We live in an era — the Anthropocene — where humans and societies are reshaping and changing ecosystems. Pollution, human-made climate change and overfishing have all altered marine life and ocean food webs.

Increasing ocean temperatures are amplifying the accumulation of neurotoxic contaminants such as organic mercury (methylmercury) in some marine life. This especially affects top predators including marine mammals such as fish-eating killer whales that strongly rely on large fish as seafood for energy.

Now the combination of mercury pollution, climate change and overfishing are conspiring together to further contaminate marine life and food webs. This has obvious implications for ecosystems and the ocean, but also for public health. The risk of consuming mercury-contaminated fish and seafood is growing with climate change.

Mercury rising

Regulations have lowered global mercury emissions from human-made sources, such as coal-fired power plants, between 1990 and 2010, but mercury is still present in the marine environment.

Methylmercury builds up in the muscle tissue of fish across the food web, “bioaccumulating” in larger and high trophic level predators. This is why larger pelagic fish (for example, tuna, marlins, billfishes and sharks) — those that eat a lot of fish — are in general considered riskier to eat than smaller ones.

Seared tuna. Photo: Taylor Grote / Unsplash

In humans, mercury can lead to neurological disorders. Children who are exposed to mercury during fetal development and childhood have a greater risk of poor performance on tests that measure attention, IQ, fine motor function and language.

Climate change can amplify the accumulation of methylmercury in fish and marine mammals at the top of their food webs due to changes in the entry and fate of mercury in the ocean and the composition and structure of these marine food webs. A warmer and more acidic ocean may increase the amount of methylmercury that enters the food web.

Overfishing can also exacerbate the mercury levels in some fish species. Pacific salmon, squid and forage fish, as well as Atlantic bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod and other fish species are susceptible to increases in methylmercury due to rising ocean temperatures.

Our modelling research work shows that Chinook salmon, the largest Pacific salmon species and main prey of endangered southern resident killer whales, is projected to be exposed to high methylmercury accumulation due to changes in its prey that are driven by climate change.

Under a worst-case climate-change scenario, where greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and global temperatures reach between 2.6C and 4.8C by 2100, Chinook salmon will see a 10 per cent increase in methylmercury. But under a best-case scenario, where emissions are low and global temperature rise is in the order of 0.3C to 1.7C at the end of the century, mercury levels would increase by only one per cent.

For forage fish, such as Pacific sardine, anchovy and Pacific herring, which are key ecological and commercial species in the Pacific Rim ecosystem, the methylmercury increase is projected to be 14 per cent under the influence of high emissions and three per cent under low emissions. Here again, this increase is driven by dietary shifts and changes in the food web composition due to warmer oceans.

A school of sardines. Photo: Klaus Stiefel / Flickr

Fishing down the food web

Atlantic cod stocks were over-exploited along the northeastern coast of Canada during the last century. Chinook salmon stocks from the northeastern Pacific Ocean are also dwindling because of natural factors and environmental stressors, including predation, habitat loss, warming oceans and fishing. The combination of these pressures can make Pacific salmon more susceptible to methylmercury bioaccumulation.

When one species is overfished, fishing fleets expand and adjust their targets, often fishing down the marine food webs. The cascading effects lead to changes in prey and foodweb composition for the remaining species, likely altering the transfer of organic contaminants such as persistent organic pollutants and methylmercury in top predators.

Aquacalypse now: the end of fish

When fish are removed from the food web, larger fish and top predators may be forced to consume more or different prey, or smaller fish than they usually do. These fish can be highly contaminated with mercury.

The combination of climate change and overfishing are further shifting the composition of fish in the ocean and where they are found. They are also altering the way these species are exposed to pollutants, increasing levels of methylmercury in Atlantic cod and Atlantic blue fin tuna — fish that are often eaten by humans.

Protecting health and the planet

Based on this evidence, the public health community should revisit and revise fish consumption guidelines for those who are most likely to be exposed to mercury (coastal communities) or experience negative effects (pregnant women, infants and children).

Our simulations show that the projected methylmercury concentrations in forage fish and Chinook salmon will surpass Canada’s mercury consumption limits this century, as well as the consumption advisory level issued by the World Health Organization.

In our human-dominated world, it is imperative that we consume fish and shellfish that come from sustainable fisheries and make efforts to reduce ocean pollution. International and national environmental policies, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goal to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, marine resources and fisheries (SDG 14) and the Paris Climate Agreement, can conserve marine species and protect our blue planet for generations to come.

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Widespread species decline at the hands of humans is a powerful tale. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 27 per cent of 100,000 assessed species are threatened with extinction. This disappearance is a warning that something is amiss on Earth.

The Anthropocene is the newly recognized geological epoch defined as widespread environmental change or crisis caused by human activity. Some predict history will remember it as the sixth mass extinction event on Earth.

Yet when the choice lies between protecting an endangered species or pursuing economic development, we almost always side with development. Maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise: as a species, we have evolved with a predisposition to favour growth over environmentally rational decisions. The world is literally dying around us as we continue to pursue the myth of endless growth.

Paying no heed

In June 2019, Canada’s federal government approved the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion to carry oil from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia. It did so despite an environmental assessment that found marine vessel traffic associated with the additional pipeline capacity will further dim the already dire prospects for the endangered southern resident killer whales.

This was not much of a surprise, really, since the federal government had already approved the pipeline expansion in November 2016. That approval, however, was quashed by the Federal Court of Appeal in August 2018, in part because the original environmental assessment had failed to consider the pipeline’s adverse impacts to the marine environment.

At a policy level, Canada marked its commitment to protect species at risk in 1992 when it ratified the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The federal, provincial and territorial governments agreed to a national approach for the protection of species at risk in 1996.

The strongest legislation to protect species at risk in Canada is generally considered to be the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA). But describing SARA as “strong” is misleading.

Studies show that species are less likely to be listed as threatened or endangered under SARA if they are the target of a commercial harvest. The most obvious example may be the demise of the Atlantic cod, a marine fish once abundant off the coast of Newfoundland. It has still not been listed under SARA despite having lost 99 per cent of its population since the 1960s due to overfishing.

And only rarely does the habitat necessary to the survival or recovery of a species at risk, called critical habitat protection, get legally protected under SARA.

As the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion approval illustrates, SARA is too easily disregarded by federal officials. Arguably SARA has protected only two species from economic development: the small population of greater sage grouse in southeastern Alberta and a population of the western chorus frog in a suburb of Montréal.

Whooping crane woes

Some provinces still have no dedicated legislation for the protection of species at risk. Alberta is one of the laggards. Provincial officials in Alberta routinely approve resource development at the expense of species at risk protection.

Perhaps the most glaring and obvious example is the massive ecological footprint of forestry, drilling sites, seismic lines, oilsands mines and in-situ oil extraction projects in northern Alberta. This has contributed to a sharp decline in woodland caribou populations.

Alberta continues to offer pie-in-the-sky measures to halt this decline. But in 2018, the province suspended efforts to protect caribou habitat, claiming that Albertans needed a caribou protection plan that also protected jobs and the economy. Say what?

On July 25, the Alberta Energy Regulator approved yet another new oilsands mine to be constructed and operated by Teck Resources just 30 kilometres south of Wood Buffalo National Park, despite finding that the mine will have a significant adverse impact on what is left of caribou habitat in this region of Alberta.

The Alberta Energy Regulator also acknowledged that the proposed Teck mine falls under the migratory pathway for the only native population of migratory whooping cranes on Earth (their summer breeding habitat is protected in Wood Buffalo National Park), and that during migration, the cranes could land on the mine’s tailings ponds and come into contact with the toxic soup.

A whooping crane family in their wintering grounds at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas. Photo: Flickr

The whooping crane is listed as an endangered species under SARA, and mortality risk during migration is considered to be a primary threat to the overall total population of about 500 birds.

Nonetheless, the Alberta Energy Regulator found that any additional mortality of cranes because of this new mine would not have any adverse impact on the species. It would rely on proposed bird deterrent mechanisms to prevent cranes from landing in the tailings ponds. Yet the effectiveness of all known deterrent mechanisms used by oilsands operators has been questioned and surely any adverse impact on an endangered species should be viewed as significant.

The Teck mine still requires federal approval before it can proceed, so there is perhaps still a distant hope of protecting further destruction of habitat for the threatened caribou and endangered cranes.

Commercial pass

British Columbia is another province without dedicated endangered species protection laws. Enacting new legislation had been a policy priority for the B.C. government until recently, when in response to concerns about the adverse economic impacts of protecting caribou, the premier announced that new legislation was off the drafting table.

The Ontario Endangered Species Act was, at one time, considered to be strong legislation. However, in 2013 the Ontario government enacted regulations under the legislation to exempt certain commercial activities such as forestry, hydro-electric generation, quarrying and wind power generation from rules that protect endangered species.

In April 2019, the Ontario government proposed further amendments to its Endangered Species Act. Environmental advocates say these changes will give industry a free pass to exterminate species at risk in the province.

Economic gain, environmental pain

Meaningful legal protection of species at risk in Canada requires effective legislation implemented by all levels of government, but the provinces are the key. That’s because the overwhelming majority of endangered wildlife in Canada and their habitat are located on lands owned by the provinces.

Habitat loss is the primary cause of species decline and energy development is a significant contributor in this regard. Those with the greatest legal power to protect species at risk (that is, provincial officials) also happen to be those with the most to gain economically from the extraction and development of natural resources.

The result is predictable. Species decline will continue to accelerate in Canada as we push for more energy development and reduce the regulation of resource extraction and economic growth. Legal protection for endangered species in Canada seems to be getting weaker at precisely the moment when it should be getting stronger.

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We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often described as the Anthropocene.

Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of these planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being. Climate change, and the associated impacts to land and environment, for example, have recently been linked to a range of negative mental health impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, as well as feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair.

Not well represented in the literature, however, is an emotional response we term ‘ecological grief,’ which we have defined in a recent Nature Climate Change article: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

We believe ecological grief is a natural, though overlooked, response to ecological loss, and one that is likely to affect more of us into the future.

Understanding ecological grief

Grief takes many forms and differs greatly between individuals and cultures. Although grief is well understood in relation to human losses, ‘to grieve’ is rarely considered something that we do in relation to losses in the natural world.

The eminent American naturalist Aldo Leopold was among the first to describe the emotional toll of ecological loss in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.”

More recently, many respected ecologists and climate scientists have expressed their feelings of grief and distress in response to climate change and the environmental destruction it entails in places like: “Climate scientists feel weight of the world on their shoulders” and “Is this how you feel?”

Photo: Jean Wimmerlin via Unsplash

Ecological grief is also a significant theme in our own work. In different research projects working with Inuit in Inuit Nunangat in Arctic Canada and farmers in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, both of us have spent a combined total of almost 20 years working with people living in areas experiencing significant climatic changes and environmental shifts.

Despite very different geographical and cultural contexts, our research revealed a surprising degree of commonality between Inuit and family farming communities as they struggled to cope, both emotionally and psychologically, with mounting ecological losses and the prospect of an uncertain future.

Voices of ecological grief

Our research shows that climate-related ecological losses can trigger grief experiences in several ways. Foremost, people grieve for lost landscapes, ecosystems, species, or places that carry personal or collective meaning.

For Inuit communities in the Inuit Land Claim Settlement Area of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, the land is foundational to mental health. In recent years, melting sea ice prevented travel to significant cultural sites and engagement in traditional cultural activities, such as hunting and fishing. These disruptions to an Inuit sense of place was accompanied by strong emotional reactions, including grief, anger, sadness, frustration and despair.

One male who grew up hunting and trapping on the land in the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut explained:

“People are not who they are. They’re not comfortable and can’t do the same things. If something is taken away from you, you don’t have it. If a way of life is taken away because of circumstances you have no control over, you lose control over your life.”

Chronic drought conditions in the Western Australian Wheatbelt elicited similar emotional reactions for some family farmers. As one long-time farmer described:

“There’s probably nothing worse than seeing your farm go in a dust storm. I reckon it’s probably one of the worst feelings […] I find that one of the most depressing things of the lot, seeing the farm blow away in a dust storm. That really gets up my nose, and a long way up too. If its blowing dust I come inside – I just come inside here. I can’t stand to watch it.”

Sweeping away the dust in the central Western Australian Wheatbelt Feb. 2013. Photo: Neville Ellis

In both cases, such experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastalgia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the loss of a healthy place or a thriving ecosystem.

People also grieve for lost environmental knowledge and associated identities. In these cases, people mourn the part of self-identity that is lost when the land upon which it is based changes or disappears.

For Australian family farmers, the inability to maintain a healthy landscape in the context of worsening seasonal variability and chronic dryness often elicited feelings of self-blame and shame:

“Farmers just hate seeing their farm lift; it somehow says to them ‘I’m a bad farmer’. And I think all farmers are good farmers. They all try their hardest to be. They all love their land.”

For older Inuit in Nunatsiavut, changes to weather and landscape are invalidating long-standing and multi-generational ecological knowledge, and with it, a coherent sense of culture and self. As one well-respected hunter shared:

“It’s hurting in a way. It’s hurting in a lot of ways. Because I kinda thinks I’m not going to show my grandkids the way we used to do it. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting me big time. And I just keep that to myself.”

Many Inuit and family farmers also worry about their futures, and express grief in anticipation of worsening ecological losses. As one woman explained from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut:

“I think that [the changes] will have an impact maybe on mental health, because it’s a depressing feeling when you’re stuck. I mean for us to go off [on the land] is just a part of life. If you don’t have it, then that part of your life is gone, and I think that’s very depressing.”

Similarly, a farmer in Australia worried about the future shared their thoughts on the possibility of losing their family farm:

“[It] would be like a death. Yeah, there would be a grieving process because the farm embodies everything that the family farm is … And I think if we were to lose it, it would be like losing a person … but it would be sadder than losing a person … I don’t know, it would be hard definitely.”

Ecological grief in a climate-changed future

Ecological grief reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive in a human-dominated world.

From what we have seen in our own research, although this type of grief is already being experienced, it often lacks an appropriate avenue for expression or for healing. Indeed, not only do we lack the rituals and practices to help address feelings of ecological grief, until recently we did not even have the language to give such feelings voice. And it is for these reasons that grief over losses in the natural world can feel, as American ecologist Phyllis Windle put it, ‘irrational, inappropriate, anthropomorphic.’

We argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts, and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. How to grieve ecological losses well — particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing — is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

Moonrise of Rigolet, Nunavut. Photo: Ashlee Cunsolo

We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.

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How much stuff will you give and receive this holiday season? Add it to the growing pile — the 30-trillion-tonne pile. That’s how much technology and goods humans have produced, according to a study by an international team led by England’s University of Leicester. It adds up to more than all living matter on the planet, estimated at around four trillion tonnes.

Scientists have dubbed these times the “Anthropocene”, because humans are now the dominant factor influencing Earth’s natural systems, from climate to the carbon and hydrologic cycles. Now they’re labelling our accumulated goods and technologies — including houses, factories, cars, roads, smartphones, computers and landfills — the “technosphere” because it’s as large and significant as the biosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. Researchers estimate it represents 50 kilograms for every square metre of Earth’s surface and is 100,000 times greater than the human biomass it supports.

As CBC science commentator Bob McDonald wrote, “Our technology is a super-organism that competes with the biosphere for resources, and is winning that competition by taking over the surface of the planet.”

Report co-author Mark Williams explained the significance: “The technosphere can be said to have budded off the biosphere and arguably is now at least partly parasitic on it. At its current scale the technosphere is a major new phenomenon of this planet — and one that is evolving extraordinarily rapidly. Compared with the biosphere, though, it is remarkably poor at recycling its own materials, as our burgeoning landfill sites show. This might be a barrier to its further success — or halt it altogether.”

Living systems renew and recycle. Organisms die, get eaten or absorbed by other organisms, and other life takes their place.

But much of what we produce takes enormous amounts of natural, mostly finite resources to make and breaks down slowly, if at all. It covers the land and fills oceans, and even extends into space.

As the human population continues to grow and consumerism shows no signs of abating, the technosphere expands, causing pollution, contamination and resource depletion, further upsetting the delicate natural balance that keeps our planet habitable for humans and other life forms.

Many things we’ve invented have made our lives easier in some ways. But much is unnecessary and, we’ve learned, a lot comes with consequences we didn’t foresee — such as climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from our obsession with private automobiles and cheap energy. 

If this pace continues, we’ll leave a fascinating fossil record for any intelligent species that comes across our planet in the future. But that may be all. If we want to survive as a species, we must get a handle on population growth and consumerism. It’s something to consider this time of year, when so much time and energy are spent on acquiring new stuff, for ourselves and others.

Although population growth is starting to stabilize, curtailing growth requires greater access to effective, voluntary family planning and birth control, increased women’s rights including the right to make decisions about their bodies and reproduction, and reducing poverty.

We can all do our part to reduce consumption. We might find we’re happier when we do. At the end of his life, my father didn’t talk about accomplishments or possessions or wealth. He talked about connections to friends and family and shared experiences. Although he didn’t have a lot of material possessions, he felt wealthy and happy.

That’s what life is about. A new car or smartphone won’t make you happier in the long run. Nor will it fill gaps caused by loneliness or lack of connection to others.

That doesn’t mean we should live without material goods, but we should consider what we really need, and make sure we recycle items we can no longer use. Reduce, re-use and recycle! And reconsider what really makes us happy.

More important, during the holiday season, we should nurture our connections to friends and family, and give gifts that won’t add to the technosphere. We can share time, experiences and food. Those who find themselves alone might consider volunteering to help others during what can be a difficult time.

May you all have a joyous season, focused on the important things in life. And may the New Year bring humanity a greater understanding of what truly makes life worthwhile.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Electronic waste. Photo: Steve Janosik via Flickr CC licence 2.0.

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