By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
Earth Day has a strong spiritual connection for me because I was married on April 22, barefoot in a beautiful garden in Hawai’i. Well, the legal marriage took place at a hot dog stand, but the vows were spoken in a tiny bit of tropical paradise that no longer exists.
We can all love Earth Day, a time to celebrate, connect to, and express our affection and care for Mother Earth and the many gifts she gives us. It’s a day to think and learn about our roles as individuals and communities in ecological conservation and protection and to take action.
The Roots of the First Earth Day
But the first Earth Day was birthed from the devastation of ecological disasters and the awakening brought by Silent Spring, a book detailing the dangers of pesticides by Rachel Carson. It bloomed from “the culmination of decades of pressure and public concern over the deterioration of the environment and the depletion of natural resources,” according to Dr. Abiodun Oluyomi of Baylor College of Medicine.
“Senator Gaylord Nelson, the junior senator from Wisconsin, had long been concerned about the deteriorating environment in the United States. Then in January 1969, he and many others witnessed the ravages of a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, Senator Nelson wanted to infuse the energy of student anti-war protests with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution,” according to earthday.org
They continue, “Senator Nelson announced the idea for a teach-in on college campuses to the national media, and persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair.”
Being Proactive with Joy and Grief
We can find both joy and awe in Earth Day celebrations. They come, specifically for many of us, from connecting with nature.
Give yourself a gift this April and spend some time in nature with a renewed sense of curiosity. Smell something you’ve never smelled, listen to the sounds of a forest, or gather some leaves and feel the differences between them. There are so many furry leaves out there!
My April nature joy comes from cleaning out the garden beds and my awe comes from seeing what’s pushing up through the earth. This winter was icy and bitter, but the mullein survived and sits, fuzzy-petaled, next to my driveway. Put yourself on the path of your joy.
Solastalgia = Solace + Desolation + Nostalgia
But there is also grief and pain that is embodied in the profound term “solastalgia”:
“The distress caused by environmental change; the homesickness we feel while still at home; the lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape.
“All of these are ways that Glenn Albrecht has defined the word he created to describe this emotion so many feel in response to finding our beloved world so impacted, under threat, and certain to suffer radical change.
“To feel solastalgia is to feel pain, sorrow, and grief, but it is also to recognize that the source of this pain is our love for the places of which we are part.”
Paul Bogard, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World
Courageously put yourself also on the path of your grief. While many of us try to push grief down, there is the promise of new awakenings, metamorphosis and, perhaps, revolution.
Perhaps, like me, when you read the definition of solastalgia you feel the pang of a word representing a feeling that’s hard to describe. Solastalgia is a here-and-now feeling, unlike eco-anxiety which speaks to a fear of something happening in the future. Right now we are longing and filled with sorrow. We are heartbroken.
In fact, feeling a sense of joy or awe from nature often brings our grief to the forefront:
“English naturalist Helen MacDonald observes that awareness of the specific plants and animals in the natural world around you increasingly means ‘opening yourself to constant grief.’
“She is not alone in noticing the rising tide of grief that comes with awareness of climate change and its accompanying environmental devastation.” – Dorothy Dean
There are many things that bring me joy and awe and grief and desolation at the same time: Whales. Glaciers. Polar bears. Lightning bugs. Pretty much every bird.
Acknowledging Our Solastalgia Is the Only Way to Heal It
In community there is healing, and so I’d like to share with you the variety of emotions that are bundled with Earth Day, from the book Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, which is a collection of essays about working through the grief, displacement and estrangement that comes with the climate emergency.
Laura Erin England, What If She Had Lived?
“But the darkest feeling I have experienced in this tangle of grief came when I learned that my longtime friend, Erin, an accomplished ecologist whose children are the same ages as mine and who battled an aggressive cancer for nearly seven years, was in hospice care.
“A fleeting, involuntary feeling rattled me—envy. Envy that she will not have to witness the hotter, more volatile world that our children will grow into and the erosion of possibilities for health, happiness, and peace in our children’s time. Envy is always a corrosive emotion; in this case it was an ugly residue of heartache.”
Many feelings accompany grief including envy, which disgusts me when I feel it and may disgust you too. And yet, I do envy the people who died not knowing how bad things really are, not feeling the terror of a world in decline.
Kathryn Nuernberger, On Elegy
“The scientist was explaining the symbiotic mutualism between whistling thorn acacias and cocktail ants the same week the last male white rhino died. You might have seen photographs of his colleagues on that preserve cradling Sudan’s head in their laps…
“He brought it up, like he couldn’t help it, as people who have just been to a funeral sometimes do, but I didn’t ask him what it was like. I once ate waffles at the bottom of a mountain with an ornithologist after she showed me two of the last spotted owl fledglings. Once she started crying, it was hard for her to stop.”
It’s okay to feel so much grief from the climate emergency that you’re afraid if you start crying you may not stop. The pain is deep because our connection to nature is deep. Even now when many of us are unknowingly disconnected from the natural world, the body remembers.
Kathryn Miles, Two Hearts, Two Minds
“But as a person who has spent most of my life knowing only severely compromised landscapes, I also believe we all have the capacity for more than just grief.
“I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I must have at least intuited that belief as a college student, when I struggled to understand why it wasn’t okay to simultaneously love a place and to mourn the damage that has occurred there—to hold both sentiments as equally valid and true.
“In the years since, I’ve come to understand that a whole host of disciplines have principles and theories that allow for this. Neuroscientists talk about the two hemispheres of our brain and the independent awareness they both contain. Psychologists distinguish between our intuitive and reflective selves. Zen Buddhists believe that we all contain both small and big minds.”
Our grief is accompanied by other feelings, like love and belonging. Sometimes I feel guilty when I see the ocean, knowing that my lifestyle is a part of the islands of plastic and the declining populations of creatures who depend on the seas. And yet, the ocean fills my heart with joy and I cling to the beauty of it. I’ve had to learn to hold opposing value systems and perpendicular emotions at the same time, with the same two hands.
Meera Subramanian, A Shared Lament
“What new maps might we make? There is an old African American belief known as ‘homegoing’ in which an enslaved person’s spirit, after death, travels back to Africa to arrive at a place their body had never been before but where they felt completely at home. This, then, is the flip side of solastalgia. How do we create a world in which we all feel at home, even as the land around us continues to change, as it will? As old systems unravel, what might we build in their stead?
“What new maps will we create, and can the left, and the right, and the masses in the middle begin to figure out how to make them together? Can the drafting pens be held by hands too often left out of world-making? Turn the old maps over. On the other side is a blank slate. There we could chart a path born of shared laments, navigate the new routes that might bring us back together.”
Joy, grief and solastalgia need not be partisan or divisive. We can find belonging with people who are very different from us through our shared elation, sadness and longing. We can wring goodness from the sorrow, find community in our individual forsakenness.
Every Time We Love We Open Ourselves to Grief
Seven years ago my husband and I separated and then divorced. Suddenly Earth Day for me was much more about grief than hopeful joy. It was tearing apart rather than coming together. It was the death of dreams and a swirl of fear and perhaps even a sense of failure. It was loss on top of loss on top of loss.
I fumbled around for years, trying to recover. And eventually I figured out that recovery was in feeling the grief. Sitting in it. Letting it hurt. Saying goodbye to dreams. Facing new fears. Shaking with anxiety. Being uncomfortable. Really, really uncomfortable. Mourning, you might say.
“I agree with Lisa Sideris and other scholars writing about human emotional responses to the continuing destruction of life on Earth: neither blind optimism nor paralytic despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of affairs that has led to solastalgia.
“Rather, it is time to mourn. Paradoxically, this mourning, which may at first glance seem to be a giving-up, is an essential step toward transformation.” – Dorothy Dean
I can’t tell you for sure, because I’m still in the middle. But I believe on the other side of grief, through our mourning, often there is peace. Acceptance that life is messy and wild and unfair. And sometimes, transformation.