Thread by @MesMitch

How scientists are coping with ‘ecological grief’
Scientists reveal how they are dealing with a profound sense of loss as the climate emergency worsens

Polar bears foraging in a rubbish dump near the village of Belushya Guba, in the Russian Novaya Zemlya archipelago. Melting ice is forcing the bears to move further inland and into contact with humans in their search for food.😢😪😔😣

Melting glaciers, coral reef death, wildlife disappearance, landscape alteration, climate change: our environment is transforming rapidly, and many of us are experiencing a sense of profound loss.

Now, the scientists whose work it is to monitor and document this extraordinary change are beginning to articulate the emotional tsunami sweeping over the field, which they’re naming “ecological grief”.

Researchers are starting to form support groups online and at institutions, looking for spaces to share their feelings. I talked to some of those affected.

Director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Canada. Consolo works with indigenous Inuit communities

What changes have you personally seen that have affected you?
Labrador is one of the fastest-warming places in Canada, with around three degrees temperature change since 1900.

It’s a place that relies on solid ice formation, with deep cultural connections to cold. We interviewed hundreds of people on the coasts over five years, and no matter what age and gender, the changing environmental conditions were impacting them mentally, emotionally.

Indigenous people talked about how being able to travel, to hunt, was freedom – a way of connecting to ancestors, culture, and feeling well and whole. With the climate shifting, people spend less time on the land, so they feel sad, angry, lonely and helpless.

A lot of people talked about grief for what it might mean for children and future generations to come. One of the Inuit elders said, “We are people of the sea ice. And if there’s no more sea ice, how do we be people of the sea ice?”

And that sort of profound existential question is so deep and complex.People talked about mourning their own identity, and also anticipatory grief: the sense that the changes are continuing, and that they’re likely to experience worsening of what they’re already seeing.

People also discussed the sadness of watching others around the world suffer environmental-related trauma, and knowing the pain of what it’s like.

This is a slow and cumulative grief without end – unlike a human death, say. There’s not one moment that you can pinpoint, but long, enduring grief and anxiety that’s underneath.

How have you been dealing with it?
In doing this research, I did have a very long period where I almost felt consumed by what I was seeing in the environment, and also being surrounded by and immersed in the grief of others.

When I was experiencing my own very severe ecological grief, one of the things that really helped me through was talking to the indigenous elders – having people to share with.

It was a really amazing moment, because they talked about how grief isn’t something to avoid or be scared of. It’s certainly painful. It can be terribly isolating; it can be a really horrible experience.

But if we come together, and we share our grief, and we share pain and emotions, there’s a real strength to that.

Any advice to others experiencing ecological grief?
There’s a power and an honour to grief, because it means that we have loved something, and we’ve had a connection to a place or to species of the planet.

We need to find ways to mark our loss and share our loss, but also to remind ourselves that we only grieve what we love. I think new rituals are essential to celebrate that love, and to mark the loss and to come together for loss

What I really learned from the elders was to start talking about grief as a totally normal response to climate change or other forms of environmental degradation. So it’s not something to feel ashamed about.

And then through the leadership of those elders, they started bringing other people in the communities together to talk about what we were finding in research, and have people share their experiences.

The sense of helplessness is very prevalent – the feeling that the scale of our environmental crisis is so large that as individuals we can’t intervene. And I think that’s actually one of the really powerful mobilizing potentials of ecological grief –

it’s driving action and anger; climate marches. More and more people are coming forward to share their pain and there’s power in that – the capacity to make a sea-change in policy because ecological grief is so much now a part of the public narrative.

Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier led a really amazing movement across Canada, bringing a lawsuit against the government for “the right to be cold”.We’re seeing incredible leadership coming out of indigenous peoples’ elders, and part of what we have to talk about is:

how do we deal with our grief? Because who and what we choose to grieve tells us a lot about ourselves and where our values are.

The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record.

The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.

Hotter oceans lead to more severe storms and disrupt the water cycle, meaning more floods, droughts and wildfires, as well as an inexorable rise in sea level. Higher temperatures are also harming life in the seas, with the number of marine heatwaves increasing sharply.

The most common measure of global heating is the average surface air temperature, as this is where people live. But natural climate phenomena such as El Niño events mean this can be quite variable from year to year.

“The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis. “

Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.”

We found that 2019 was not only the warmest year on record, it displayed the largest single-year increase of the entire decade, a sobering reminder that human-caused heating of our planet continues unabated,said Prof Mann, at Penn State University, US, and another team member.

The analysis, published in the journal Advances In Atmospheric Sciences, uses ocean data from every available source. Most data is from the 3,800 free-drifting Argo floats dispersed across the oceans, but also from torpedo-like bathythermographs dropped from ships in the past.