#Climate grief

[hope-for-the-planet]

Under what legal experts called a “historic” settlement, announced on Thursday, Hawaii officials will release a roadmap “to fully decarbonize the state’s transportation systems, taking all actions necessary to achieve zero emissions no later than 2045 for ground transportation, sea and inter-island air transportation”, Andrea Rodgers, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the case, said at a press conference with the governor.

[headspace-hotel]

"Disaster Taxon," poem assembled using text from Wikipedia articles

[seal-at-sea]

haven't seen a lot of people talking about climate grief... there are so, SO many fucked up aspects of trump winning, so many things to be afraid of-- fuck, I'm just so angry and sad!!! If you're feeling the same, I guess I just wanted you to know you're not alone ❤️

[mcromwell]

"Orphan" 11"x14" acrylic, paint pen, colored pencil, wax pastel, and conte crayon on paper

Brought to you by grief and climate anxiety 🔥

[reasonsforhope]

I can't take the state of the world anymore, every day things constantly get worse and there's literally nothing we can do. Every time things get better they're immediately undone by forces more powerful than us. I just want things to go back to the way they were before when it felt like there was hope, now it feels like humanity is doomed and will never, ever get better. I just want to die so I can finally know peace from this evil.

Hey. I'm really, really sorry you're having such a hard time. That sounds like an incredibly painful headspace to be in.

Please find someone you can talk to and who can help you - whether that's a peer counselor or a good friend or a trained mental health professional. Especially a trained mental health professional, if you can. You can find a really thorough list of crisis hotlines listed by country here.

Also, I realllllly recommend getting off any websites or social media that are contributing to you feeling like this, or at least block all the people/tags posting things that are making you feel like this. Negativity bias is real - the news/internet doesn't accurately reflect the world and neither does the way your brain perceives it

In the meantime, a few quick words/facts of comfort. I hope they can give you at least some reassurance or solace.

We literally have more reason to hope we can solve climate change than ever before x

Starting about six months ago, major international energy reports have come out for the first time showing that we have a visible, concrete path to staying under 1.5 degrees celsius x

Twenty, even ten years ago, scientists talked about whether we could possibly manage to limit global warming to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. Now, those numbers aren't even on the map - we're talking 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. We've cut expected warming in half in under a decade x

Renewable energy is growing so exponentially it's now "unstoppable" x

Two hundred years ago, in 1800, there wasn't a single "liberal democracy" - a democracy that gives all citizens the right to vote - on the planet. Just over one hundred years ago, in 1900, there were five of them. Today, roughly half the countries (aka roughly 100) on the planet fall into this category. International politics is so often two steps forward, one step back, but this is actually an astonishing pace of progress in the grand scheme of things x

For all of human history, until just over 200 years ago, roughly half of all children died. Across times, across cultures. Half of all children died by the age of 15. Half of them. Today, globally, that same child mortality rate is only 4%. We did that. We changed what was previously an eternal, inescapable, and horrific condition of human existence, and we are going to keep making that rate go down x

Two steps forward, one step back, is still moving forward. There are so, so, so many reasons that we are not already doomed. There are so many reasons to think the future is going to be bright

To anyone struggling with thoughts like this: please, please give yourself the chance to see it

[zenaidamacrouras1]

donate to Appalachian flood recovery

Thanks to folks who have reached out 💜💜💜 what a beloved community. I am okay, my area just had power outages, but the flooding and damage farther south than me is bad. It's just really fucking bad. I have a lot of friends in North Carolina and East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia who are expecting to be trapped in their homes without power for a week or more and that's the ones that have homes left.

Above are screenshots from the insta page Country Queers. It's a bunch of locally led mutual aid groups that will turn your money directly into toilet paper, bottled water and diapers.

All of these groups have fucking done this before, a few years ago, in the last once in a lifetime flood that obliterated Eastern Kentucky. EKY Mutual Aid was fucking tireless during the Kentucky floods.

If you want to give tax deductible to more long term work, this is a great group of locally based funders that have been here for the long haul for recovery and will be doing it again.

Appalachia Funders Network:

[coldalbion]

On Howling & Dread

Grief is not bad, nor is the mourning wail something that should be proscribed. The very fact that we are encouraged to grieve, but only to a "socially acceptable" level, lest we overspill, lest we "make a mess"? This is an issue. We have not engaged in the requisite howling to even approach a relationality with what is. Only then can joy and laughter be founded in the deep roots, in the darkest storms. I genuinely believe the ancient goês knew this. It is right there in the word.

Alas, some particularly with the "love and light" folks, don't seem to realise how commodified even so-called "emotions" have become - how "think positive, healing thoughts" ideas are becoming ever closer (and in some ways always were) to the capitalists who would assure you that the pandemic is over, and the price of doing business is to now quietly let millions die as fuel for the status quo, be that COVID, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, climate change, etc.

There is something reaching to us in the Dark Places of Wisdom, and if we cannot meet the dread properly, then we deny the strange solidarity of the pandaemonic All. We deny that for many acoss the world, unevenly distributed, the apocalypse has already come. For some it, is months, days, years. For others? Generations or centuries.

Some say we are *already* in the afterlife. In the underworld. Infused and suffused with the dead and the monstrous, an oceanic chthonic cauldron. If that's so, then it is the crossroads, the meeting point and origin for all Life that unites us all and upwells ceaselessly.

So next time the dread grips you, consider how all Life is united. Consider howling. And watch what flows.

[anniekoh]

A plaque at the base of what once was the Okjökull glacier, also known as the Ok glacier, which in 2014 became the first Icelandic glacier to disappear due to climate change (source)

The memorial plaque, written by prominent Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason, reads:

A letter to the future Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. August 2019 415ppm CO2

[ladytemeraire]

It's November 1st and my neighbor's lilacs are blooming

It was 80 degrees this week and Mt Fuji had a snowless October for the first time in 130 years and lilacs are blooming in fucking November

But yeah sure climate change is a myth

[screams into the void]

[surlifen]

nobody wants to hear my environmental grief it's such a bummer it's a huge bummer. this reading for class is making me almost cry

we used to have jaguars we used to have massive herds of grizzly bears grazing on clover. did you know they were social? did you know jaguars were endemic to california? jaguars. we used to have coastal prairie with wildflowers so thick you could see it from ships offshore. the tule elk is named for the tule marshes it lives in, but it prefers grassland. we drove it into marshes as its last refuge from colonization and then named it after that

we had jaguars... I didn't even know...

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"Kristan Childs, a therapist in Sebastopol, California, agrees. “They need permission to feel,” she observes. “Some think if they allow themselves to feel, it’ll be like falling into a pit of despair they can never get out of. But almost always, the opposite happens,” she says. “When they see other people feeling the same way, it actually lifts the burden of aloneness.” And some even feel inspired to take collective action, she says." In the current generation of scientists, Gatti had to learn how to shift her mindset in her daily practice to avoid burnout. Similarly to Kalmus, she uses climate grief as a fuel to keep sounding the alarm. “The least I can do is to make noise and learn to speak a language everyone understands — so they become conscious that we must change at the micro and macro levels,” she says. “This is a huge opportunity for humanity to evolve.”

[hope-for-the-planet]

"People assume that in the 50 years since the first Earth Day we've made no progress. That we're in a worse position now than we were in the 1970s, that there's no point in environmental action," [...] Quite the opposite is true. Climate-friendly advances that would have seemed impossible even 10 years ago are now commonplace. And three times in the past 50 years humanity has faced--and fixed--massive, man-made global environmental issues.

The fight isn't won yet, but don't forget that we have made enormous progress.

We would be in a much, much worse position if it wasn't for all the incredible work of environmental activists who came before us, most of whose names and contributions we will never know. They are the reason that we have a fighting chance now, and we owe it to them to pick up their banner and keep running.

[lectorel]

I miss real winters. The kind of consistently-cold-for-months, snow-up-to-your-knees, wake-up-early-to-shovel kind of winters, where the snow and the night sky reflect off one another like endless mirrors, turning midnight as bright as a cloud-covered noon. I miss ice, and cursing gutter-icicles for the damage they heralded. I miss the snap of stepping outside on a freezing day, when that first breath of frozen air is a sharp as an electric shock. I miss being cold, really, truly, deeply cold, the kind of cold that sinks into your bones and makes your skin feel like it's burning when you step into a heated room.

I never wanted to live in a land of perpetual summer - California can keep its surfer weather. Give me back the freezing winds and the sub-zero temperatures of my childhood.

[boymanmaletheshequel]

May Zeus and Poseidon, Gaia and Aeolus, have mercy on the souls who have been claimed or marred by hurricane Helene, and may the corporations responsible for the earths decline, and with it, their deaths, never know peace before they die, when they die, and long afterwards as well. To all my Hellenists, polytheists, nature witches, and other good people who have lost people or homes to this storm, don’t stop fighting for our planet, don’t stop fighting for your lives, don’t stop fighting for your homes. We can’t fix climate change entirely, not that we know of, but there’s still time to hold responsible those who bore it upon us. Never forget to curse the names of Blackrock, of Exxon, of Chevron, Shell, and so many others. Do not let them or their ceos know peace, and don’t stop fighting for a better, safer world from the rape of corporate greed. Love y’all, stay safe. 💚

[parlerenfleurs]

It's like a good chunk of the population is living in a dream where the climate crisis is not happening.

NFTs and AI using up water and energy for a mediocre output? Not a problem, investors love a new hobby, people love not using their brains and hands and being fed meaningless drivel. Soil artificialisation being a huge and known cause of catastrophic consequences? Huh? Who? Toxicity in all the materials used in a house, the utensils for cooking, plastics in our clothes, paints, water, electronics? We don't have a choice, do we?

It's enough to make one become mad.

I need to bury myself in art to stay sane. Or maybe to leave it all and become a radical, because I, too, live in a dream where using a smartphone and playing video games and using so much electricity and shitting in water are things that I do, after all.

[theduckopera]

now

and now

the soft looming of what we have made and the way we can no longer carry it in our own hands sits between us, silently, in the dark

now

as we bear it with us like a prayer, or an ornament, or an ornament that has always been in some lonely way, a prayer—

now

as we make our sweet little lives a processional for all that we have been rushing to become and all that race has cost

and as the star-crossed land we call the past slips desperately behind us into the dusk—

now

between where we could have been by now and where we, as a people, now stand

we link hand with hand and learn to live on demand.

--Sky Stanton (@theduckopera)