Can we grieve the loss of climate?

Last week I was lucky enough to interview Professor Glenn Albrecht, the former Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University, who became (https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html)[world famous] for coining the word solastalgia - the despair that one feels when their home place has been destroyed or irrevocably changed. Towards the end of the interview Professor Albrecht mentioned that grief was not a legitimate response to climate change because the climate had not died and framing it so devalued the grief that felt at great loss or someone’s death.

This was followed up later in the week by a (https://glennaalbrecht.com/2020/08/26/covid-grief-climate-grief/)[blog post] on the same subject.

Valid and real grief is certainly the tenor of the times as Professor Albrecht states:

In many countries, during the worst of the pandemic, victims of Covid-19 have been buried in mass burial locations with no relatives in attendance. No ceremony, no recognition of passage. No witnessing. Grief layered on grief.

Indeed the anonymity of death during COVID is particularly galling for those that experience it first hand. A few days ago, I could not go to Sydney to attend the ceremony to bury my (https://kujo.svbtle.com/my-sister-and-her-baby)[sister’s stillborn child] due to stage 4 restrictions in Victoria.

I understand the need for a special word reserved to signify extreme desolation at great loss, yet I do question the wisdom and utility of such a narrow definition of grief to only apply to death in the recent past. The associated question is: Would human grief really be devalued in its broadening as Professor Albrecht suggests?

In the climate movement, it is only recently that “grief” has become widely used to describe a response to the current climate catastrophe. Previously a steely resolve to hope at all costs had proliferated. (https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/august/1566136800/jo-lle-gergis/terrible-truth-climate-change#mtr)[This piece by Joëlle Gergis states the intensity of emotion very eloquently].

Every now and then, the reality of what the science is saying manages to thaw the emotionally frozen part of myself I need to maintain to do my job. In those moments, what surfaces is pure grief.

Certainly the shift from hope to grief is due to the closing of our window of action combined with the grim realisation of the bleak future that awaits us. Here grief arrived to describe human awareness of climate change at the moment when we are crossing thresholds and it has become clear that we are not going to avoid climate change as a global catastrophe, instead it is simply a matter of degree. As people come to terms with the reality that will be life in the near future - a life that will be replete with death both animal and human - do we injure the language by applying the term grief to that realisation?

Perhaps then the issue is that grief cannot be projected into the future - which is fair. I cannot begin grieving for my friend sitting across from me at the cafe table when I realise she will one day die, as sobering as that realisation is. Yet climate change operates on a different scale - the very actions we are performing today will inevitably result in death in the future. There is a causal chain when referring to climate change it just happens to be a long and complex one. Furthermore the destination is hazy - but with the awareness of widespread death as a distinct probability should arrive with debilitating shock. This shock is the realisation of a great loss - loss of a stable future where the institutions of society that accompany human safety can no longer be taken for granted, where human survival may be a far more precarious affair with those the most vulnerable are those that have done the least to contribute to the problem. It will also be one where human and animal death will be necessarily happen far more often. Yet the loss is far greater than even this - it will involve the death of every facet of the life today we take for granted. Grief is the process by which the shock at this loss is processed and assimilated.

In fact - we don’t even need to wait to some indistinct point in the future the loss is beginning right now. Is it too strong a term to describe grief as a possible response to a billion animals that expired due to the bushfires?
(https://overland.org.au/2019/05/intimacy-extinction-2000-dead-bats/)[This piece by Shannon Woodcock about the death of thousands of bats is particularly visceral and has stayed with me] - I challenge anyone to read it and say that the emotion expressed within does not meet the criteria for grief.

Albrecht also states that if we misapply the word grief it will devalue its application elsewhere. I understand this instinct - words are slippery enough so that if they will be used in the incorrect context their meaning will shift. Professor Albrecht’s comment is that we need grief to retain its authentic meaning - now more than ever. Yet it is futile to try and enforce a strict meaning within the general public or the broader climate movement. Any attempt is also likely to backfire. Grief is not just a word, it has a shape and it is a process - should you discount such a response to the realisation of climate change, mark its use as illegitimate, it will leave those grappling with the fact that our climate will be altered irrevocably in the near future without a process by which they can accept the new reality.

Professor Albrecht’s final point that we don’t need grief, we need political action. True enough for the latter clause of that sentence, yet we have had a climate activism that has historically tried, through sheer force of will to overcome those emotions (fear, anger and yes grief) that were not politically expedient. All that it has left the climate movement with is burnout on a global scale.It and has not resulted in any political achievements. This existential threat has an emotional component that operates independently of the movement’s political demands. To ignore this reality will result in more dissonance, more distress and more burnout. In the long run and in aggregate it is far more dangerous than a process by which those can come to terms with the reality that faces us and do our best to mitigate its harshness.