. So, my struggle is to not be paralyzed by this, but to do what I can to save what can be saved.
Jonathan Cook:
Like the other people we’ve heard from, Todd feels the threat of paralysis in reaction to the news of ongoing problems with climate change. He feels devastated and overwhelmed. He acknowledges that the reality we’re facing is bleak.
However, Todd is remaining active. He’s been leading a climate activist group in Ithaca for years, convincing people to show up for protests week after week, organizing actions to keep climate change in people’s awareness. Todd does this not in spite of his climate grief, but because of it.
Todd Saddler:
One of the ways we respond to our difficulties and our own demise is thinking about, well, others will carry on and it can get better later. But this apocalyptic global perspective of. The climate crisis takes that away, and it leaves you with the feeling. Oh, I'm going to leave this earth one day and I have not left it better than I found it, and that is really profoundly powerful to me.
There's so much denial of the truth. Willful ignorance has become a policy and practice these days. But the things they were pretending aren't real do not go away. They don't go away, just like my own grief doesn't go away if I push it away. Climate change doesn't go away. If we say it's a Chinese hoax, the consequences are not going to go away. We're going to keep getting reality checks ever again, going to get louder and louder. The sooner we pay attention to them and respond, the sooner we can begin to heal. Pain. Nobody likes pain. It's there so that we will try to change things. Pain exists to help us to avoid harming ourselves and suffering more, to give us a signal that something's wrong and the earth is giving us these signals that something is wrong and our fellow human beings are giving us these signals that something is wrong.
Jonathan Cook:
Todd names the biggest challenge facing climate activists: Climate activism requires people to face the pain of a world undergoing ecological collapse. Instead of regarding pain as something to turn away from, however, Todd perceives pain as a signal that warns us of problems that need to be addressed.
Todd grieves for the losses that come with climate change, but he’s focused on learning from those losses. His grief gives him a sense of urgency rather than despair. He works to confront climate change because of the pain it causes him.
I’m not presenting Todd’s experience of climate grief as an example that everyone should follow. Instead, I’m interested in Todd as an example of the diversity of ways that climate grief can be experienced. The painful feeling of loss is shared among all the people we heard from today, but the manifestations of that emotion come in different forms. John reacts by emphasizing practical solutions. Ian emphasizes psychological sustainability for activists. Betti leads a shamanic community that aims to help people process their feelings of climate grief. Eleni turns toward a dream of a personal, local experience of nature, and Shannon puts that dream into action. She sent me a lovely picture of her raspberries just today. They looked delicious.
Sometimes, activists get invested in the idea that people should feel a certain way about climate change, but perhaps there isn’t just one emotionally authentic way to cope with the issue. Maybe we shouldn’t tell people how to manifest their climate grief. Some people feel best avoiding the emotion of climate grief altogether. What works for Todd isn’t what works for John, and vice versa.
A healthy ecosystem depends upon biodiversity. No single species can do all the work that’s necessary to keep the food web functioning. Sometimes, species appear to be working at cross-purposes, even as they maintain a balance on the whole. Perhaps sustainable activism is like that. Perhaps we need a variety of people, all coping with the feeling of loss caused by climate change, but doing it in the way that feels best to them, each contributing in a way that feels right to them.
It may be that an important part of restoring respect for natural biological diversity is to show respect for human emotional diversity. People who can acknowledge the validity of other people’s different ways of reacting to large scale trauma maybe also be more willing to share their space with species of animals, plants, and fungi that have their own ways of being alive.
Imagine what the world could look like if humans learned to trust other species of living things enough to share space on Earth with them. That emotion, trust, will be the subject of next week’s episode.
Until then, thanks for listening.