Prologue: I am going to intentionally leave aside the current politics of our country because the near collapse of dialogue between our partisan culture is deafening, toxic, and not helping redress the underlying question that calls deeply into our hearts and way of being. Instead, I am going to start with a single question:

What if it is true?

What if the sixth extinction, global climate change (as outlined by the IPCC), habitat loss and deforestation, and the ongoing exploitation and despoiling of the once-wild places of this majestic earth… what if all of that is simply true?

What then? What feelings and experiences bubble up in your awareness, in your body, in your fingers and cheeks?

I have a confession to make: until just last week, I had not really accepted the strange, dry, and warm winter we are having here in the Crystal Valley, Colorado. I was not accepting this snow drought and our yard, for the first time in our nine winters being here, now mostly devoid of snow. I found myself regularly hoping for the weather to bring snow and for the return of winter cold. This is early February, and I have never experienced this in my four-plus-decades of life in Colorado.

And then it hit me: I was projecting an unconscious wish upon the world that things be different. As I felt into the ickiness of that shadow, I was able to make contact with something deeper stirring in me:

my climate grief.

One thing about growing up in this post-colonial world (where my ancestors, like most of the people I know, were not indigenous to these lands, and thus I/we have been severely divorced from an earth-based way of knowing and being in the world) is the thinness of sanctioned places for raw, wild, untamed emotions to be felt, heard, seen, released, experienced.

What we repress within becomes projection.

Thus, in a culture where large emotions often are disallowed, either by spoken or unspoken social contracts, the disconnect of the felt-sense of experience is often vast.

As a rite-of-passage wilderness guide, this is something that I see come forward again and again for people on the land: the need to be fully alive, wild, present, emotional, raw, real. And we invite that because that is ceremony, and the land can hold it. We are not strange alien beings brought to this planet; Earth made us just as we are.

In a very real and tangible way, one of the underlying elements which makes ceremony true is the open invitation for all of this to emerge. As Colleen Bishop (2024) wrote succinctly in a blog last year:

"The intent is for any or all of these patterns to come up above--from the depths of darkness--and break through the layers of the surface, so you can see, experience, and face them--empty, alone, and exposed. Ultimately, the uncomfortable and traumatized parts that have been buried beneath a moment or a lifetime of armoring arise for you to let it go.  But, the dissolution and disintegration beckons the courage and willingness of the quester to face it; no one else can do it for them."

As it emerges, be it on the land and in a rite of passage or in our everyday existence, we can make space and lean into the discomfort. This is what Trungpa and that lineage of Tibetan Buddhadharma names as bravery in our path to becoming the victorious ones—a victory not over something out there but in regard to our human predilictions to close down and look away.

So, returning to the matter at hand, what is climate grief, and how do we begin to open our inner doorway to the changing lifeworld of which we are fully immersed within?

While the details of human (eco)psychological understanding are still being developed, one thing that is certain is that the psycho-emotional impacts are affecting an increasing number of humans across the planet. Simply put, I know that I am not alone in experiencing the profound impacts of a changing natural world as grief. Qualitative research by Dufrechou (2004) centered around the grief experiences 40 people felt in response and in relationship to nature. As with so many wonderful research projects and ways of examining our world, for Dufrechou (as like me with this essay), it started with an experience. Articulating these experiences is a burgeoning research field, not simply as a distantly-removed academic discipline but rather as an urgent need for grounding and processing rapid change.

Woodbury (2018) made a compelling case for intentionally shifting our conceptual and lived understanding of 'climate change' to a 'climate trauma.' Climate change suggests something that is separate from us, out there, happening elsewhere and is suggestive of the need for institutional avenues for fixing, changing, and redressing (p. 6). Climate trauma, however, (re)personalizes it and helps us begin to see and work with the systemic assault of change happening to our bodies and the body of earth. Ellis and Cunsolo (2018) used the term ecological grief, but the thread interweaving the intents of both is the same.

Comtesse et al. (2020) articulated three aspects of ecological grief, all in relation to the combination of a loss (either a tangible or intangible resource) and an emotional investment. As they explained, ecological grief emerges from three interwoven experiences: the acute loss of animals and landscapes, the loss of environmental knowledge of and in relation to particular landscapes and more-than-humans which had defined a cultural or social identity, and the future loss which are on the horizon of our understanding.

So, how do we find our way forward? How do we listen deeply to one another and the changing lifeworld and open ourselves to adaptability and resilience?  How do we not ignore or push away or reject the deep intuitive nature of our knowing and curiosity, even if and especially when such emotions feel inconvenient to the productivity goals we have internalized from this mechanized industrial culture?

I must also confess that I have no answers.

But I know that if I deny these feelings inside, as they emerge and in the moment, then I am repressing an innate developmental aspect of my human animal-ness. I know, too just how difficult it can be to see beyond the doorways of our own shadows—such as my unconscious wish for things to be different that I started this blog.

So I ask myself as I pose this here too: can we give space to the places inside us that feel deeply that which is happening to the earth? Can we stay in the honesty of our reflections, and let the fragility of our defenses fall away to reveal the brave and victorious hearts underneath?

What if we try.

References

Bishop, C. (2024, July 11). prana and alchemy in the quest toward liberation [blog]. Alchemy of Prana. https://www.alchemyofprana.com/post/prana-and-alchemy-in-the-quest-toward-liberation

Comtesse, H., Ertl, V., Hengst, S.M.C., Rosner, R., & Smid, G.E. (2021). Ecological grief as a response to environmental change: A mental health risk or functional response? International Journey of Environment Research & Public Health, 18: Article 734. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020734

Dufrechou, J. P. (2004). We are one: Grief, weeping, and other deep emotions in response to nature as a path toward wholeness. The Humanistic Psychologist, 32, 357–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873267.2004.9961760

Ellis, N., & Cunsolo, A. (2018, April 4). Hope and mourning in the anthropocene: Understanding ecological grief. The Conversation [Academic News Blog]. https://theconversation.com/hope-and-mourning-in-the-anthropocene-understanding-ecological-grief-88630

Woodbury, Z. (2019). Climate trauma: Toward a new taxonomy of trauma. Ecopsychology, 11(1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2018.0021