Negotiating Ecological Grief
Climate change is frightening and depressing — but that shouldn’t stop us from finding joy in the struggle for a better future
Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its latest report on the state and future of Earth’s climate and biosphere. As expected, it was more dire than the last report, which was more dire than the one before, and so on it will apparently go.
Meanwhile, the unceasing news updates about fires, heat domes, and other unfamiliar and frightening phenomena are making clear that the world isn’t just changing—it has changed. Given how things have gone for the last few years and decades, no one who has paid attention could reasonably have expected a turn for the better by now. But the sheer scale and speed of the disruptions described in the report, and the degree of certitude that such consequences and worse are now unavoidable due to sustained inaction, were jarring even for those who have followed this grim situation for many years.
The mainstream climate conversation, it seems, has finally made the shift from figuring out how or whether we can stop the worst from happening, to determining how we make peace with what is now certain to happen. Our primary task has become one of mitigating the negatives to whatever degree…
