Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet
Our leaders addiction to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources has me paralysed with fear and solastalgia M any of us have experienced grieving after the death of a family member or a longtime friend. We regard it as a form of suffering which we hope will be alleviated with time. Advice from loved ones, doctors and therapists may help us to cope by offering the solution that time will heal. In some, like Queen Victoria, the loss of a partner may cause lifelong grief with self-imposed withdrawal and solitude. I have now realised that I have a grief disorder which has arisen slowly over the past few decades and is likely to remain prolonged. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads My brain suddenly came to the diagnosis when I tried to watch Tim Wintons series on Ningaloo Nyinggulu, one of the Earths last truly wild and intact places. I use the word tried because it hurt to watch, and I had to turn it off. After many years of working on environmental issues and being steeped in the wonder and beauty of the natural world I had realised it would inevitably die soon. Now I cannot watch these images of a dying partner. I suspect that this grief had probably festered in my brain since the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 in South Australia and Victoria, which caused 75 deaths and enormous structural and environmental damage. I was able to externalise my distress by painting the beautiful new epicormic leaves of rejuvenation. The 2019-20 bushfires overwhelmed me when at least 33 people died, with smoke pollution killing many more, and more than 3 billion native animals died or were displaced. I am walking in a forest overwhelmed by giant blackened trees and bushes contorted in the throes of death. In this graveyard, a thick covering of fine, white ash muffles all sound like snow, and no birds sing; the sun is shining but the sky is grey. I awake in distress and ruminate for hours on the implications and the many other climate and environmental portents. It is morning in our happy family home, situated in beautiful natural stringybark forest with grunting koalas, bounding kangaroos and chattering parrots. I open the door at sunrise to a stinging dust storm; the forest has gone, I stand alone in the howling, blistering Australian desert, and my Munch-like scream is lost in a shriek of wind. I awaken sweating and paralysed with fear. I have continued my night-time encounters caused by increasingly threatening scientific data. Of relevance to my disorder, Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, created the word solastalgia. It is the pain experienced when the place where one lives and loves is under immediate destruction. It is felt as a sense of erosion of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress. It is a lived experience, a form of homesickness when one is still at home. When Albrecht lived this experience it related to the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales and the impact of large-scale open-cut coalmining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley. People exposed to environmental change experienced negative effects exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change. Today this grief or solastalgia has extended to many displaced families from recent flooding, a recognition that their previous local environment will never return and part of their being is lost. We are slowly coming to realise that grieving for country is always with Aboriginal people and probably increasingly as the encroachment on their environment has advanced over the 200 years since our invasion. It must be aggravated by their realisation that their 60,000 years of sustaining an environment is mostly dismissed by a so-called advanced civilisation which takes little notice of their experience and knowledge. Sign up to Five Great Reads Each week our editors select five of the most interesting, entertaining and thoughtful reads published by Guardian Australia and our international colleagues. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion Most scientists agree we now live five minutes or less to midnight, which is the collapse of our society. It is not only that world temperatures are rising faster than modelling suggested and even expected impacts are more severe, called the new abnormal by climate scientist Michael Mann, but that the promises of action by national leaders are not being fulfilled, and democratic systems are incapable of reform to encompass urgent needs. Even more crucially, our brains and those of our national leaders remain addicted to economic growth and its consumption of environmental resources. No-growth economies remain an elusive good dream. Are we yet at the point of no return? We will not know until its too late, but scientists see it likely in the next few decades. Many concerned individuals opt out in despair; most individuals also fail on the simple everyday measures that could make a difference. After striving on this issue for decades I feel we perhaps have a 1% chance of avoiding collapse of our systems but as a gambling nation we must take these odds and throw ourselves into action, for example to stop the largest coming climate disaster for Australia and the world, Beetaloo and Middle Arm. Despite my crippling dreams, I will be there. David Shearman is emeritus professor of medicine, University of Adelaide, South Australia