Climate Grief Is Going For City Life

Perhaps if they all gave up their own use of petroleum and gave their money to government they’d feel better?

The Climate Grief of City Life
We mourn glaciers and forests lost to climate change. Why not streets and sewers?

Living in the days of climate change means we are living in the era of ecological grief. The emotional phenomenon has inspired funerals for glaciers in Iceland, Oregon, and Switzerland. Scientists have reported feeling shock and loss with each consecutive return to the Great Barrier Reef, as new expanses of coral bleach and desiccate. All across the mining country of Central Appalachia, where mountains have been halved and forests are felled to extract coal, the grief appears in the form of diagnosable mental-health conditions.

You would be less likely to see the term ecological grief applied to a flooded New York City subway station or a heat wave forcing Philadelphia public schools to close early or dangerously scorching playground asphalt in Los Angeles. And yet for most city dwellers, the way we experience climate change comes not from the collapse of natural formations but through damage to the man-made infrastructure that makes up our urban spaces and our daily lives. When that infrastructure is harmed or destroyed, be it by wind or fire or flood, it alters our habitats—and that, too, elicits an intense sense of emotional loss and instability.

The philosopher Glenn Albrecht has developed a vocabulary to describe the emotional experience of living through climate change: Solastalgia, for example, describes a homesickness born out of the observation of chronic environmental degradation of one’s home; tierratrauma refers to the acute pain of witnessing ruined environs such as a logged forest or trash-filled creek. The basis of Albrecht’s work is that humans are fundamentally connected to our natural environments, and we experience pain when they are damaged. To that end, his research tends to focus on rural areas, where the barrier between humans and nature usually feels more porous.

The crazy doesn’t get any better. This is a doomsday cult, and these people need some serious mental health help and deprogramming.

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