Ecological (and egological) grief
Separation of personal and collective, self and other.
Feeling Environmental Loss
https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/outputs/graduate/9983776735702771
My work is concerned with our perceptions of climate change and our relationship with the environment. Scientific study of historical worldwide climate data shows that global temperatures have been steadily rising for at least the last one hundred years. The concept of the anthropocene—a particular geologic epoch defined by human presence—links climate change specifically to humans and their impact on the environment. Even confronted with the data, many feel disconnected from climate change. While one can detect temperature change of single degrees over the course of seconds or minutes, it is difficult to feel this kind of temperature change over the course of decades. My work for the past three years has been concerned with questions related to how we feel and figure environmental loss. Crafting, mourning, and emotion have continually cropped up in my work as ways of apprehending environmental loss.
Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0092-2
Climate change is increasingly understood to impact mental health through multiple pathways of risk, including intense feelings of grief as people suffer climate-related losses to valued species, ecosystems and landscapes. Despite growing research interest, ecologically driven grief, or ‘ecological grief’, remains an underdeveloped area of inquiry. We argue that grief is a natural and legitimate response to ecological loss, and one that may become more common as climate impacts worsen. Drawing upon our own research in Northern Canada and the Australian Wheatbelt, combined with a synthesis of the literature, we offer future research directions for the study of ecological grief.
Cultural, Existential and Phenomenological Dimensions of Grief Experience
Grieving as relearning the world is inherently social
This essay opens with exploration of how we become and are who we are only in and through society with others. We incline to think of ourselves in radically individualistic ways as if we were so many impermeable atoms floating in social space. We fail to grasp how relationships with others are not accidental, but rather integral, to our personal integrity. Consequently, we fail to understand the social dimensions of our suffering in bereavement or to grasp how coping with our suffering through grieving is socially conditioned and constrained. We encourage self-reliance and fail to see how our relearning how to live in the world after someone has died (grieving) is interconnected with the grieving of others. Our individual relearning is intimately interwoven with the individual relearning of others and with family and community relearning of how to live together. The essay includes constructive suggestions about how grievers can deal more effectively with relearning how to live in their social worlds and how to do their parts in family and community relearning. …
Aesthetic practices typically attend bereavement, and they facilitate coping and restoration of some sense of normalcy. “Aesthetic”, in this context, is broadly understood, encompassing such notions as sensory appreciation of particulars, integration of elements into coherent wholes, art-making practices and decorative activities. This chapter considers the value of aesthetic practices for the bereaved, drawing attention to one aspect of the phenomenological experience of bereavement that makes coping particularly difficult, a pervasive disorientation within the time-space continuum. The deceased person has vanished from time and space. The bereaved person’s interaction with objects and places that have associations with the deceased bears the mark of the disruption in the bereaved person’s usual sense of time and space. They bring the deceased into prominence within one’s awareness, but in such a way that the person’s absence is the dominant impression. Aesthetic practices help to normalize the situation by resituating the deceased within space and time. Using aesthetic practices in the context of bereavement mitigates the pain of separation from the deceased by enabling us to consider our imaginative engagements with the deceased as not mere illusions but forms of connection.
Cemeteries, painting and poetry regularly use nature to offer solace for grief in northern Europe’s historically Protestant and secular cultures, but rarely in southern Europe’s Catholic cultures. To explain this difference, the chapter examines two hypotheses. The first argues that the comfort that northern European mourners find in nature is rooted in nationalistic forms of romanticism. The second hypothesis takes this further to show how northern European mourners’ love of nature is rooted historically in anti-Catholic movements-the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. From the eighteenth century right through to the twenty-first century, Protestants and secularists, being unable to pray for the deceased’s soul, have shifted attention to the mourner’s grief. Lacking Catholic rites for the dead, they turned elsewhere to express grief and find comfort. One place to which they turned was nature, Protestantism tending to favour romantic nature, secularism favouring classical nature. Examples are given from a range of Western European countries (plus brief mentions of Russia and Greece), chiefly from cemeteries but also from poetry and painting; examples not readily explicable by either hypothesis are discussed. The chapter concludes that cultural understandings of nature can shape not only grief’s expression but also forms of solace, and grief itself. …
This chapter is an attempt to address environmental losses, to rethink what mourning is and does in the context of the current climate crisis and thus to articulate and advance the concept of ecological grief. While a majority of grief researchers tend to focus on grief as it stands in relation to bereavement, i.e. as the personal reaction to the loss of a loved one, an argument is here made for taking seriously the phenomenon of mourning climate change and the losses that global warming entails (loss of nature, of home, of work, of a whole way of life). Drawing upon the work of Judith Butler and queer death studies, the chapter scrutinizes ecological grief at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the existential and the political, and thus hopes to interject an alternative avenue into discussions around the culture and phenomenology of grief. Consequently, the goal is emphatically not to get ecological grief recognized as a mental illness and included in the diagnostic manuals; what is at stake is finding interdisciplinary ways forward that do not resort to personalizing, pathologizing and depoliticizing the issue in question.