#ecogrief

[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.

[reasonsforhope]

How can I stay positive regarding the wildfires?

It can be really hard in the face of so much destruction. I don't know how much anyone can specifically stay positive in the face of disasters like this -

but I can give you some thoughts about how to let hope live alongside everything else you're feeling about this, and how to avoid spiraling and remember that this is not proof that we're doomed.

Possibly relevant note lol is that I've lived my whole life in California, so suffice to say figuring out how to move forward among the consequences and destruction of massive wildfires is something I'm definitely not new to.

I remember walking to my classroom in elementary school, about 20 years ago now, and it was literally snowing ash around me. This too shall pass.

Take a few deep breaths. I know it's cliche but it's also important

Zoom out in terms of perspective: Wildfires can make the sky look apocalyptic (like I said, I have lots of experience with this!), but they are regional, and they always end. These wildfires are awful but this specific wave of fires is happening in just one country in a huge, huge world. There's far more land that isn't burning

Canada is about to get substantial international aid in fighting the wildfires - there are already 200 additional firefighters headed over from the US and France, and Canada (Quebec specifically) is also already in talks with Costa Rica, Portugal, and Chile about additional firefighters/resources. Help is on the way and these numbers really will make a big difference, and as the disaster continues (unfortunately it is uh...pretty early in fire season), more help will be sent. People are doing what they can to help, because in the face of disaster, that's what we're wired to do

There are actually MUCH better fire management plans than just about anyone is using, esp in North America but that we COULD implement and increasingly WILL going forward. A lot of the wildfire situation these days is because of the West's incredibly wrongheaded derision toward traditional Indigenous land and ecosystem management practices, including cultural prescribed burns that keep massive wildfires from happening. California in particular is already partnering with several First Nations to revive prescribed burns, to significant success. As fires continue to be terrible, more and more places will get on board with this. We can and will implement practices that will truly change our situation

Cultural burns work because, ironically, the reason for the wildfires is that "is that we've been so good at putting out every fire possible that it has led to overly dense forests and a buildup of burnable material like branches and dry vegetation" that makes wildfires much worse in a number of ways. At lower intensity, however, as with cultural burns, forest fires can actually have huge environmental benefits

Finally, every time a natural disaster happens like this, as awful and destructive as they are, it serves as a wake-up call for thousands of people and adds both ever-mounting urgency and ever-mounting evidence to the importance of fighting climate change, which really does translate into action. For a lot of people, "saving the environment" feels super distant - but you know what feels super immediate? Saving their homes from burning down (or getting flooded or otherwise destroyed, etc. etc.) In 2021, the UN ran the world's largest climate survey, across 1.2 million people and 50 nations, and almost TWO-THIRDS SAID THAT CLIMATE CHANGE IS A GLOBAL EMERGENCY THAT WE NEED TO WORK HARDER TO ADDRESS. Imagine that 10 years ago! That other third of people aside, this really is real and massive progress

Also, every time there's a big disaster like this, climate change deniers look more and more baldly ridiculous. Think about it: How often did you hear US Republicans bullshitting about climate change denial 10 years ago? And how often do you hear them doing it now? In fact, there's increasing evidence that Republicans really are shifting on climate change (mind you they're managing to do it in an obnoxiously somehow pro-fossil-fuel way, but it's still a major sea change). Some of them are literally calling for a clean energy transition, and Kevin McCarthy himself (guy in charge of the US House right now) created a task force for to a conservative climate change agenda that acknowledges climate change is real. There's now a conservative climate conference that does active lobbying and a House Conservative Climate Caucus, which somehow has SIXTY MEMBERS. Again, something that would've been unimaginable just six or seven years ago.

Every acre that the fires burn this year is an acre that's pretty guaranteed to not burn next year, for what that's worth. (And I do think it's worth mentioning, esp with such a high number of acres)

The battles are going to be hard, but I truly believe that even the ones we lose often bring us closer to winning the war.

Fires burn, but life always grows back.

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 3, final)

Queer Ecologies

‘what it might mean to inhabit the natural world having been transformed by the experience of its loss’?

‘[the queer artist's] natures are not saved wildernesses; they are wrecks, barrens, cutovers, nuclear power plants: unlikely refuges and impossible gardens. But they are also sites for extraordinary reflection on life, beauty, and community’ (344)

AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts

The artist (Jan Zita Grover’s North Enough) writes about moving from San Francisco, where she has worked as a personal caregiver to many individuals who were dying, and died of, AIDS, eventually to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and Minnesota hoping for ‘a geographic cure’ to her burnout and grief. (344)

‘in their persistence [grief, mourning], generate a form of imagination—an awareness of the persistence of loss—that allows her to conceive of the natural world around her in ways that challenge the logic of commodity substitution characterizing contemporary relations of nature consumption” (344)

“The north woods did not provide me with a geographic cure. But they did something much finer. Instead of ready-made solutions, they offered me an unanticipated challenge, a spiritual discipline: to appreciate them, I needed to learn how to see their scars, defacement, and artificiality and then beyond those to their strengths—their historicity, the difficult beauties that underlay their deformity.  AIDS, I believe, prepared me to perform these imaginative feats. In learning to know and love the north woods, not as they are fancied but as they are, I discovered the lessons that AIDS had taught me and became grateful for them” (344)

Rather than the landscape of her dreams, the land looks more like a candidate for reclamation. Through Grover’s research we learn that the region is one that been ‘systematically abused: logged several times, drained, subjected to failed attempts at agriculture, depleted, abandoned, eroded, invaded, neglected.”

Jack pines are predominant in the region; tenacious, ‘the first conifers to reestablish themselves after a fire” (16), in their own way remarkable even as they are useless for lumber, short lived, and not at all the sorts of trees about which adjectives like ‘breathtaking’ circulate” (345) they are a loud testament to the violence that has generated them.

“the diminishment of this landscape mortified and disciplined me. Its scars will outlast me, bearing witness for decades beyond my death to the damage done here” (20) But still: the love emerges, painfully, gradually, intimately. (345)

She experiences the landscape in terms of loss and change, rather than idyll and replacement. It is all personal; it is all about developing a way of making meaning that recognizes the singularities of the past and takes responsibility for the future in the midst of intimate devastation. (345)

‘Environmental hubris’—fly fishing, the introduction of non-native fish to the river, changing temperatures of rivers caused by logging and diversion; specific policies, politics, and technologies that have had effects on the rivers, the fish, and the other species throughout the river and the north woods (356)

A refusal to demonize the ‘invasive’ species; Grover herself is ‘invasive’ both culturally and personally (white settlers and big city imports) thus her ethical claim is not for purity but for an active and thoughtful remembering of historical violences in the midst of ongoing necessity of movement and change (346)

Seek relationships with Clear-cuts and landfills in order to bring to the foreground the massive weight of human devastation of the natural world; “a discerning eye can see how unstewarded most of this land has been. The charm lies in finding ways to love with such loss and pull from it what beauties remain” (81) (347)

“she does not romanticize the dying even as she might mourn their loss to the world; instead [through Grover] we witness each loss as particular, irrevocable, and concrete: she is their witness” (347)

Can we learn to see these landscapes as creation as well as destruction?

Rather than mourn the loss of the pristine, she carefully cultivates an attitude of appreciation of what lies before her, beyond the aesthetic wilderness to the intricate details of human interactions with the species and landscapes of the region. In this manner she comes to be able to find the beauty in, for example, landfills and clearcuts; far from naivete or technophilia, this ability is grounded in a commitment to recognizing the simultaneity of death and life in these landscapes, the glut of aspen-loving birds in the clear-cut, the swallows, turkey vultures, and bald eagles near the landfill.

--

It is necessary to face our fear and pain; we have to make room in our relationships with the natural world, queer and otherwise, for the recognition that that is what we might be feeling in the first place (355)

[hope-for-the-planet]

It gives me so much joy to see kiwi populations recovering enough for them to inconvenience and frighten humans by breaking into their warehouses and chicken coops. These are the fruits of many years of kiwi conservation work.

that’s a whole man.

[jerryyuan002]

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[newswireml]

Feds struggle to fill seats for employee 'ecogrief' training#Feds #struggle #fill #seats #employee #ecogrief #training

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s “ecogrief” training is more widespread than originally thought, having already been conducted in “many” of the agency’s regions, according to an internal email obtained by The Washington Times. But the agency has been struggling to fill all the seats in its upcoming round of training on Friday, with 10 of the 35 slots unclaimed as of Tuesday. “We still have some…

[hope-for-the-planet]

In 1981, Japan’s last five living toki were removed from a wild that had become too dangerous for them.

I tell a lot of sad stories here, about mistakes we’ve made and animals we’ve lost. This isn’t one of those. This is a story about one of those precious times when we were able to fix the things we’d broken.

A joint effort between Japan & China, and the discovery of seven more birds in that country, led to a successful breeding program, which in 2008 saw the first ibises fly free again in Japan. Today, at least 5000 toki exist in the world.

The last wild-born toki, one of those captured in 1981, lived almost long enough to see her species’ return. Reaching the equivalent age of a centenarian human, she died in 2003

Two hundred years ago, the wetlands of Japan rustled with pink-tinged feathers. Tall, pale birds stepped carefully through reeds and iris, hunting small fish, crabs, and frogs. 

Nipponia nippon, it would be dubbed by the national ornithological society, a bird emblematic of its country. The Crested Ibis. The Toki. The Peach Flower Bird.

Marshes slowly changed to rice fields, with farmers who resented the toki for ruining crops; to kill the birds was outlawed, so children chased them from the fields, singing warnings.

The doors of the country were pried open. Laws changed. Farmers bought their first guns, their sights set on birds who were no longer protected. The toki, the red-crowned crane, and many others began to suffer. But the worst was yet to come.

Pesticides are indiscriminate killers. The poison sprayed to kill a beetle can travel up the foodchain, toppling a cascade of larger animals, or affecting their ability to reproduce. It was reckless pesticide use that nearly wiped out the Bald Eagle. In the rice fields, the peach-flower-bird had little chance. 

In 1981, Japan’s last five living toki were removed from a wild that had become too dangerous for them.

I tell a lot of sad stories here, about mistakes we’ve made and animals we’ve lost. This isn’t one of those. This is a story about one of those precious times when we were able to fix the things we’d broken. 

A joint effort between Japan & China, and the discovery of seven more birds in that country, led to a successful breeding program, which in 2008 saw the first ibises fly free again in Japan. Today, at least 5000 toki exist in the world.

The last wild-born toki, one of those captured in 1981, lived almost long enough to see her species’ return. Reaching the equivalent age of a centenarian human, she died in 2003—not of old age, but injury after throwing herself against her cage door. 

Her name was ‘Kin’. ‘Gold’. 

Mended things can never be as whole as they once were. There will always be cracks that show, weak spots that remain vulnerable. Yet, like the shining seams of a kintsugi piece, these scars speak an important truth: here is a thing that someone chose to save; handle with care.

The title of this painting is ‘Restoration’. It is gouache on 22x30 inch watercolor paper

[deblala]

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/interior-department-now-offering-ecogrief-training-employees/

[hope-for-the-planet]

Previous similar drops in emissions were due to periods of economic stagnation or recession--this is the first significant drop in emissions that has coincided with GDP growth.

The majority of this decline is due to changes in energy use and generation. Coal demand has dropped nearly to 1900s levels, while use of renewables grows significantly--for the first time renewables accounted for half of the energy generated in "advanced economies" included in this analysis.

[queering-ecology]

Chap 12. Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (part 2)

Mourning and Melancholia

(1915 essay by the same name by Sigmund Freud); mourning and melancholia are reactions to the loss of a beloved object: “both are grave departures from the normal attitude of life” (1984, 252)  but with mourning “we rely on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time” (225) in melancholia the ego will not let go, the melancholic internalizes the lost object as a way of preserving it.  (334) A loss has occurred, “but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either” (254)(335)

Mourning is thus a process of recognition of beauty as well as an acknowledgement of its extinguishment (things are beautiful because they die) (336)

Melancholy Nature

Ecotourism, wilderness tourist practices are a form of ecosocial ritual by which consumers of ‘vanishing’ nature confirm their own transcendence of nature in the moment of mourning its loss: by understanding nature as something ‘lost’ at the hands of modernity, and by witnessing its demise in the fetishized chunks that are offered up to spectacular consumption by modernity, the victory of the modernity responsible for the loss is confirmed (337)

The temporal logic of this (bourgeois) progressivist narrative is very akin to Freud’s: the position of the present as ‘better’ than the past is achieved through an understanding of loss that assumes the libido will simply ‘move on’, and that also, in this case, assumes that modernity will simply move on from nature even as it memorializes its legacy in parks and monuments (337)

Fetishization and commodification of a lost, romanticized nature—“unspoiled” wilderness—is very important; it is the very quality of nature’s impending extinguishment (buy now or you’ll miss it) that fuels much ecotourism (337)

“Nature” becomes mythic, idyllic, a commodity, a fantasy, a fetish  that can be bought to extend the reach of capital rather than critique the relationships that produced the loss in the first place. The idea of a pristine nature on the perpetual verge of destruction is not only a violent rationale for the dispossession of peoples and livelihoods but a seductive fantasy that keeps consumers poised to watch that destruction. (337)

Nature as a fantastic, watchable visitable commodity is a part of modernity (338); the consumption of nature as wilderness is an imposition of one hegemonic relationship—capitalist exchange—into a landscape of many other relationships and intimacies, relationships that are often destroyed in a process of consumption itself. crucially, the fantasy of wilderness is not only infinitely consumable, but infinitely replaceable.

There is lots of evidence of environmental loss but few places in which to experience it as loss, to even begin to consider that the diminishment of life that surrounds us on a daily basis is something to be really sad about, and on  a personal level. Non-human beings and particular life filled places are,  here, ungrievable in the same moment that their loss (or impending loss) propels their value on the market (338-339)

How does one grieve in a context in which the significance, the density, and even the existence of loss is unrecognized?

Melancholia, pressed into the service of memory—environmental loss becomes something recognizable and meaningful—and grievable

Queer Melancholia

Mourning is a process of accepting that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever (Butler 2004, 21) (340)

Melancholia is a productive response to the twentieth century’s “catastrophic losses of bodies, spaces, and ideals, [and that] psychic and material practices of loss and its remains are productive for history and for politics” (5) (340)

Melancholia suggests a non-normalizing relationship to the past and the world, in which the recognition of the identificatory persistence of loss in the present—loss as self, the fact that we are constituted by prohibition, power, and violence—is central to our ethical and political relationships with others.

Butler writes; grief furnishes a sense of political community…by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility (2004, 22) (341)

The author makes direct connections to queer activism especially surrounding the AIDS crisis and the catastrophic losses experienced.

“The numbers of deaths are unthinkable’ but ‘the rest of society offers little or no acknowledgment” ; is it not surprising that gay men feel “frustration, anger, rage, outrage, anxiety, fear, and terror, shame and guilt, sadness and despair” but rather that “we often don’t”  (Douglas Crimp) Crimp believed that the failure of activism to acknowledge the fact that AIDS is bound up with internal violence as well as external is itself a form of disavowal; “by making all violence external, pushing it to the outside and objectifying it in ‘enemy’ institutions, and individuals, we deny its psychic articulation, deny that we are effected, as well as affected, by it”; Mourning is a vital companion to organizing and melancholia a part of the politics of AIDS. (341)

Cvetkovich; the collective preservation of loss is an ‘archive of trauma’—[…]suggests the acknowledgement of melancholia as a public activity; public melancholy as a form of survival (342)

What might it mean to consider the preservation of a public record of environmental loss, an “archive of ecological trauma”—made up of the kinds of art, literature, film, ritual, performance and other memorials and interrogations that have characterized so many cultural responses to AIDS—as part of an environmental ethics of politics?  

What would it mean to consider seriously the environmental present, in explicit contrast  to dominant discourses of ecological modernization, as a pile of environmental wreckage, constituted and haunted by multiple, personal, and deeply traumatic losses rather than as a position from which to celebrate their demise by consuming them (and moving on to something else)?

What might it look like to  take seriously the fact that nature is currently ungrievable, and that the melancholy natures with which we are surrounded are a desperate attempt to hold onto something that we don’t even know how to talk about grieving? (342)

[socialorganism]

Climate Crisis refers to the response governments prepare for newly-unpersoned populations in the wake of engineered ecological disaster. It refers to the ways governments exile, imprison, and murder people affected and displaced by climate weapons. It refers to the ways governments make these programs possible, the way they pour resources into economic exploitation and counter-insurgency as global policy, and the way they manufacture consent for their rapid transition to authoritarian extremism and apartheid.

Red scares, neoliberalism, austerity, neocolonialism, surveillance, drug trafficking. Just a few ways to soften global populations up in the years between your leaders knowing they had the opportunity to weaponize the planet, and the year they would see the fruits of their ill labor. Time-buying measures for a system of domination that felt its providence was endangered by the possibility of a better world.

Climate Change is here.

Climate Crisis is rolling out.

Climate Change is the deliberate and premeditated use of the planet's systems as weapons of mass destruction against an insurgent, global population

[kayespivey]

Have you heard about eco-grief or climate-grief? The feeling that the world is burning and it’s overwhelming to the point of causing anxiety? I talk about that some in this video and my own experience with environmentalism and eco-grief.

[sondercoach-blog]

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[jerryyuan002]

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[summersfirstsnow]

Some things about finding joy in the natural world and conservation that didn't press on bruises too painfully for me but also didn't ignore the reality of life in a climate-change ravaged world:

Underland by Robert Macfarlane isn't ecogrief specific but can help if you want to revel in what remains a bit

The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us by Megan Bowman

Swamplands: Tundra Beavers, Quaking Bogs, and the Improbable World of Peat by Edward Struzik

Some words from some folks in environmental or environment-adjacent fields that engage head-on:

seconding Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by the inimitable Robin Wall Kimmerer: the audiobook especially is phenomenal (the author reads it herself and it's wonderful... you can hear her smiling sometimes) it helped me so much when I was struggling with environmental grief toward the end of my degree, the author brings her knowledge as a Pottawatomie woman, a botanist, and a parent to her work in a way that's just beautiful

Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, & Solutions for the Climate Crisis: edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Katharine K. Wilkinson: this is an essay collection from a variety of authors about engaging with climate grief as well as climate solutions

Hi friends.

I'm looking for suggestions on what you read, write, and do to deal with eco grief. Usually my brand is "cautious optimism, on purpose, to stave off despair." It hasn't been working lately.

Favorite authors? Favorite essays? What things make you feel less powerless and like you're watching an unequivocal, massive, total train wreck that you are also on?