This is a topic that I have learned about recently from my wife, a mental health nurse. We are writing up a presentation for a conference this fall so I have learned an awful lot about this growing mental health issue. Read and realize that our actions are not just having physical impacts but also causing deep anguish.
It’s Time to
Talk About Ecological Grief
This story was originally published
by Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk
collaboration.
When I called Courtney
Howard, one of the authors of the recent Lancet Countdown 2018
Report on health and climate change,
she was Christmas shopping during a pit stop in London on her way to the 24th
United Nations Climate Change Conference in Katowice, Poland.
As she picked out ballet shoes for
one of her young daughters, we discussed her work on the mental health impacts
of climate change. She recounted to me the moment in her own life when climate
change’s bottom line really sunk in. She was at home with her daughter doing
some mental math: Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories,
where she lives, was already 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the
1940s, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had
recently reported that
average global temperatures were on pace to warm another half degree or more by
2052. The warming would be irreversible in little more than a decade — well
within the lifetime of her children. She wound up on the floor, wrapped around
her daughter in the fetal position.
The impact of climate change on our
physical world has by now been made clear and manifest to anyone paying
attention: Rising sea levels and increasing temperatures have begotten
wildfires, drought, tsunamis and heat waves, which have wrought unprecedented devastation. The impact of climate change on our internal worlds, though,
has gone relatively unstudied. But a growing body of evidence demonstrates that
climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression,
anxiety, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, and a host of negative
emotions including anger, hopelessness, despair, and a feeling of loss.
Researchers have dubbed these feelings “ecological
grief.”
In a briefing for Canadian policymakers released in conjunction with the Lancet Countdown,
Howard and her colleagues honed in on ecological grief, eco-anxiety, and
something called solastalgia —
a form of homesickness one experiences while still at home. Grief and mourning
are natural responses to the scale of ecological loss we’re living through.
Research shows that the sixth mass extinction is underway, and the World Health
Organization named climate change the single greatest threat to global health
this century.
Ecological grief is the grief that’s
felt in response to experienced or anticipated ecological loss. It may arise
due to acute environmental disasters. For example, one in six survivors of
Hurricane Katrina met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, and crop-damaging heat waves have been shown to lead to
increased suicide rates in
India. But grief can also stem from stress and anxiety associated with slow,
creeping changes in one’s environment — feelings that many of us are
experiencing as the winters become uncannily warmer and extreme weather events
become more frequent.
Communities whose livelihoods and
ways of living are inextricable from their natural environments, though, are on
the frontlines of the crisis. In the Inuit communities of Nunatsiavut, located
in the north of Canada’s most easterly province, Newfoundland and Labrador,
temperatures are warming twice as fast as
in the rest of the world. That has led to diminishing ice cover, shorter
winters, and unpredictable weather. Like other public health challenges, the
burden of climate change’s mental health impacts falls primarily on groups that
are already vulnerable. The losses these communities suffer extend to every
corner of their lives, and they’re unending, says Ashlee Cunsolo, the director
of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University and another contributor to the
recent Lancet report. The land — or ice — is literally shifting beneath their
feet and before their eyes. The attendant grief these communities experience is
similarly amorphous and ubiquitous.
The changing landscape brings food
insecurity, post-traumatic stress disorder, population displacement, and
trauma. There are no roads in or out of Nunatsiavut’s Rigolet, the southernmost
Inuit community in Canada. The town is accessible by ice road, by plane, or —
during the summer months — by ferry. In recent years, the ice has started to
form a month later and melt a month earlier, says Derrick Pottle, a hunter and
commercial trapper. And when there is no ice, community members have nowhere to
go. Without the ice road, “you’re trapped — even if you wanted to get out you
couldn’t.” For Pottle and the rest of the community, the sea and the land are
“our highways, how we move around, how we get out to harvest, and how we
connect to the land.”
Ecological loss can also lead to a
crisis of culture and identity. In the 2014 documentary about climate change in
Rigolet, “Lament for the Land,”
an existential question is posed: “Inuit are people of the sea ice. If there is
no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”
