Let's Start with a Poem…

How to Grieve a Glacier
It’s not something you can hold in your arms.
You can’t rock with its image in a blanket
and keen away the nearing pain.

That white face is distant, and cold, unrelenting
in its forward grind to the sea,
stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back
into history and oblivion.

The sun itself finds nothing to love,
save soft rivulets of water its rays release
from eons of hard frozen luck.

But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant,
and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch
thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.

So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed
and imagining what next will show itself,
what balded rock and bared shoreline,
as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.

We know it is leaving, abandoning us
to what our kind has created,
and we know its gift of rarified water
will only bring more sorrow.

Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration.
Glowing face of one turned toward
what the living cannot see.

~ Marybeth Holleman, tender gravity

~

My youth has been marked by a feeling that I’ve struggled to put into words that has unconsciously shaped my perception of humanity, truth, and goodness, subconsciously shaping foundational relationships with fellow humans, myself, and god. I know I’m not alone in this experience, and recently I discovered a word that begins to touch on that feeling, even if it falls short of capturing the uncanny, existential weirdness that arises alongside it.

Dictionary.com describes ecoanxiety as:

Anxiety caused by a dread of environmental perils, especially climate change, and a feeling of helplessness over the potential consequences for those living now and even more so for those of later generations.

The key word in that description is “dread”. But not the kind where you’re worried about that presentation you have to give for work in the morning, or the feeling in your stomach when you consider having to spend another holiday marinating in the perspectives of your less-evolved relatives. This kind of anxiety is so large and unapproachable that it cannot be held in understanding. It’s caused by the gap in the facts about what is happening (390 billion tons of ice and snow lost from glaciers per year(2), an 81% decrease in freshwater species populations in 2017(3)) and my relationship to them. How am I supposed to feel when confronted with statistics that indicate catastrophic loss on a scale I can’t emotionally relate to?

Ecoanxiety is distinct from solastalgia(4) in that my anxiety is purely existential. I worry on a deep, theoretical level where experience is mostly limited to a belief in the conclusions of the scientific process. I’ve done the math, and each picture of a bleached coral reef or story from a climate refugee adds emotional fuel to the logical models. I can’t help but worry about these things, or help but see the increase in intensity and frequency of wildfires close to my home as justification for my worry. But I’m fortunate that I myself haven’t been displaced due to climate-related disaster, or watched my livelihood wither away with drought. I’m not sure we have a word for that level of ecologically-induced despair just yet. But one day, I’ll feel a rush of joy and anguish as I look upon one of the last monarch butterflies, and wonder if I’ll ever see another. One day my ecoanxiety will transform into solastalgia.

The primary feeling that arises from this type of grief for me is a sense of loss that is difficult to put into words. I don’t know how to grieve on the scale that such destruction and disregard demands. Practically speaking, I’m not sure the human being is equipped to empathize with objects like the earth itself, or species too microscopic to see, or generations of old growth forest in a way that makes us capable of holding such emotion and processing it. For me, it’s like wave upon wave of sadness, despair, and anger that crash through me, toss me out to sea, and leave me struggling for air and the comfort of the soft sands of certainty beneath my feet. But when I find my way back to shore, the coastlines have eroded further, the rocks are slick with oil, and the cries of seabirds are strangely absent.

Words so often feel incapable of describing these kinds of feelings, because I don’t actually think we’ve successfully defined these emotions yet. While we all experience psychological affect, an emotion itself is culturally constructed(5). We can’t define or share an emotion until it’s commonly experienced across a group of people, and capable of being mutually inhabited. Maybe that’s why I feel stuck in a perpetual phase of grieving when it comes to global warming; the language needed to process such emotions doesn’t exist yet. Or perhaps it’s because the disaster itself hasn’t yet come to pass. It’s in motion, and I’m aboard The Titanic 2.0, waiting to impact sea ice that’s melted down below the surface, as the sonar sings a death dirge.

So how then can we process this slow-rolling, language-defying disaster we’re complicit with? There are noble, cathartic models of grieving that emulate our human traditions around the concept of death, like a funeral to mourn the loss of a glacier as if it were a friend or family(6). These kinds of displays help us learn to empathize with the ecology we are enmeshed with, and encourage us to find ways of coping using existing emotional structures and traditions.

I find this kind of release to be culturally useful, because it’s visible. It shows that we’re learning to care, that some of us are paying attention, that our values are capable of growing beyond profit and exploitation. But it could be argued that funerals only give solace to the living, not the dead. And what would the glacier make of our symbolic remembrance of her majesty? How, truely, to grieve a glacier?

More precise language helps in communicating the loss associated with global warming, but for me it’s often the subjective language of poetry that provides some measure of tangible relief. Marybeth Holleman captures the essence of the majestic dying of a glacier. Dying, because it’s disappearance is ongoing. As it leaves us, it does so with dignity and pride, “stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back into history and oblivion.”

Holleman captures what is often missed in our righteous assessments of the state of the natural world: the observation that, even in its dying, its recession, its leaving of our memory and our future, it is beautiful. “But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant, and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.”

When did I last take reprieve from my doomscrolling, to notice the majestic beauty all around me before it leaves us forever? Am I taking the time to be present, to be here in time to appreciate and honor my friends, the great northern diver and the wood thrush? My family, the boreal lynx and the arctic fox? My lovers, the stagehorn coral and the ringed seal?

“So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed
and imagining what next will show itself,
what balded rock and bared shoreline,
as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.”

I’m learning to look toward the tendency to feel sadness, despair, and anguish as an indicator that I’m out of alignment with the natural world, and objectifying it even further. Making it into a victim for whom humanity can be oppressor and savior alike. What brings me true respite from my grief is learning to sit in silence and awe of the glacier while we still can. To know that in the years to come I honored her while she was alive, and didn’t take her beauty and bounty for granted. To remember her voice and timbre as she sang out in words I could not parse. But to listen, nonetheless, to her dying words instead of trying and failing to give her mine.

If we must anthropomorphize the natural world in an attempt to come into relationship with it, then I want to learn the lesson of spending time with the glacier while she’s still living, and not regret the moments we didn’t have at her wake, after she’s gone. Our children won’t have the opportunity to know what has been lost. The gift I have now, the responsibility I can take on, is the chance to process the strangeness of this new grief pragmatically, without making my loss central to the story of the anthropocene. I can learn to honor my living ancestors with the gift of time, before the cancer takes the best of them and leaves only memories behind.

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief […] For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
~ Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

Footnotes

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/destroyed-habitat-creates-the-perfect-conditions-for-coronavirus-to-emerge/
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1071-0
3. https://www.iberdrola.com/environment/climate-change-endangered-species
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18027145/
5. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/201803/how-culture-shapes-emotions
6. https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-to-mourn-a-glacier
7. https://www.marybethholleman.com/tender-gravity