Dr. Ashlee Cunsolo, Founding Dean, School of Arctic & Subarctic Studies, Labrador Institute of Memorial University, and Laureline Simon, Founder of One Resilient Earth discuss the impact of climate change on Inuit communities, as well as grief and mourning as doorways to gritty hope.
Laureline: Looking at all the research you undertook on mental health and climate change, as well as on ecological grief, particularly with Inuit communities, I am very grateful for the opportunity to have this dialogue. To start with, I am curious to know what led you to work with Inuit communities and how the topic of climate grief emerged in your work.
Ashlee: What is interesting is that everyone assumes that I went into the research specifically to look at mental health and grief, and that’s not the case at all. Over 10 years ago, one of the Inuit communities, Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, in Northern Labrador had been doing a lot of research on the effects of climate change. Labrador is one of the fastest warming places in Canada and one of the fastest warming places anywhere in the Circumpolar North.
Inuit here have been experiencing climate change for decades, so things that are projected to happen in other areas have already been experienced here for quite some time.
Rigolet was really at the forefront of looking at climate change and health, which was a relatively new field at that time, and understanding what this means for Inuit communities.
Rigolet had been conducting a study looking at climate change impacts on water quality and health, and some of my colleagues were involved. The community wanted to expand research beyond water quality to all aspects of health and wellbeing. This included physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. And because I was working on the connection that people and place have to wellness from a social science perspective, I was invited to join and to see if I was a good fit with the research and the community.
Laureline: Did this mean a lot of time in the community?
Ashlee: It did. For two years, we talked to over 80 people with local researchers. And I think the youngest community member was 9 years old and the oldest was over 80 – out of a community of 300, that’s a lot of people to talk to. And what was amazing was that no matter the age, gender identity, background, or how much time they spent on the land, everyone mentioned at least one major thing that was linked to the mental and emotional health spectrum. People would say in the interviews: “I’ve never told anyone this before,” or “I would never normally share this, but this is something that really bothers me.” And it’s interesting because it all started because one of the Elders who was leading a lot of the project, was telling us all about how climate change impacts everything. And then I asked her how it made her feel and she got very emotional and went through all the things she felt. We talked for a long time about it. But one of the things she said was: “No one has ever asked me this before.” Although there had already been a lot of climate change research with the Inuit, it was focused on documenting observations. No one had ever followed up and said, and how does that make you feel?
That really changed everything for the research, in terms of the focus and how the interviews and discussions evolved.
It’s not just what do you see and what do you know, it’s how does that affect you? What is it like? How do you feel? What does it change about your life?
And it was people who have been deeply connected to the place over generations, who were the ones that raised this huge concern. Back in 2009, when this all started to come up, there was hardly any research anywhere in the world on climate change and mental health. Some great studies were coming out of Australia but that was about it. We thought: what’s going on here? People in communities are clearly talking about this. And yet why isn’t it represented anywhere in the literature?
There’s a huge Arctic science conference every year in Canada. We did a presentation on the mental health impacts that we were seeing at the time. The presentation was given by two Inuit women and the leader of the community. For this presentation half of the room was packed with Inuit. And as we were presenting the Inuit were nodding and saying: “Yes, I feel that,” and calling out to the Inuit people from other regions represented who were saying: “Yes, this is happening in our region.” At the same time, the scientists who were non-Inuit were shaking their heads and saying: “There’s not enough evidence for this, we don’t know.” And it was this strange example of how research doesn’t always ask the right questions. During the question period, we were also challenged by a couple of scientists who said: “What do emotions have to do with climate change? We need to be focusing on the science and the technology.” And then before we could answer, people from other parts of the Arctic were like: “You can’t tell us what our lived experiences are. You can’t tell us what our emotions are. This matters. We’re living with this. You’re not. You’re studying it. We’re living it.” That was the response.
And I think about that all the time, because research is only as good as the questions that are asked in the first place and how they’re framed. And you can do all this great climate change research, but if you’re not asking people about the mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening, it just means that nobody’s asked. And that has been a huge thing that I carry with me every day.
When people say: “Well, we don’t see a lot of evidence that climate change is impacting mental health” – because still it’s a very small field really, globally – it doesn’t mean it’s not. It means that people haven’t asked those questions and that we’re not putting resources into looking at it.
What is fascinating right now is that the terms of ecological grief and eco-anxiety are everywhere in the media, all over the world. It’s in blog posts. It’s on Twitter, it’s on Facebook. People are expressing these things. It’s all over the place, but there’s hardly any published literature on it. The media is so far ahead on this topic right now because that’s where people are living and expressing themselves. Research takes years to conduct and publish and lived experience has far outstripped what we have in the published literature.
What is also fascinating is that policy wants numbers. It’s hard to quantify emotions. There’s not a lot of research, and yet we know people are suffering. And there is an urgent need for more research; yet, we know people are suffering. We know it. People are telling us. And although I think we do need more research, it can’t be without supporting people along the way.
We need to prioritize both research and mental health support simultaneously.
Laureline: It is true that in a lot of the organizations I worked with, there was a big taboo about the emotions associated with our work on climate change. I remember having one colleague I could talk to about those emotions, while the others would usually shut down, suggest I should not be so emotional, or try to cheer me out of it quickly. As if the emotions were clashing with the rationality and efficiency I was supposed to demonstrate in my job, always. I suppose this also relates to the mental health stigma. In a professional context, it is usually ok to talk about physical health issues but it feels that mental health conditions still scare people off. As a result, I often wondered whether colleagues and collaborators were dissociating somehow. I vividly remember attending the presentation of a report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services, which was maybe one of the most depressing reports I’ve ever read. I was in this room and beginning to feel absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of scientific facts confirming species extinction, and the ongoing destruction of ecosystems. Yet, as I looked around, people were taking notes or checking their phones. I couldn’t feel any heavy emotion, which to me was frankly disturbing. It also raised lots of questions as to where those emotions go. I am not surprised either that your conversations about emotional, mental and spiritual health associated with climate change started with Inuit community members.
Ashlee: Yes, I’ve talked about this at length in many different settings. And yes, people are often uncomfortable with mental health topics and with sharing and feeling emotions. But how we grieve and for whom and for what we grieve is tied to larger ontological and systemic structures (e.g. colonialism, patriarchy). So when talking about land, connection and emotion, there are all of these other broader social structures that kick in that shape how people in different places understand this land connection and the resulting emotions if things shift. And when you look at who’s expressing emotion and who’s grieving, especially sort of a decade ago, it’s precisely the same people who have been marginalized, oppressed, colonized and stripped of political voice over generations, while they still held that connection and the knowledge for others.
The gifts that people all over the world – whether it’s Indigenous Peoples or holders of other ancient knowledge systems – offer in being the keepers of that knowledge and connections is a gift to humanity that is beyond profound, and that we don’t remember to recognize, pay respect to, nor understand.
Indigenous Peoples from all over the world have stepped forward and said: “Yes, I feel this. Yes, it’s impacting my identity, it’s impacting my spiritual connection. It’s affecting all aspects of my mental and emotional health” – and many other people too . And we are also seeing the youth in the climate marches and with Greta Thunberg, who are saying: “I am so stressed, so depressed, so scared and so angry.” And that’s remarkable. The outpouring and open expression of emotion from young climate activists who are openly grappling with mental health and with needing support is remarkable.
Ten years ago, I would be the only one in the room talking about climate change and mental/emotional health and people would brush it off all the time. People said: “Oh, it’s only a few people,” or “I don’t think you’re objective enough about your research.” And none of us are objective, let’s be honest. How are we to be objective when a million species are at risk of extinction? How does humanity pretend there are no emotions around the sheer and utter loss for us, and for our accountability in that process? Humanity will have to do a deep spiritual accounting for the loss that we have put on other beings and other species.
As for emotions, I don’t know where they go. Some people damp them down. Others may not know how to cope if they really opened themselves up to all of the emotions. There’s this famous paper in 2009 in The Lancet, that said climate change is going to be the biggest public health threat of the 21st century. But I don’t think it’s public health. I think it’s mental health. I think that within that public health realm, the mental health piece is going to be profound and will be affecting people in ways we don’t even yet understand because climate change is cumulative. It affects everything and there are new things that we are going to be experiencing in the climate crisis for which we can’t even understand what it will do until it happens.
We have no idea what happens when so much of humanity struggles with mental health related to all the manifestations of climate change.
We don’t understand what that will do to the global population. It will not be just a regional issue. What will happen if 60 percent of the entire world is experiencing some sort of mental health stress or response from climate change? We don’t know what the numbers are going to be. We don’t know what the effects are going to be. We don’t know how people will cope. Different cultures will need to cope differently. Different regions will need different support. Different climate stressors and different parts of the globe will trigger different emotional and mental responses. So the complexity of it is huge… and we have no idea what it’s going to really mean for the global psyche.
Laureline: Referring to social media, the idea of trauma or collective trauma associated with climate change, is quite prominent. I have also read about post-traumatic stress disorder lately, how it affects the entire personality, can change DNA through epigenetics, and have long-term, even transgenerational effects. It is particularly preoccupying because what practitioners identify as the causes of trauma seems to be evolving from particularly violent war-like events to more common situations, which can have very damaging impacts nonetheless. I was wondering if you were also working with that trauma framing of the situation?
Ashlee: I don’t as much as a number of people who are really digging into the trauma piece from things like large scale and acute displacement and destruction from events such as wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes. There is certainly evidence for long-term traumatic response within the disaster mental health field, and as we see increasing incidences of acute weather events, it’s very likely that the linked rates of PTSD will increase. From a more chronic perspective, there is increasing concern that living daily with the stress of climate change, and worry about the present and the future, can have negative outcomes. Some people are exploring the idea of pre-traumatic stress disorder, or the stress and trauma that happens before an event, or because of more chronic climate stressors.
I’ve talked to a number of psychologists who are working on this area and they’ll say they have so many clients saying: “I don’t know what it is. I shouldn’t feel this bad. Why do I feel so stressed or anxious or depressed?” Because there hasn’t been one event. And so even people who are experiencing it feel like they shouldn’t be because they can’t attribute it to any one thing. So it may be about changing that public perception. Realizing that ongoing stress day in and day out has serious negative effects that can affect your ability to sleep or function or your relationships or your work.
The other health impacts of climate change are often more linear and therefore easier to study. If the temperature increases, we see this percentage of respiratory diseases or this percentage of aggressions increase. But with mental health, we don’t see that because it can be everything. It’s so all-encompassing. Different factors play in. It also depends on people and what they’re exposed to and what their history is and whether or not they have preexisting mental health challenges, whether they live in high risk regions… So many other variables make it beyond complex to really understand the true implications of what’s happening for people on a mental and emotional level.
Laureline: And it feels like climate change is almost creating a new category of mental health issues, for which we may not really have any kind of treatment or even support in place at the moment. Because if you think of episode-related trauma – stemming from a given context and/or occurring at a given time – then you can have some strategy in place to deal with it. But when it’s chronic and it’s related to a constantly evolving situation, given that the environment is continuously degrading around us, creating new situations to deal all the time, it raises the question of what to do about it. Can we really grieve? Are we supposed to grieve continuously?
Ashlee: I really feel we’re really in an era of loss and grief, and I think it’s this grief without end. I don’t think there is an end to the losses that we’re going to see in the coming years. I think that humanity has to embrace that we are in this era of loss and that means developing new skills so we know how to live with ongoing and enduring grief, where it’s loss after loss after loss. And I think that means new skillsets. That means new understanding. That means new support, because we’re going to see more and more people affected directly and indirectly by climate change. We’re going to see more and more loss. And it’s not just going to be one thing and then it’s over. If all the emissions stopped today, we’d still have decades of warming ahead of us.
So I think we’re in a place where it’s about embracing the grief and not running from it anymore. And particularly for a lot of Western societies, that’s a hard thing to do.
People don’t want to feel the grief. They were not taught how to grieve. It’s not part of the culture. Death is not openly discussed. So a lot of skillsets that other cultures have are missing. Those cultures have a very different connection to life and death from the one we have in modern Western civilization, which has put people at a huge disadvantage in knowing how to deal with grief in all its forms. For instance, knowing that it’s not silly to grieve for something that’s not human, as, of course, you’re connected to it. I think it’s about developing a whole new skillset that many people on this planet have never lost, but that many other people do not have anymore.
It’s about reconnecting with place and environments and understanding that sort of deeper human reciprocal relationship with nature, including the spiritual connection, the reciprocity that’s there, the relational pieces. And then it’s about connecting to understand grief and loss and death in very different ways and knowing what it’s like to live with grief and to not be crippled by it. Finding ways to make that grief productive and unifying rather than isolating. It’s like a giant new skillset for a lot of humanity.
Laureline: It also suggests that Indigenous communities may be expressing their grief more because they have the tools to deal with grief, and that unless one has the tools, no grieving can take place. Based on your research and work with Inuit communities, are there some lessons in terms of the grieving process that we as non-Indigenous people could benefit from? Or should it be about reinventing our own ways of grieving?
Ashlee: I think it’s a bit of both. I also think lessons are less about grieving, than they are about connection – connection to, love of, and respect for place, over generations. Whether it’s people I’ve worked with in Labrador or other parts of the North, other Indigenous leaders and peoples around the world:
what is to learn is how to connect to the environment and how to see yourself as one small part of a web of many, how to understand the animate nature and respect nature and the other life that’s around us.
That’s a totally different epistemology and ontology to understand the world in that way. That is a huge part of the re-learning for many people who lost it and whose culture, such as that of the modern Western civilization, lost it. Finding that reconnection and that re-understanding of the animate nature around us is one of those key things. I think when you have those connections, it reframes everything that you do and it reframes how it affects you, but also how you then understand yourself within the world and within the larger global ecosystem that we’re all connected to.
Laureline: At the same time, we can envision how such a connection can be scary. Connecting to nature today means feeling destruction at an even deeper level. I have sensitive kids who both know about environmental degradation, and have a strong connection to nature, and one day, when we were out in a forest, one of them burst out crying and said: ‘I’ve just realized we can lose all of that,’ which was really heartbreaking. It feels important to know how to navigate the strong emotions that will emerge out of this connection, without denying that this connection also offers the best way to deal with those emotions.
Ashlee: We only grieve what we love and what we’re connected to. And so in the work that I do when I talk to people about grief, it is about understanding that grief is a gift. We’re being given a huge gift – it’s a hard gift, but it’s a huge gift – right now because the emotions that we feel are exposing the deep connections that we have. Grief is a form of honoring what we love and what we’re losing, but also a huge reminder of what needs to be protected and what we need to stop.
Grief is painful, sad, scary and isolating. It can also be debilitating. But it is this enormous gift that we’re being given right now, which, in many ways, has become a global gift because so many people are feeling this all over. And it’s not a gift that we want to mistreat or forget about or ignore because you don’t often get these sorts of opportunities. So even though it’s a hard opportunity, it’s an enormous moment for people to re-align in the world, and create that mental, emotional, spiritual space in which we can see how we actually look at who we are and what our place in the world is and what our value is. And that grief can show us that, if we can make it through. Joanna Macy does a lot of grief work around that idea of walking through the door, doing the hard work, and knowing that you can do it, knowing you can survive it, knowing that there are communities of support that can walk with you through the forging or the fire of grief.
Laureline: It also seems that such deep grief cannot be dissociated from spirituality. To me, it provides an opening to a spiritual dimension that we are often missing in the West. I can fully relate to this process of going deep into grief, and running the risk of feeling it fully. I know (now) that it will get me to this other space where I can still feel the grief, but there is somehow another quality to it. It is the only time when I have the impression of being beyond grief, although I know the grieving process will continue.
Ashlee: I think it’s a grief that’s then not a hopeless grief, it’s a grief full of gritty hope, a hope that’s earned. There’s so much rhetoric around hope related to climate change that I really struggle with. I think that there’s a couple of reasons why I struggle with it. Some of it is putting too much faith into government, technology, and the belief that someone out there will find a solution and humanity will be okay, therefore, we don’t have to change anything. But I think there is a power to hope, if it’s a hope that’s earned through going through hard things. And that’s why I always call it gritty hope. If you’ve grieved and you’ve gone through it, you can still be grieving but you see the transformative power and the openings. Then you can see grieving as a gift, connect with other people and create communities of grief. Judith Butler uses a phrase I love which is the “we-creating capacity of grief and mourning.” She talks about grief and mourning as labour. And it is, because you have to work hard. It is hard.
But if we can do the hard work, go through the suffering while seeing it as a gift, change the mindset, do the learning and have the “we-creating“ capacity, there is hope. It’s an earned hope.
So, it is about embracing grief as hard labour, but something we all have to do. If the climate crisis wasn’t here, we would also have to grieve because we are all always going to lose loved ones. So we somehow have to rectify being afraid of grief with just understanding that it is such a key component of being alive. We will all lose people and things we love, and others will lose us. We will grieve and be grieved. And now that we have this climate crisis on us, there’s so much human and other-than-human loss. So we need skills and we also have to change our understanding of the power of grief and see it as a politically mobilizing force.
Laureline: Reflecting on the “we-creating capacity of grief,” I often have the feeling that the grief work can help connect people from very different origins, backgrounds, generations or geographies. I see it in the Climate Workers Circles we organize, where we gather students as well of people at the end of their career, artists and sustainability professionals, and, more generally, people coming from many different countries. It’s a space for open sharing and deep listening, which is not always about grief. Yet, it’s fascinating to witness how sharing openly can really lead to connections between people, and that it does not require agreeing on anything.
Ashlee: I also do a lot of academic and community presentations, as well as public talks and media, and inevitably people will say: “I thought I was the only one that felt this way,” or “I’ve always felt this, but I didn’t have language for it,” or, “Really? This many people are feeling this? Like there’s people researching this because it’s a thing?” Just the relief that people feel when they’re like: “Oh, I thought it was just me,” or “I’ve never told my family.” It’s remarkable how much we keep in. And it’s remarkable how much emotion has been kept in for so long.
Because you look at people like climate scientists and environmental people and people working in NGOs and people working in conservation, I mean, everyone has witnessed day in and day out the collapse of things they love. And that alone, the fact that people haven’t been talking about that is pretty remarkable, especially the scientists who feel that they can’t talk about it or their science will be discredited and how much they have to keep inside when we need to hear from everybody. We really need that sort of work done.
Laureline: I fully agree, but also believe it is going to require strong support systems in place, particularly for the younger generations. Not that older generations don’t need support, but I think as the crisis intensifies, the lives of the younger generations are going to be ever more affected. I’m thinking about students because we have a number of volunteers who feel the pain, and it really feels like in this day and age, there should be more support for people going through studies related to environmental issues. Yet, I may not have the full picture: do you know of some new initiatives for students in this field?
Ashlee: There’s not a lot, although university is often hard and stressful and can bring out a lot of mental health struggles anyways in the best of times. But if you throw in having to study the collapse of the world and the loss of species and the crises that will come: it is so hard. Many of my students go from class to class, learning about ecological collapse, the great human die-off, capitalist system collapsing, food insecurity… Their week of five classes has just been doom and gloom, which is so hard on them. And so I always talk to my students and say: “What you have chosen to study is so much more emotional than what many of your friends who are doing other things. You were drawn to this topic because you love nature and you want to make a change. And now you have to spend days hearing how everything is being destroyed.”
One student I used to work with is deeply in love with the marine world. She did a marine degree, where she learned that everything that she has loved was either being destroyed or being harmed because of plastics in the ocean, overfishing, climate change…
We are not supporting students because we’re still saying that ecology is “objective,” but it’s not when you love what you wanted to study.
We’re not taking this into consideration. And so mental health support at universities all around the world is low. It’s getting a little bit better because we’re understanding that students’ mental health is important, but it’s not enough already just to support general university stress. In medical programs, special support is given to students as they are in high stress situation and are going to see people suffer or die. We don’t see that for ecologists or young people in environmental studies. We’re not identifying specific mental health support for those disciplines.
I see student groups emerging where they’ll have climate anxiety talking groups and there’s a lot of events or gatherings. Students are identifying the need to talk to each other, which is great. And I’ve seen some university community discussions coming up, and I think that’s good. But it’s not coming from the formal mental health structures of institutions that would have recognized the need. Part of it is because they don’t have enough funding to just cover the general mental health challenges of post-secondary education, let alone specialized grief or loss people might feel.
Renee Lertzman has created specific resources, and Joanna Macy has her grief programme, which is great. Lise Van Susteren, is also doing some excellent work, as well as a lot of political advocacy. The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association now have many people looking into the resources that may be needed to address climate grief, starting with investigating the populations that need support the most, and the resources they might need. So people are trying, but it’s also new in some ways.
Laureline: It also feels that support might need to go beyond the field of psychology or psychiatry, as this grief differs from any kind of grief that we may have felt in the past.
Ashlee: Do you know the work of Glenn Albrecht? He’s amazing! He’s an environmental philosopher from Australia, who calls himself a “farmosopher”. He coined the phrase “solastalgia,” and just wrote a book last year called Earth Emotions, where he tries to create a whole new lexicon of words that can identify what people are feeling in this time. He has been finding new words that can express the complexities of emotions related to the current environmental crisis. He argues that the English language is holding us back in many ways and he delves in what we can learn from other languages, cultures and traditions. Because if we don’t have the language, we’ll never describe the emotions and we’ll never make the change.
Ashlee Cunsolo, PhD, is the founding Dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, a former Canada Research Chair, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Artists, Scholars, and Scientists. She is a leading voice internationally on climate change, mental health, and ecological grief, a regular contributor to media and policy, and editor of Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Grief and Loss.