There’s a little known essay by Sigmund Freud that details his walk through a garden with an unnamed poet and a philosopher (whom some suspect to be Rainer Maria Rilke and Friederich Nietzsche).

The scene is pastoral, a summertime flush of petal and leaf adorns their surroundings.

And it’s bumming the poet out.

He “felt no joy in it,” Freud wrote in his essay, On Transience. “He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction.”

The poet could not overcome his awareness that all that is will eventually be lost. That recognition opened up a chasm between his experience of the world and his ability to feel its delight.

“All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.”

These words, written in 1915 during the crush of the First World War, speak presciently to the heart of last week’s news that earth’s species are spiralling out of existence at ever-escalating rates of extinction. This new scientific assessment caused an emotional shudder the world over.

How can we possibly begin to grasp the significance of this moment, the first great extinction event to be witnessed and caused by human hands?

What the hell do we do with that?

In his essay Freud makes an important observation that is as relevant for navigating the world today as it was when embroiled in the horrors of war a century ago: fully submitting to a thing’s impermanence doesn’t diminish its worth — it intensifies it.

“I did dispute the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss of its worth,” Freud writes. “On the contrary, an increase!”

Facing the impermanent world

In September, on assignment for The Narwhal, I followed directions to the base of a wide gated driveway in a heavily treed neighbourhood in rural Langley, B.C.

There, I met up with The Narwhal’s B.C. legislative reporter, Sarah Cox, and we were greeted by two young female scientists who escorted us onto a second property that lay a kilometre away, past three more secured gates.

We were making our way to the undisclosed location of the world’s only captive breeding facility for the critically endangered northern spotted owl. With just a handful of birds remaining in B.C.’s wild, drastic measures have been taken to prevent the creature’s full and final disappearance from Canada.

Incubation chambers, robotic eggs and meticulous documentation of owly romance are all a part of this very human endeavour of species preservation.

Strangely though, the other very human activity that has led to the species’ arrival on the brink — mainly habitat destruction through logging — continues unabated in spotted owl habitat in British Columbia.

There are more than 1,800 species at risk of extinction in B.C. alone, more than any other province or territory in the country. From the mountain crab-eye fungus, to salmon, to southern mountain caribou, to the killer whale — species great and small are in a death spiral.

While the scientific community has raised the alarm on many of these species, in some cases for decades, very few have received formal listing as at risk under Canada’s federal Species at Risk Act, legislation that only came into being in 2002. It’s a slow and painful and politicized process to have a species formally recognized as at risk.

Some won’t outlast the wait.

For those lucky, or maybe unlucky enough to be caught at the brink, action can be taken to rehabilitate populations in some cases. The spotted owl’s captive breeding program relies on pairs of owls, which mate for life, to bond and breed. This can take years of awkward courtship. The wait for note-taking scientists can be excruciating. But they continue on, with the hope of releasing laboratory-bred individuals back into B.C.’s forests one day.

There is no guarantee for the spotted owl. It’s a fundamental recognition that feeds into this program’s work: the spotted owl is impermanent. Its existence now holds no promise of existence in the future.

But that’s obvious, right? How could we think of a species in any other way?

The natural world just is

Except we didn’t always think this way. For the vast majority of human existence there’s been a fundamental assumption that the world is permanent.

The original Greek term for world and being was one and the same: physis. It was one fundamental term to describe what is, what exists. It was also the word for nature.

Embedded right into the language that informed so much of our thought in the Western world is this sense that the natural world just is. Human life and thought and activity is what takes place on this more fundamental base layer that’s just, you know, there.

This general sentiment — that the natural world is more or less an infinite and permanent strata for human goings on — is also what paved the way for what’s become modern-day capitalism with its perpetual growth fetish and apparent inability to contend with the planet’s finite resources.

Nearly a half-century’s worth of ecological thought has arisen in rebellion to this notion of nature’s immutable permanence. But it was the first images of earth seen from space, the pale blue dot, that finally crystalized a sense of earth’s finitude in the broader public imagination.

Earth, seen here as a tiny speck in a scattered light ray from the sun, was photographed by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Valentine’s Day, 1990 at a distance of more than 6.5 billion kilometres away. Photo: NASA

“Look again at that dot,” Carl Sagan famously wrote of the image. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

But our general coming to terms with the finitude of planet earth has been harder to accomplish than many thinkers in the last century were able to grasp.

A revolt against mourning

A part of this can be attributed to how deeply entrenched our structures and systems and worldviews have become since, pretty much, the Industrial Revolution.  

It’s a dirty slate problem: with no clean slate available, we’re faced with the challenge of charting a new course from within the old. And that’s proven harder than we might have imagined.

But beyond the embeddedness of our fossil fuel reliance, deforestation, consumption and accumulation that underlies so much of our invisible everyday life in the western world, Freud points to a deeper, emotional resistance to the idea that this world may not be forever.

Photo: Peter Rudwell. Cinemagraph: Carol Linnitt

When faced with the impermanence of the things we love, Freud writes, our instinct is to respond in one of two ways: despondency or denial.

But by challenging us to face the world’s impermanence, Freud charts a path for a third way.

Back in the garden with his poet and philosopher friends, Freud is perplexed by their sadness in response to the beauty of their surroundings.

Sure, he thinks, “A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues we admire today may crumble to dust … or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases.”

But these inevitabilities don’t diminish the value of art or life, do they? So what could account for the despair of his companions?

“Some powerful emotional factor was at work which was disturbing their judgment,” Freud discovered. “What spoilt their enjoyment of beauty must have been a revolt in their minds against mourning.”

They were experiencing, Freud discovers at last, anticipatory mourning. The poet and philosopher were feeling despair at the loss of something — even before it was lost.

The idea of anticipatory mourning has become a touchstone concept in deciphering the complex feelings associated with ecological grief. Stress, fear, anxiety, alienation and solastalgia are common responses to the disfiguring and erosion of the world as we know it in the Anthropocene, or the ‘age of man.’

Scientists describe dramatic declines in biodiversity as one of nine critical breaches in the earth’s planetary boundaries alongside climate change, pollution, loss of freshwater and ocean acidification.

The world-as-we-know it is radically transforming. While the Holocene, the geologic epoch in which the entirety of human history has taken place, was characterized by its stability, the Anthropocene is a time of fundamental instability, unpredictability and change.

Even now as the world’s official bodies deliberate on what to call our new epoch — the Anthropocene? The Capitalocene? The Catastrophozoic era? — it’s becoming more clear that the gut instinct reactions of despondency and denial won’t get us far.

But just as the view of earth from space prompted a radical conceptual shift in our understanding of this planet, so too can our evolving understanding of extinction offer a radical renewal of our sense of what it means to be human in this shared world.

But in order for that to happen, we must overcome the resistance we mount to our own mourning.

Mourning is something of a riddle, Freud says. And yet it’s critical to understanding where and how we invest our love (our, ahem, libidinal energies).

Imagine for a moment, you’re watching your children play in the front yard. An errant ball makes its way to the street and your daughter runs after it. A car is coming her way. With your voice stuck in your throat you begin to cry out as the car swerves, only just sparing her life. In the moments and maybe days that follow you are highly attuned to your child’s impermanence, maybe your entire family’s impermanence. Maybe too, your own.

It is a nauseating moment of recognition. But that foretaste of loss allows you to see with raw clarity how truly mortal, fleeting life is.

It’s the acknowledgement of that mortality that allows you, for a moment in time, to properly regard your daughter for the transient creature she is. She is a garden in bloom.

To see her or that garden in any other way is to not see them at all.

The Extinction Report offers us a similar moment to hold the world’s riches in this proper regard.

In his essay, Freud writes that the war “showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless.”

What becomes crucial is our ability to attune ourselves to the world in its ephemeral state.

For otherwise, have we really ever loved the world at all?

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

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.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Headlines declared it “terrifying.” Edmonton was dubbed an “apocalyptic ghost town.” The Star declared, “It’s not the end of the world. It just looks that way.”

As it turns out, there’s little disagreement when it comes to wildfire smoke: it’s alarming.

Residents of the western provinces have been choking on smoke in recent weeks, as smoke from the more than 550 wildfires burning in B.C. drifts around the country. Special air quality alerts have been issued in Vancouver, Victoria, Prince George, Salmon Arm, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, the Battlefords and even Manitoba — and the list goes on.

Air quality alerts are issued to warn residents about the dangers of fine particulate matter present in wildfire smoke, which can cause numerous health effects including everything from sinus irritation to heart attacks.  

But it’s not just breathing difficulties and watery eyes that impact people living in smoke-affected areas.

For many, it’s the unsettling feeling of living under a thick cloak of smoke, one that obscures the sun, wipes out the blue sky and hides the landscape in a disconcerting brown-grey veil.

Smoke-pocolypse 2018. Over 600 forest fires are raging throughout BC. Hug your local firefighter. . . . #smoke #bcforestfires #forestfire #smokey #mountains #britishcolumbia

A post shared by Charlie Schrodt (@fullspeedahead) on Aug 21, 2018 at 2:22pm PDT

Little research has been done to quantify the psychological effects of widespread and persistent wildfire smoke, though researchers have found ties to feelings of hopelessness, irritability, depression, fear, isolation, change of sleep patterns and lethargy. The research is scarce, in part because prolonged and widespread smoke is “a relatively new phenomenon in North America,” according to Dr. Sarah Henderson, senior environmental health scientist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Increasingly though, experts are concerned about the mental health effects of our new reality: weeks of seemingly unending smoke wafting across the western provinces each summer.

“It’s very oppressive to live under smoky conditions,” Henderson said. “A couple of days of it is more tolerable than a couple of weeks of it.”

‘The Lost Summer’

One of the few studies examining the mental health effects of prolonged periods of wildfire smoke was published last year in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. It looked at the impact of wildfire smoke in the Yellowknife area during the 2014 fire season, which saw significant smoke. The study found “a direct connection between the wildfires and smoke and a decrease in [people’s] mental and emotional health.”

When widespread smoke moves into a community, residents are often advised to stay indoors and close their windows, or to spend more time indoors with air conditioning. The study found that this leads to significantly less time spent outside, or socializing.

When smoke persists, closing your windows is no longer enough for many people. If a person doesn’t have an air filtration system, indoor air quality can eventually mirror the dangerous air quality outside.

“There’s a sense of not being able to get away,” said Dr. Warren Dodd, assistant professor at the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, and the lead researcher on the study. “Where do you go? There’s smoke everywhere.”

Being outside in the Pacific Northwest right now feels like smoking 7 cigarettes but this guy’s #stillgotit. More power to him. #bcforestfires #forestfires #forestfiresmoke

A post shared by Jon Feinstein (@jonfeinstein) on Aug 21, 2018 at 7:26am PDT

“One of the strongest emotions that people felt was isolation,” Dodd said. “This extended period of smoke meant that they weren’t able to leave their houses for the summer. People felt like they were isolated from the neighbours and from their community.”

First Nations participants reported an inability to take part in traditional activities, from hunting and fishing to berry harvesting. Other residents noted they were unable to work in their gardens, ride their bikes or take their kids outside to play.

Dr. Courtney Howard, board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, was also a researcher on the Yellowknife study. She recalls the dangers of isolation and inactivity due to wildfire smoke.

“Physicians are increasingly giving prescriptions of exercise to people — whether it’s heart disease or anxiety or depression.” Howard said. “So not only do people have the smoke impacting their health, they’re losing the activity that was the treatment of their disease.”

“People don’t realize the health benefits they’re getting even from just walking to work, until they can’t do that anymore.”

This feeling of isolation and inactivity has resonated for many people this summer, too. Smoke has already forced people to re-evaluate their summer plans, from community events to outdoor activities.

In Edmonton, events at the annual marathon were postponed due to poor air quality. Flights were halted from parts of B.C.’s interior. Kamloops cancelled an annual celebration that typically draws 10,000 people, triathlons were cancelled in Penticton and Kelowna, and in Calgary, the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer was cancelled halfway through, with 1,900 cyclists picked up just a few hours into the event.

As one participant from Yellowknife told researchers for the summer of smoke study: “It was the lost summer… it takes a deep, emotional toll, if not a spiritual toll.”

‘Homesick when you’re still at home’

There’s something larger at play for many people when they wake up to dim, smoky skies.

Dodd points to the concept of solastalgia to explain the gloom people feel when the smoke rolls in — and sticks around for weeks or months.

“It’s basically the feeling of being homesick when you’re still at home,” he explained of the feeling people get when their community is shrouded in smoke. “It’s really this concept of stress and anxiety about environmental change that’s happening in a place that is very familiar or at home.”

For many people, Dodd said, wildfire smoke is particularly frightening because it feels emblematic of larger environmental issues. “It’s connected to things that might happen in the future.”

Howard echoes the theory. “Increasingly, people are having anxiety about what’s to come, sadness about what’s to come, and even depression around the climate-related state of the world,” she said. These feelings have come to be known as “ecological grief.”

Dr. Ashlee Cunsolo, director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, wrote about ecological grief in an article published in the journal Nature earlier this year. She and her coauthor defined the concept of ecological grief as “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.”

“Once we published [the article] we were inundated with people from all over the world saying  ‘this is exactly how I feel but I never had a word for it,’ ” she told The Narwhal.

Worse than yesterday #bcforestfires #bcwildfires #sky #ocean #smoke #smokey #redsun

A post shared by Daniel (@dantronzero) on Aug 20, 2018 at 7:57pm PDT

For many people, Cunsolo said, there is a close connection between people, place and identity. When the landscape changes — even if the change is temporary, like with wildfire smoke — people may begin to feel a sense of alienation.

“Land connection is so much a part of who people are, that when it’s disrupted through things like climate-induced wildfires, or loss of sea ice or severe storms that are increasing then people’s sense of identity shifts with that sense of place,” she said.

“People love the landscape and it’s a place of solace, so when that landscape changes, their sense of identity and connection also shifts.”

For many people, widespread wildfire smoke is off-putting to say the least. For others, there’s a sense of foreboding.

“People called it a smoke apocalypse and it felt like that,” said Howard of the particularly smoky summer in Yellowknife, where she works as an emergency physician. “It becomes a real marker of ‘whoa, nature is powerful and it can change and we are small and this is big.’”

“It reorders our sense of place in the world.”

Grief as a ‘motivating force’

Howard says part of the problem for many people is “the feeling that this might be the new norm.”

When the streetlights come on in the middle of the day, ash rains down from the sky and the smoke blocks out the midnight sun, people begin to wonder if this might become more common. Cunsolo calls this “anticipatory grief.”

Wow this shit crazy! #bcforestfires #smoke #onthewater

A post shared by OHAD16 (@ohad_16) on Aug 20, 2018 at 7:32pm PDT

“People are starting to think this is a permanent shift,” said Cunsolo. “With that permanent shift comes the potential for a permanent loss of things that are important to them.”

As wildfire smoke continues to blanket much of the West, Cunsolo is adamant that the feeling of ecological grief can also be a force for good.

“People use grief to come together, to support each other and to protest,” she said. “It becomes this really resistant form of mourning where you take it public and it mobilizes you.

“Grief can actually be a very motivating force.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.