How to Love a Burning World
Summer 2021
By Jennifer Atkinson
Forthcoming publication in Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. Edited by Paul Bogard, Univeristy of Virginia Press.
When you live in Seattle, a city known for its rain and gloom, summer is the season of redemption – the big payoff after endless winter gray. Or at least it used to be. In recent years our anticipation of blue skies and clear mountain views has been overtaken by dread of wildfire season, when smoke drives us inside and brown skies block out the sun. As one long-time resident here remarked, “I used to wait for summer to cure my seasonal affective disorder, but now I have it in July and August too.”
Even smaller aggravations - the ubiquitous smell of smoke, itchy throats and red eyes – have become unbearable in light of the knowledge that one is breathing the scorched remains of forests and animals, lost homes and human lives, and toxic particles from a thousand untraceable sources: cars and sofas and laptops and buildings.
And then there’s the heat. A week before I wrote these words, the Pacific Northwest experienced the highest temperatures ever recorded in Seattle, Portland, and parts of western Canada, which soared to 121 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists said it was a one-in-a-thousand-year event. Roads became so hot they literally buckled. And hundreds died in a region where most of us do not have air conditioning. To put this all into perspective: the average June high in these parts is 69 degrees.
And yet the misery of this heat intensifies another feeling that doesn’t subside when the temperatures do: a deep, existential dread of all the summers ahead. As Charlie Warzel wrote in an op-ed following this June from hell: “there’s a distinct psychological pain that accompanies the thought that the unbearable present is only a preview of the extreme climate to come.”
This sensation stretches far beyond our region, of course. Eco-anxiety, climate grief, solastalgia – call it what you will, the American Psychological Association defines the general phenomenon as a “chronic fear of environmental doom.” In a recent survey of people ages 8-16, nearly three-quarters reported being deeply worried about the state of the planet -- and such numbers are rising across every age group. My own students at the University of Washington tell me they have nightmares about the future, or don’t want to have kids because they believe the world is hurtling toward apocalypse. As they’ve watched snow disappear from our mountains and salmon decline in our rivers, their distress has grown so intense that I launched a seminar to help students cope with climate despair.
So is this rise in anxiety good or bad for the planet?
It depends. On the one hand, climate despair can depoliticize our environmental crisis. When we pathologize eco-anxiety as if it were some kind of mental health disorder, we locate the problem with the individual rather than the larger political structure. And that directs our focus toward soothing people’s feelings instead of taking collective action to overhaul the systems turning Earth into an ashtray. I often see this among students who enroll in my climate grief seminar hoping the program will “fix” them so they can go back to feeling happy. It’s understandable to want relief from this pain: but in doing so, are we seeking solutions to the wrong problem?
Moreover, while climate anxiety may be an effective “wakeup call” for people initially learning about climate injustice, staying in a space of alarm, panic, and dysregulation can be counterproductive in the long term. This is especially true among climate activists and those already deeply concerned. At best, constant fear and stress lead to burnout. At worst, they drain our courage and immobilize us from acting in the first place. Mental health professionals also point out that such emotions trigger the fight-flight-or-freeze response, overriding the kinds of creative and critical thinking we need to work through this crisis. And in the face of an existential threat like climate breakdown, personal anxiety can quickly spiral into helplessness, nihilism, and despair – all of which fuel a too-common belief that we’re too insignificant to impact the situation. It also doesn’t help that people who feel depressed and isolated are more likely to withdraw than to seek out others – the very thing needed in this critical moment for building coalitions and taking collective action.
Yet on the other hand, we mustn’t dismiss the truth of our pain, which arises from a profound love for all that’s being destroyed. Grief is a sign of compassion and connection with the living world. What would it mean not to mourn all this lost beauty, the humans and wild creatures that won't survive the upheavals to come, and the suffering that didn't have to happen?
When we suppress our grief for the world, we're also suppressing our compassion for it.
This recognition -- that love is actually the source of our pain – may be the key insight needed to navigate the contradictions of climate despair. As Malkia Devich-Cyril has written, “Joy is not the opposite of grief. Grief is the opposite of indifference.” Having lost my father to cancer the same year I began teaching seminars on climate grief, I learned how this link can offer a pathway through personal bereavement and the loss of nature alike. With both, we discover that grief is not here to take us hostage; grief is a guide, showing us the root of what it is we love, and deepening our resolve to protect it. In the face of accelerating climate upheaval, this insight has served to remind me that I’m not a hand-wringing alarmist, but a human being with a working emotional compass that points my attention to what matters most.
Honoring this link between love and eco-grief can have political benefits as well. We’ll never address our climate crisis without a critical mass engaging the political process, and that requires us to transcend self-focus, seek out others who feel urgency and concern as we do, and then work in concert toward a common goal. Love is essential to that process, because love directs our attention outward. At its core, love is an affirmation of something beyond the self -- a desire to act on behalf of another being. Even a planet.
None of this means we’ll feel cheerful across the years ahead. On the contrary. Our love for the world is the very thing that brings pain as we witness so much life and beauty destroyed.
But that grief is never the whole story, and looking only at our losses perpetuates a self-defeating myth that nothing of use has ever been achieved and that all the work lies ahead. And so we must also tell the story of what remains, and how that came to be. The trees on our streets that were not cut down because someone a generation ago fought to protect them. The pockets of wildlife starting to recover because past activists changed the laws. The air and water that is cleaner than it would be, the species that have not been driven to extinction, because people last century passed legislation to protect them. All that still thrives, all that was not destroyed, because someone once loved it.
Harnessing both love and grief, it’s our turn to be those people to future generations.