Grieving California and the World

December 19, 2022 9:50 AM

It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.” Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation;

of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

posted by mygothlaundry (7 comments total)

I liked the quotes from the professor:

“Every wisdom tradition and psychologist will tell you that sitting with grief is a necessary part of recognizing and internalizing a new reality in the face of a loss,” Jennifer Atkinson, the University of Washington professor who teaches the climate grief seminar, told me. “And one of the things that I've encountered in a lot of the research and work and interviews that I've done is how valuable and productive grief is in finally shaking us out of this collective denial or disavowal. You don't have to really be a climate denier, deny the science, to sort of deny the fact or disavow the fact that our lives are truly unraveling and will not be what we thought they were.” Grief, Atkinson argued, “is the opposite of indifference.”

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Much of Atkinson’s work in class is focused on making grief acceptable to students. She encourages them to think of grief not as a pathological feeling to run from or bury, but as an emotionally healthy response to climate change. “If we got rid of these feelings, we’d lose so much of the motivation to stay in this fight,” she explained. “The core of all of it is to emphasize that grief is an expression of love.”

posted by aniola at 11:13 AM on December 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's hard for me to work out exactly what my response is to this. My mom lost her house in Paradise and has been an emotional wreck ever since. My own limited awareness of how bad the climate projections are and the disproportionately limited response from the US government have been slowly ratcheting up my climate anxiety. The disastrous response to COVID has done little to give me hope for any improvements when it comes to the looming climate catastrophe that has already done a lot of damage to my life.

I'm trying to figure out what I can do since I'm going to have to live through whatever more hell is coming, where I can go that might not be as bad, how to make effective decisions to get ready, but it's been hard to do that with this heretofore unacknowledged grief. I feel like I keep discovering new ways that this world and the future could have been better lately.

I was tempted to go with the traditional "." as a statement of grief for this world and for California. I never really liked it all that much, but it's home to a lot of people and to see it all go up in flames is hard.
posted by Nec_variat_lux_fracta_colorem at 2:30 PM on December 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

In Finnish, Pihkala has also developed a detailed vocabulary of climate emotions as specific as “winter grief,” mourning the loss of traditional winters, or “snow anxiety,” related to uncertainty about whether it will snow.

I need a word for the unsettlement associated with going for a long drive through the countryside and then discovering that my car has not become covered in splattered bugs.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:33 PM on December 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

winter grief and snow anxiety are things I definitely experience here in the north east of the usa. We have fucked up so badly.
posted by youthenrage at 5:42 PM on December 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've been enjoying the Climate Change and Happiness podcast by one of the researchers mentioned here: Panu Pihkala, along with Thomas Doherty. It's really helped me deal with a lot of these issues emotionally and intellectually.
posted by yamel at 6:48 PM on December 19, 2022

It can be hard to talk about grief and bargaining and anger about the climate and those who are profiting off destroying it . It is a relief to be allowed to sometimes be hopeless, sometimes be in despair, sometimes be grim.

Hope and fear and fatigue and obsession... once we see it, how the world is being poisoned, we need it all. We need that pain. Yell and cry and pray and stomp and grieve and hope and resolve and raise your fist.

The balm is action. Find the others, decide, commit reason. Because there are things we need to do. We are sitting around a table with a time-bomb in the middle. It is not enough to abstain from hitting the trigger, we must tackle the psychopaths at the table who built the bomb and are grasping for the trigger. And we have to defuse the bomb. Because there is no where far enough to run, no where strong enough to hide, there is no buying our way out. It might not be polite and it had better be fast

It is insane to stay sane in this insane world watching as it burns.

Action.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 9:38 PM on December 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think it's worthwhile, when thinking about this, to make the distinctions between hope and optimism, pessimism and despair as described by Doug Muder:

As so often happens, the way to start is to get the definition right, and in this case that means not confusing hope with optimism. Hope is a way of approaching the present moment, a belief that here and now striving for better things is worthwhile. Optimism, on the other hand, is a claim to know something about the future: that it's going to be OK.

The opposite of optimism is pessimism, which claims to know that the future will go badly. But the opposite of hope is despair, a belief that, in this moment, striving for better things is pointless..."

"Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging. Because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?”

Being a hopeful batter, on the other hand, doesn’t imply that you know anything one way or the other about how it’s all going to come out. You just go up there and swing, and whatever happens will happen.

I try to be a hopeful batter, to remember that my understanding of the world is only a model and that I don't know everything that could happen.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:10 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]