We can mourn other people – but what about natural grief? | The environment

I remember talking to North Atlantic right whale experts years ago. He was a practical man, with a scientific mind. But as we talked about the female whale that lost her calf, she seemed to be emotionally affected. He had lost before, having been hit by a ship. He seemed almost embarrassed by the depth of his emotions.

I was not surprised. I found his grief honorable.

There are less than 400 right whales in the North Atlantic. Every birth is a celebration; every death is physically and emotionally devastating. Scientists who spend years researching endangered species are stuck with them. So are many of us, whether it’s an endangered tree, a crumbling shoreline, or a summer night once filled with fireflies.

However, our culture has almost no language or customs for this kind of grief.

Just outside of Manchester, Vermont, there is a heron rookery that I have driven to for nearly two decades. Each year, great green herons and their nests filled the bony swamp trees. These birds guarded their chicks from the sleet and floods, their devotion a hallmark of Vermont’s spring.

Then there were little by little processions. This spring, there was only one. I passed him on my way to the dentist and when I drove my kids to football games. Trees and swamps remain. But the once visible hermit community does not do that.

This giant raises its young alone.

No one held a memorial service. There was no public acknowledgment that something popular or important to the country had declined. But every time I pass the rookery, I feel a pain that is completely invisible to share. It sounds like a contradiction in modern life: we face a great loss of nature and mostly act as if nothing is happening.

As a culture, we know what to do when someone dies. We gather, tell stories and hold sacred space. We make room for sadness. But what do we do when a species disappears from an area? What do we do when the coastline changes beyond recognition, when the forest is cut down for lumber and timber, or when our favorite rookery becomes an empty, ghostly place of broken trees and standing water, with nothing but the sound of the highway to stop the frogs’ song?

For the past ten years, I have reported on environmental change throughout South America. I’ve watched roads expand into wildlife corridors in Florida, housing developments replace marine forests in South Carolina, and islands in North Carolina change under the combined pressure of the climate crisis and relentless development.

I find myself carrying an emotion deeper and more intimate than anxiety: grief. Increasingly, I wonder if many Americans are experiencing the kinds of grief for which we have no language or culture.

The word “grief” can sound extreme. But what else should we call the feeling that comes when our favorite place, species or ecosystem is being changed before our eyes? Realizing that our government climate, technology addiction, consumerism and the underlying disease of change are making these losses commonplace is devastating. Although there are exceptions, what is lost now will likely be lost forever.

I see significant improvement in my students writing about environmental degradation. Another described having brunch with her mother while embers from the California wildfires escaped their eggs. Another wrote about the division of settlements and horse riding in the competing public lands of the arid American west. Another recalled walking through a flooded market in Thailand after an unusually severe typhoon.

Perhaps part of what they express is not just grief but moral damage: the distress that occurs when our values ​​and actions drift dangerously far adrift.

We teach young people to care for living things, to tell the truth, and to leave places better than they found them. Then we ask them to watch the ongoing unfolding of the natural order while behaving as if nothing important is wrong. A ton of my readers’ pieces speak to the mysterious climate of our time, the eerie sense that the ground beneath us and the sky above us are changing and met with a strange business-as-usual attitude.

Without the occasional walk, complaint or memorial trip, we tend to bear the loss of nature silently and alone. What could have been a collective experience is now secretly filtered, wrong, submerged, accepted.

I grew up in eastern North Carolina in the 1980s. When someone was sad, the community cried. He brought a casserole, sat on the porch, and gathered in the church. He puts words to the loss. You wrote cards, remembered good times and good qualities, cried, made space for difficult feelings. He helped hold the weight of the loss until the family could carry it again.

We can mourn grandparents, spouses, friends, and neighbors, but we don’t know how to mourn endangered animals, damaged rivers, changed coastlines, democratic institutions, or the healthy future we expected to inherit. We must acknowledge non-human species and places that deserve to mourn and are prone to natural disasters.

We know from centuries of experience that grief needs evidence. In 2016, Australian author and activist Richard Flanagan published an obituary for the Great Barrier Reef after a major coral bleaching event. Written in the familiar language of loss, the piece treated the mathematical disc not as a collection of natural figures but as a cherished and irreplaceable object. Flanagan described the plate as a thousand-year-old living structure, visible in space and home to a variety of rare organisms. His point was not that the ocean literally died, but that traditional environmental reporting was inadequate for the extent of what was lost.

The obituary gave readers something that science alone could not: permission to mourn.

In Iceland, mourners gathered in 2019 to remember Okjökull, the country’s first glacier officially declared lost to climate change. A plaque placed at the site spoke directly to future generations: “We know what is happening and what needs to be done.” The event was scientific, political and emotional all at once – a public acknowledgment that something important had disappeared.

These efforts may seem strange, but they point to an important truth. Not only do people need scientific information in an age of rapid environmental degradation. They also need more formal venues to share their feelings: memorials, festivals, funerals, even laws. Our current actions do not match the magnitude of our loss, and I believe we underestimate how much environmental destruction will continue to affect us emotionally, physically and spiritually.

What I instinctively understand when I pass that empty heron song is that I see not just a decline in bird numbers, but a profound and subtle decline in public health and accountability.

Great blue herons are what naturalists call indicator species. Their health reflects the health of all natural wetlands. When herons disappear, they often indicate serious disruptions to water quality, habitat integrity, food webs and biodiversity. First we see the destruction of the environment, then the loss of species, then the decline of the entire living community. What follows is often a less bearable world: an environment highly vulnerable to invasive species, viruses, floods and ongoing extinctions, and places that feel quiet, poor and less alive.

Perhaps what we need is not just more data about environmental decline, but more permission to acknowledge what that decline feels like and what it means to us. We need to name it ourselves, acknowledge its personal and local impact, and invest in storytelling that reminds us of the richness of nature that we have access to and do not protect. We need to make a lot of noise about this loss, write it down, and mourn it together.

Grief, well-understood and well-defined, is nothing to be ashamed of, but our growing indifference and silence in loss almost is.