Why I am dedicated to holding collective spaces for grief

I struggled while writing this piece. I have no glamorous innovation to offer, no upbeat story about a problem-solving invention. This essay is about profound grief. Grief about coming to terms with the climate and ecological emergency. Sticking to the requirements, this essay is also about how grieving together might just save us. I do not think it is particularly convincing, as grieving is a process too messy and uncontrollable to be eloquently captured by me, especially when it is about grieving a hyperobject (Morton, 2013) that we are all engulfed in. Adapting to the climate crisis asks us fundamental questions such as: “How do we relate to other beings around us? How much of our comfort are we willing to give up?”...It does not stop there. As climate extremes accelerate, tipping points rapidly approach, and we feel the inevitable pull of existential anxiety surging up in our throats, it also asks us to consider, “How do we face death? Our own death but also the loss of forests and species? The glaciers ‘and rain forests’ and potentially our own species’?”

Coming to terms with the ubiquitous losses has been a driving force in my relationship with the climate crisis. My pain for our burning world has broken me open to its intricate, interconnected beauty. I feel touched by Aldo Leopold’s reflection, “The only penalty of an ecological education is being alone in a wounded world.” (Leopold, 1949). These words, expressed in the same yearthe German constitution was written, still ring with truth. Despite the recent media attention that terms such as eco-anxiety have received in the past years, eco-distress remains stigmatized. For a long time, I have felt alone with my existential angst. Alone with dark-colored glasses that made me see a sinister future while everyone else had an unspoken agreement not to look into the abyss as climate realities were slowly scratching cracks into a carefully protected worldview, an ivory tower built on historic oppression.

A while after co-founding the local Fridays for Future group in Freising in 2019, I met with a delegate of the German parliament to talk about the European Regulations to ban single-use plastic. During the discussion, I pointed out how scared I felt about our future and invited the participants to reflect on their feelings; a deeply uncomfortable silence was followed by a quick change of topics. After being in turbo-acting mode as spokesperson and organizer, this was the first time I expressed my feelings. Strangely enough, talking about my existential fear with my fellow activists or friends had never occurred to me.After the initial momentum bled out, I felt desperate, frustrated, and lonely. “What keeps us from acting? Why is there such apathy?” I kept asking. The caring and loving people in my life turning their backs on the biggest threat to humanity didn’t make sense.

Renée Lertzman’s book Environmental Melancholia, published in 2015, was among the first books related to eco-emotions I got into my hands, and it drew me in. Built on her in-depth interviews, the psychoanalyst describes how apathy is not caused by a lack of caring but by caring about the immeasurable environmental loss being too much to take in a culture with few words or spaces for mourning environmental degradation. Apathy is muted grief that finds no place. It dawned on me that grieving might be a way to thaw the state of paralysis as it had on many others before me. Joanna Macy was one of the first to describe how crucial grief might be for coming to terms with our changing environment. In her Work that Reconnects she sees “Honoring our Pain” as a crucial step to “Seeing with New Eyes” (Macy & Brown, 2014). More and more scholars recognize grieving as incremental for reweaving our relationships with the rest of the living world, taking action, and fulfilling a moral duty. Jonathan Lear connects humans’ capacity to mourn to our species’ adaptation and the flourishing of life (Lear, 2022). Corine Pelluchon (2023) agrees on the importance of letting ourselves be stretched by grief. She stresses the monstrosity and immensity of the climate crisis's hyperobject (Morton, 2013). In her book “l’espérance ou la traversée de l’impossible,” she suggests that by transgressing the impossible, by delving deep into despair and grief, a new sense of intimacy with life’s fragility comes forth.

Donna Haraway (2016, p. 122) sees grieving as crucial for connecting to other life forms and a first step to taking adequate action:

Mourning is about dwelling on a loss and coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction . . . The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action; rather, it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.

Grief might not be something that we need to conjure up by capturing the ghost of apathy. Worry, anxiety, and grief are already widely experienced regarding the climate and ecological emergency. According to a landmark study conducted by Hickman et al. (2021), 84 percent of young people in 10 countries across the world stated that they felt worried about the climate crisis, and 45 percent even stated that their worry impacted their daily functioning. For youth from the Global South, these numbers were even higher. The study also points out that many young people felt alone; 48 percent reported being dismissed when talking about the climate crisis.This shows how not only climate injustice but also intergenerational injustice plays a large role in how the crisis is experienced and perceived. Panu Pikhala (2022) amalgamated literature surrounding bereavement theory and coping with eco-emotions and created the Process Model of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief. A model that stresses oscillating between three dimensions of coping, namely action, grieving, and distancing.

For my bachelor’s thesis, I examined how this model resonates with young people and developed a Toolkit for Young People Coping with Eco-Distress in collaboration with several organizations and Panu Pikhala. One of the most important findings was the importance of social support when coping with eco-distress and how these supportive settings were often difficult for young people to access. At the same time, I was fortunate enough to experience what supportive settings to hold eco-grief can look like while doing an internship with the Climate Psychology Alliance. Over the years, the Climate Psychology Alliance has carried out many climate cafés, a non-action space where people come together to share their feelings about the state of the world (Anderson et al., 2024). Experiencing and training to hold climate cafés has been profoundly inspiring, showing me that I was not alone in my pain for the world.

I decided to take this path based on a gut feeling. Shortly after getting my hands on Renée Lertzman’s Environmental Melancholia, burnt out from activism, I suddenly had a precise idea of how I could be of service to life in a collapsing world. I sensed an ineffable desire to hold spaces for people’s transformative grieving processes. So, I followed a grief counseling course and researched environmental grief both through poetry and my bachelor’s thesis. After many conversations and workshops, the theories I studied seemed even more relevant, such as Stroebe and Schut (1999) and Pikhala (2022), who state that we are grieving in an oscillating motion. I believe that we need shared spaces for loss and restoration, the two poles of the oscillating movement. I have come to use the German terms “Trost- and Trotzräume” as they encompass both a sense of defiance and consolation that can be crucial in group spaces. Inspired by the spiral of the Work that Reconnects (Macy & Johnstone, 2021), I believe that these processes can continuously expand beyond ourselves into an awareness of the interconnected and animate world around us. This requires a deepening of knowledge and awareness about our environment. Much of this knowledge is painful and difficult to bear.

If we want to find effective ways of taking large-scale action, we need to equip individuals with the capacity to hold different truths. To me, holding difficult truths means discovering, learning about, and trying to comprehend them with an open heart. In my opinion, this can only happen from a plurality of different standpoints, in a multitude of ways of expression. It means holding both the facts and the wonder, as Rachel Carson brilliantly did.

To face difficult truths, I yearn for spaces of open-hearted care and wonder for the biggest and tiniest of beings. A feeling Rachel Carson was able to evoke in her readers when writing these words, she later wanted to be read at her funeral (Lytle, 2007).

What is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is the sea lace, existing for some reason that is inscrutable to us – a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit, we approach the ultimate mystery of life itself. (Carson, 1955, p.153)

To let this question pierce our hearts and inspire our actions, we should no longer be afraid of viscerally feeling difficult truths—truths that might be too grand to grapple with by ourselves— truths that should rest on many different shoulders that hold and support each other.

Sources:

Anderson, J., O’Gorman, J., Staunton, T., & Hickman, C. (2024). Being a therapist in a time of climate breakdown. Routledge.

Carson, R. (1955) The edge of the sea. Houghton Mifflin Company.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene.
Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., Wray, B.,

Mellor, C., & Van Susteren, L. (2021). Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey. the Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863–e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(21)00278-3

Lear, J. (2022). Imagining the end: Mourning and Ethical Life. Harvard University Press.
Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county almanac: And sketches here and there. Oxford University Press.

Lertzman, R. (2016). Environmental melancholia: Psychoanalytic dimensions of engagement. Psychoanalytic Explorations.

Lytle, M. H. (2007). The gentle subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the rise of the environmental movement. Oxford University Press, USA.

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming back to life: The guide to the Work that Reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (2022). Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in with unexpected resilience and creative Power. New World Library.

Pelluchon, C. (2023). L’espérance, ou la traversée de l’impossible. Rivages.
Pihkala, P. (2022). The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A narrative review and a new

proposal. Sustainability, 14(24), 16628. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628
Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and

description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/074811899201046