In addition to being the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, global environmental change and regional ecological decline are increasingly embedded within everyday experience, evoking strong mental and emotional responses across the population.
Although most people are generally aware that climate change is occurring, it continues to seem distant: something that will happen to others, in another place, at some unspecified future date. Psychologists refer to this idea as ‘psychological distance’.
Terms such as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ draw attention to the global scale, rather than the personal impacts. Additionally, the signal of climate change is obscured by the noise of daily and seasonal weather variation. All this makes the issue easier for people to push aside, particularly when faced with other pressing life issues.
Perhaps one of the best ways to characterize the impacts of climate change on perceptions, is the sense of loss. Loss of relationship to place is a substantial part of this. As climate change irrevocably changes people’s lived landscapes, large numbers are likely to experience a feeling that they are losing a place that is important to them - a phenomenon called solastalgia.
This psychological phenomenon is characterized by a sense of desolation and loss, similar to that experienced by people forced to migrate from their home environment. Solastalgia may have a more gradual beginning due to the slow onset of changes in one’s local environment.
Hence, we can argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss, is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts; and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene.
How to grieve ecological losses well - particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing - is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.
The loss of local knowledge, or traditional ecological knowledge, may be a key trigger for ecological grief. Various groups have reported having lost confidence in the seasonal rhythms of the weather; and in their ability to ‘know it’. Such experiences are often associated with anxieties related to the long-term future.
Indigenous people, in particular, identify feeling deep sadness and distress that much of their environmental knowledge - gained from generations of sharing; with ‘on-the-land’ observation and learning - are suddenly shifting and eroding.
Elders express worry about giving advice around travel routes and weather conditions, as parameters for prediction and risk, have shifted so much in recent years that they no longer have confidence in their knowledge. This causes grief at the loss of their own identity associated with ‘knowing the land’.
However, ecological grief should not be seen as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we should find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives.
Being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place. Indigenous populations have been, and continue to be, the tripwire for humanity. City dwellers, in an urbanizing world, are in denial if they think that the effects of climate change is a rural problem.
Cities, as the highest concentrations of people, will be particularly vulnerable. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated a causal relationship between heat and aggression. As the temperature goes up, so does aggression; which also reduces the ability to resolve conflict without violence.
Furthermore, research indicates that many individuals identified feeling anticipatory grief, for ecological changes that had not yet happened. In these cases, grief for anticipated future ecological losses is also tied to grief over future losses to culture, livelihoods and ways of life.
Given that we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss, and that these losses will not end any time soon, we can anticipate - along with a small, but growing, number of scholars - that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the Anthropocene.
To bear witness to ecological losses personally, or to the suffering encountered by others as they bear their own losses, is to be reminded that climate change is not just an abstract scientific concept. Rather, it is the source of much hitherto unacknowledged emotional and psychological pain, particularly for people who remain deeply connected to, and observant of, the natural world.
