Grieving is Empowering
Only by moving through the stages of grief can we do what is really needed for our planet.
Welcome to Protecting the Future, a newsletter about climate, degrowth, systems change and what it will take to keep our planet habitable.
This week I have a special guest,
, who is going to share with us the five stages of grief and how we can harness the grieving process to both make us more resilient and help us act in service of our only home. This is a particularly important topic for me, because I believe that until we, collectively, fully come to accept the highly likely outcome of our current people and planetary crises, we will not be able to create the change needed to steer the outcome away from catastrophe.Isabelle is the author of the Substack Finding Sanity, a newsletter about making sense of the world we live in and imagining the world we want to create. If you like what you read, check out Isabelle’s newsletter:
Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash
: Whether you’re a climate professional or simply a citizen of the Earth, we’ve all had our moment when we realised climate change is worse than we initially thought. Perhaps it was when you first realised this green growth thing didn’t quite add up, or after watching the planet have its hottest three-month period on record.This realisation probably brought up some quite heavy feelings, which many of us still find ourselves processing on a daily basis. This realisation can result in feelings of loss, which is where the five stages of grief come into play.
When coping with the loss of a loved one, grieving is an essential process to help us heal and learn to adjust to a different way of life. Regardless of whether you’re a hoper or a doomer, climate change is a world-altering condition and going through the grief process enables us to honour the reality of the moment we’re living through.
Doing so not only allows us to build our emotional resilience, but also gives us the space we need to harness our skills and knowledge in the service of life on our planet. By fully healing through the stages of grief, we ensure we’re in the right headspace to focus on the task at hand–the task of saving humanity.
For many people, especially younger ones, climate change is the first crisis of this level they have ever experienced, often feeling left without the emotional resilience necessary to tackle this issue–myself included.
As Naomi Klein more eloquently puts it:
Faced with ecological collapse, which is not a foregone result, but obviously a possible one, there has to be a space in which we can grieve, and then we can actually change.
What are the stages of grief?
The five stages of grief were introduced by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. Her observations that grief could be divided into five stages came from her years of working with terminally ill individuals. Other psychiatrists expanded on these to create seven stages, but I’d like to keep it to five for simplicity.
Climate grief was popularised by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, coining the term solastalgia: ‘the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.’ Many environmental writers have expanded these two observations to create the five stages of climate grief, though the most popular I believe was Andrew Boyd's writing in his book, I Want A Better Catastrophe.
The five stages of climate grief
Let’s explore what these stages might look like if we apply them to the changing climate:
1. Denial
There are many kinds of denial when it comes to climate change; from the denial of the actual crises we find ourselves in, to the denial that comes when you accept the science of the crisis, but deny the mitigation required to avoid catastrophic outcomes.
Conversely, the kind of denial I’m talking about here is the denial that comes with the cognitive dissonance of the all-consuming consequences of climate change hanging over our heads at every moment.
If we weren’t in denial, if we all truly understood the causes and effects of the climate crisis we wouldn’t be able to do anything. Buy dinner? That fruit and veg you’re eating is doused with biodiversity-killing pesticides. Use the internet? Those servers use a whoooole lot of carbon, not to mention the cobalt used in your tech mined by slaves in the Congo. Don’t buy anything and try to save money? Global banks have financed fossil fuel with $1.9 trillion since the inception of the Paris Agreement.
Though denial doesn’t just enable us to do things that aren’t great for the environment, it allows us to pace ourselves to crack open one bad thing at a time to combat that issue. We can’t tackle the extraordinary task of climate change in one go, we have to do it in bite-sized chunks to keep ourselves from losing our minds. Denial can help us through the too-terrifying-to-contemplate facts of climate change.
We’re all climate deniers, but sometimes doing so is necessary to keep ourselves sane.
2. Anger
We’ve all heard the saying ‘If you're not angry, you're not paying attention’, which perfectly encapsulates life when it comes to the climate crisis.
It’s impossible to not be angry when realising that we had the opportunity to stop the worst effects of the climate crisis, but we didn't. Or to read the news and not feel anger when politicians consistently fail to make the necessary changes to get us out of this mess.
The thing about anger is it's way too easy to drown in it. It’s too easy to get angry at everything and everyone and drown in hopelessness. But, if used correctly, anger has its place. We can use our anger to fuel our actions, to make the changes we need to make to keep the planet alive.
This piece is written by guest author,
. If this piece resonates with you, consider subscribing to her newsletter, Finding Sanity:3. Bargaining
Bargaining comes to the surface in lots of different ways. In grief, we bargain for our lost loved ones to be returned to us. In the climate crisis, we might bargain that things aren’t as bad as the statistics make them out to be.
We bargain that the government will sort itself out eventually, that carbon capture technology will work out in the end, or that nuclear fusion will really save us all. Perhaps you bargain on a smaller scale, creating a deal with yourself that if you avoid new clothes for three months you can buy one fast fashion piece for that event.
I think bargaining is the place many of us find ourselves returning to, especially those of us who are big hopers. We find comfort in the belief that the human race will figure something out eventually and we can go on living the life we are used to. Can’t we just ‘electrify everything’ and continue on as usual? Can’t the effects of climate change just come a little later? Can’t we just have a few more years of peace before we have to make real change?
4. Depression
We probably all know the stats by now; in one study of 10,000 children and young people, 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change.
Although depression and anxiety are completely normal reactions to the large looming issues that the climate crisis has created, that doesn’t mean that we have to sit in these feelings and suffer.
Personally, I have found that fully embracing the depression and despair that comes with the climate crisis has given me unexpected clarity. When I no longer need to tip-toe around the subject I will say things I wouldn’t have said before, when I no longer believe there is twenty, or thirty years of time to do the thing I want to do, I feel empowered to hurry up and get on with the thing.
Embracing the despair that comes along with depression means you can no longer wait to do the insert-the-thing-you’ve-been-wanting when that far-off date may no longer come. As doomer psychotherapist Jamey Hecht says “Your job at the end of the world is to become a happier person.”
The depression around the climate crisis also links so closely with the loss of a loved one because our planet, our environment, and the nature around us are so intricately linked with our entire lives. While we feel loss for the world we experienced as children, the flip side of that loss is love and care for our planet. How can we use our time here to experience joy in life and to appreciate what the Earth still has to share?
5. Acceptance
Writer Andrew Boyd brings to light the use of the serenity prayer when it comes to facing – and accepting – the fate of our own humanity, to opening our hearts to all the suffering and pain in the world and accepting it for what it is.
The serenity prayer is an invocation adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs who are seeking strength and wisdom in something outside of themselves to help them face another day. It goes as follows:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
The prayer may not help us to get over our grief or anger – an impossible task – but it gives us the courage to carry it with us into the battle that is finding our way out of the climate crisis.
Once we have gone through the grieving process, and arrived at acceptance, as Naomi Klein says: now we can change. We can face our reality head-on and harness our talents for good. This will look different for everyone as we all have different skills we can bring; it could be hosting awareness evenings in our local community, creating thought-provoking artworks, writing opinion pieces for online publications and newspapers (hello!), posting on social media, running for parliament or volunteering for someone who is, using our photography skills to highlight important issues and so, so much more.
We can not do these things while we are denying either the crises exist, or the mitigation that is required to avoid collapse, while we are angry, depressed, or bargaining. It is only when we come to accept our reality that we can fully embrace our talents in service of our planet, and really, what could be more important than that?
Life is never simple. This means many of us travel through these stages in a variety of ways.
Perhaps you find yourself going through the stages backwards. We accept the world we find ourselves in, slowly creeping into a depression. Entering the bargaining stage, we argue politicians will help us avoid the worst. When we find this lacking, we enter anger and become furious at the world, slowly moving into denial, where we abandon all hope.
Or you may find yourself looping back around a few stages over and over again. Personally, I find myself going through the stages of bargaining, depression and acceptance quite often, but each time the process gets easier. The time I spend in those first two stages lessens and I find my journey to acceptance is a smoother ride as my resilience builds.
Whichever way you find yourself going through climate grief, we will all have to walk the stages eventually to create the emotional resilience, skills, and knowledge we need to deal with the ever-growing and overwhelming concept that is climate change.
This piece is written by guest author,
. If this piece resonates with you, consider subscribing to her newsletter, Finding Sanity:For anyone who may be interesting in exploring grief further, this is one of many topics Ryan (Ra) James and I cover in our (re)Biz ‘(re)connecting business with Earth’ workshop. Applications for our January cohort are now open.
Thanks for sharing this, Erin! I realllllly enjoyed writing it with you. :)
fantastic Isabella and Erin - however, i suspect that the vast majority are not aware there even is a problem so haven't got to number 1 yet. I see the success in the polls in NZ of deniers as evidence of a lack of awareness of the multiple overshoot driven crises threatening us.