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Per Espen Stoknes: The Great Grief — How To Cope with Losing Our World
Climate scientists overwhelmingly say that we will face unprecedented warming in the coming decades. Those same scientists, just like you or I, struggle with the emotions that are evoked by these facts and dire projections. My children—who are now 12 and 16—may live in a world warmer than at any time in the previous 3 million years, and may face challenges that we are only just beginning to contemplate, and in many ways may be deprived of the rich, diverse world we grew up in. How do we relate to – and live – with this sad knowledge?
Across different populations, psychological researchers have documented a long list of mental health consequences of climate change: trauma, shock, stress, anxiety, depression, complicated grief, strains on social relationships, substance abuse, sense of hopelessness, fatalism, resignation, loss of autonomy and sense of control, as well as a loss of personal and occupational identity.
This more-than-personal sadness is what I call the “Great Grief”—a feeling that rises in us as if from the Earth itself. Perhaps bears and dolphins, clear-cut forests, fouled rivers, and the acidifying, plastic-laden oceans bear grief inside them, too, just as we do. Every piece of climate news increasingly comes with a sense of dread: is it too late to turn around? The notion that our individual grief and emotional loss can actually be a reaction to the decline of our air, water, and ecology rarely appears in conversation or the media. It may crop up as fears about what kind of world our sons or daughters will face. But where do we bring it? Some bring it privately to a therapist. It is as if this topic is not supposed to be publicly discussed.
This Great Grief recently re-surfaced for me upon reading news about the corals on the brink of death due to warming oceans as well as overfishing of Patagonian toothfish in plastic laden oceans. Is this a surging wave of grief arriving from the deep seas, from the ruthlessness and sadness of the ongoing destruction? Or is it just a personal whim? As a psychologist I’ve learned not to scoff at such reactions, or movements in the soul, but to honor them.
A growing body of research has brought evidence from focus groups and interviews with people affected by droughts, floods, and coastal erosion.
When elicited, participants express deep distress over losses that climate disruptions are bringing. It is also aggravated by what they perceive as inadequate and fragmented local, national and global responses. In a study by researcher Susanne Moser on coastal communities, one typical participant reports: “And it really sets in, the reality of what we’re trying to hold back here. And it does seem almost futile, with all the government agencies that get in the way, the sheer cost of doing something like that – it seems hopeless. And that’s kind of depressing, because I love this area.” In another study by sociologist Kari Norgaard, one participant living by a river exclaims: “It’s like, you want to be a proud person and if you draw your identity from the river and when the river is degraded, that reflects on you.” Another informant experiencing extended drought explained to professor Glenn Albrecht’s team that even if “you’ve got a pool there – but you don’t really want to go outside, it’s really yucky outside, you don’t want to go out.”
A recent climate survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication had this startling statistic: “Most Americans (74%) say they only ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ discuss global warming with family and friends, a number that has grown substantially since 2008 (60%).” Emphasis mine.
These quotes and statistics underscore the reality that many prefer to avoid or not dwell in—this Mordor-esque land of eco-anxiety, anger, despair, and depression. One of denial’s essential life-enhancing functions is to keep us more comfortable by blotting out this inner, wintry darkness.
The climate survey, however, also has this encouraging finding: “Americans are nine times more likely to lean toward the view that it is people’s responsibility to care for the Earth and its resources (62%) than toward the belief that it is our right to use the Earth and its resources for our own benefit (7%).”
So, what if instead of continuing to avoid this hurt and grief and despair, or only blaming them—the corporations, politicians, agrobusinesses, loggers, or corrupt bureaucrats—for it, we could try to lean into, and accept such feelings. We could acknowledge them for what they are rather than dismissing them as wrong, as a personal weakness or somebody else’s fault. It seems, somehow, important to persist and get in touch with the despair itself, as it arises from the degradation of the natural world. As a culture we may uncover some truths hinted at by feelings we tend to discredit as depressive. These truths include that they accurately reflect the state of ecology in our world. More than half of all animals gone in the last forty years, according to the Living Planet Index. Most ecosystems are being degraded or used unsustainably, according to Millennium Assessment Report. We’re living inside a mass extinction event, says many biologists, but without hardly consciously noticing.
In order to respond adequately, we may need to mourn these losses. Insufficient mourning keeps us numb or stuck in anger at them, which only feeds the cultural polarization. But for this to happen, the presence of supportive voices and models are needed. It is far harder to get acceptance of our difficulty and despair, and to mourn without someone else’s explicit affirmation and empathy.
Contact with the pain of the world, however, does not only bring grief but can also open the heart to reach out to all things still living. It holds the potential to break open the psychic numbing. Maybe there is also community to be found among like-hearted people, among those who also can admit they’ve been touched by this “Great Grief,” feeling the Earth’s sorrow, each in their own way. Not just individual mourning is needed, but a shared process that leads onwards to public re-engagement in cultural solutions. Working out our own answers as honestly as we can, as individuals and as communities, is rapidly becoming a requirement for psychological health.
To cope with losing our world requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference. And with this deepening, an extended caring and gratitude may open us to what is still here, and finally, to acting accordingly.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
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Per Espen Stoknes is a psychologist, an economist, and an entrepreneur who has cofounded clean-energy companies. He spearheads the BI Norwegian Business School’s executive program on green growth. He has written three books, including What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming. He lives in Oslo, Norway.
‘To cope with losing our world,’ writes Stoknes, ‘requires us to descend through the anger into mourning and sadness, not speedily bypass them to jump onto the optimism bandwagon or escape into indifference.’ (Photo: Nikola Jones/flickr/cc)
Vox Populi 
For the last four years, this small U.S.-based non-profit has offered programs of “peer support” to climate activists, locally first in Arizona, USA and now here in Washington, DC and nationally with a couple of climate organizations.
We include people of color/people of the global majority who are strengthening their communities and therefore doing “climate adaptation” work. even though they may not use that name, since these communities will bear the brunt of climate impacts for some time. We also offer peer support groups for white activists seeking to eliminate our racism and its impact on our work.
Climate Peer Support consists of two or more climate activists taking timed, uninterrupted turns listening to each other with encouragement to express feelings including strong ones. This basic tool is used my many of the great peer support movements including recovery and co-counseling. It works best among people who share some commonality, such as an interest in climate or related forms of community activism.
All the information to set up Climate Peer Support for yourself or your group of activists is available on our website: http://www.NIPSPeerSupport.org. We are also available for free consultation by phone or internet. Thanks for all you do.
Jim Driscoll, M.B.A., Ph.D., Executive DIrector
National Institute for Peer Support
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My heartfelt thanks to Per Espen Stoknes for addressing an increasingly urgent mental health problem; one that very few professionals have the courage or clarity to acknowledge, much less to analyze or explore candidly. As he correctly points out, in the face of galloping environmental degradation, we are all confronted with a stark alternative – denial (or its close cousin, dissociation), or the frank ownership of many “negative” emotions (anxiety/fear, rage and ultimately, grief) – emotions that are entirely appropriate to context, but are disturbing to others, and therefore likely to be labelled as “pathological” by the more glib, “well-adjusted” people who opt for the easy way out.
I have encountered this problem many times recently, but most starkly and publicly in 2014, when the Journal of Humanistic Psychology published an article of mine entitled “Cyborgs, Zombies and Planetary Death: Alienation in the 21st Century.” (The Humanistic Psychologist, vol 47, #3, pp. 283-291.) Among other things, I argued that our planetary crisis is attributable to the widespread cultural atrophy of biophilia, or love and reverence for life, and its replacement with technophilia, or the (uncritical, reflexive) love for technology and gadgets. Three interlocutors were invited to comment on my article, and one of them – who sits on the journal’s editorial board – presumed to “diagnose” my attitude toward technology and our unfolding ecological disasters as “symptomatic” of some vague malaise, rather than a realistic appraisal of existential actualities. In reply, I wrote the following:
“Dr. Pulver asserts that I feel more negative than positive affects when I contemplate the state of the world. That is true. But I am puzzled by the tacit assumption that I should feel more positive than negative affects in the circumstances – that being a normative judgment that is unsupported by evidence (unless you count positive psychology as “evidence.”) There is also a subtle technophilic bias at work here. For example, Dr. Pulver writes that nowadays:
‘Face to face relationships, communities of direct caretaking, control and ownership of one’s own labor power, all these are giving way more and more to relations mediated by cell phone, digi cam, the `absence’ of digital communications replacing the immediacy of speech.’
This too is true, but couched in a way suggests that anyone who finds these trends worrisome lacks realism. This complacent assessment of contemporary techno-social realities is accompanied by a footnote reminding us that
‘. . . this year a film nominated for an academy award in which a man has a romantic relationship with the O.S., i.e. the operating system of his cell phone, empowered by its programmers with the power of speech or at least the simulacrum of speech.’
Dr. Pulver neglects to mention that this film, called “Her”, is about a heartbroken man living in the not too distant future who copes with the end of an affair by “falling in love” with his operating system and, wait a moment – vice versa? But are machines really capable of experiencing intimacy or sustaining “a romantic relationship”? For this assumption is clearly implied in Dr. Pulver’s characterization of the movie’s plot. And the film’s conclusion implies that the opposite is actually the case. Hmmm . . .
Meanwhile, the prevailing scientific consensus is that the human species has merely 25 years (or less) to reform our species’ whole modus vivendi on this planet. If we fail in that endeavor, my teen aged children will inhabit an inhospitable world rife with scarcity and conflict, drought, disaster and disease on a scale hitherto unknown. And my grandchildren (if any) will inherit the whirlwind. Forget about the bloody past! My children have been robbed of their future. Dr. Pulver’s inability to acknowledge, much less address this side of my argument is telling. Though, who knows? Perhaps my children (or grandchildren) will have Google generated lovers for solace as the world unravels. I wish that this thought gave me some comfort or hope for the future. But no new technologies can eliminate the sense of sadness, horror and disappointment that these thoughts evoke. Why pretend otherwise? (pp. 311–312.)”
Unfortunately, in my experience, frank talk like this can get you branded as a Luddite or a mental case. We need more psychologists like Per Espen Stoknes to speak out on these matters and put them on the agenda for the mental health professions. Our collective failure or unwillingness to address this problem is “symptomatic” of complicity in a technophilic culture of denial.
Daniel Burston
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Thank you, Dan,for this well-developed and sophisticated response to Stoknes’ essay. Having children in their twenties and hoping to have grandchildren some day, I share your concern for the state of the world in the near future. In this circumstance, anxiety, as well as political involvement, is a reasonable response.
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