Grieving a Changing Environment: Exploring the Effects of Climate Change on the Psyche
Jaclyn Narleski
Illustrations by Arden Spehar
‘Oh, but you know, climate change doesn’t exist.’ This all-too-familiar phrase is prevalent in everything from casual conversation to national media, despite increasing evidence demonstrating its fallacy. Climate denialists claim it’s a ‘liberal fabrication’ and ‘the climate is supposed to change anyway,’ leaving aside the clear evidence of its increasing effects. It’s a narrative that’s pervasive and often politically charged in the greater conversation surrounding climate change. However, there is another perspective and experience that is just as real. Those who believe in climate change, and/or experience it themselves, can suffer negative mental health effects. Neurophysiological deficits and disorders can also arise from the stress of climate change — a type of stress becoming known in some circles as ‘solastalgia’ or climate grief. Despite the impacts of climate change becoming more and more visible, a gap in understanding still persists between climate effects and mental health.
The Origins of Solacium Algos
Solastalgia is defined as the feeling of distress that arises from environmental changes or prolonged anticipation of environmental changes. The term is derived from the Latin root words solacium, meaning solace or comfort, and algos, meaning desolation or pain [1]. While solastalgia may sound similar to nostalgia, it was not coined just to describe the feelings of longing or melancholy experienced when losing something one loves. In reality, it also describes the feelings of distress in response to changes in a particular environment — especially for people who have a direct connection to that environment [2]. Populations that are directly connected to their environment are typically those whose lifestyle, culture, personal identity, or community relies directly on the geographical, vegetative, and climatic features of their home [3]. For example, the Afar and Borana Indigenous communities of Ethiopia rely directly on the land for raising livestock, farming crops, and other resources. The worsening effects of climate change have caused a grazing land shortage, recurring droughts, increased flooding, and more resource-based conflicts [4]. When populations like the Afar and Borana people experience firsthand changes to their environment, they may experience solastalgia. Such changes can also include natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, or snowstorms, as well as anthropogenic — or man-made — changes, like deforestation, oil spills, or mountain blasting. Additionally, anthropogenic climate change can, in turn, cause environmental changes such as increases in hurricanes, snowstorms, and drought, as well as shifts in temperature [2]. The consequences of these natural or man-made environmental changes can also affect mental health [5].
The term ‘solastalgia’ was first coined by philosopher Dr. Glen Albrecht in 2003, and has since been widely used in academia as interest rises in the mental and emotional impacts of environmental change [6]. In the past five years, the effects of climate change have grown exponentially, leading to an increase in media coverage documenting both individual and shared experiences of these environmental changes. As mental health challenges caused by climate change have become more commonplace, there has been a surge in research illuminating the struggles that individuals experiencing solastalgia navigate [6]. As such, the term ‘climate grief’ was dubbed to describe the feelings of distress that frequently accompany the anticipated loss of ecosystems, land, species, or ways of life [3]. While some populations may experience solastalgia because of their direct connection to their environment, others may experience distress over the mere anticipation of the vast effects of climate change, man-made destruction, or natural disasters.
To Fight or to Fly: Stressing on Solastalgia
Grief is a universal response to a loss or separation from someone or something we love [3, 7, 8]. Solastalgia and climate grief both describe emotional responses to losing, or anticipating the loss of one’s home or way of life due to severe environmental damage [2]. While solastalgia and climate grief are the overarching concepts that encompass emotional responses to environmental loss, more specific subtypes of these responses have been named to further describe specific situations and feelings that accompany climate change [9]. These subtypes are known as eco-grief, eco-anxiety, and eco-guilt [9].
Eco-grief, which is similar to climate grief, characterizes the feelings of anger or sadness that arise from the loss or anticipated loss of one’s physical environment [9]. For example, someone might feel angry and frustrated when experiencing an abnormally consistent drought that limits their water supply. Eco-anxiety encompasses the feelings of worry that arise from considering either the future of climate change or how future generations will experience its damage, as well as the distress of knowing others may suffer from environmental harm [9]. This subtype describes the symptoms commonly associated with anxiety and depressive disorders, such as an inability to sleep, socialize, or work, that arise as a result of changes in one’s surroundings [10]. For instance, a mother might have difficulty sleeping because she is extremely anxious about how climate change will impact her children’s lives. Eco-guilt describes the feelings of individual responsibility, self-blame, or dissatisfaction with oneself or one’s generation as related to climate change [11]. For example, a commuter might feel guilty for driving to work every day, feeling personally responsible for the carbon emissions put into the atmosphere from their car. Each subtype defines various feelings of distress that come from lived experiences of environmental degradation, and each can develop into distinct psychological issues.
Solastalgia can occur simultaneously with, or result in, other psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or mood disorders like depression [11]. PTSD can manifest from experiencing a life-threatening event, like a natural disaster, that causes death, major injuries, loss of resources, or relocation from home, while anxiety disorders or depression can occur as a result of other types of change as well. Prolonged environmental changes, or even the anticipation of environmental changes, can result in mood disorders. Some examples of transformation include extreme heat waves, glacial spells, droughts, floods, or the extinction of species. Aggressive behavior, substance abuse, and suicide rates have also been shown to increase with environmental disruption [11, 12].
Prolonged depressive responses like grief, stress, and anxiety can cause neurophysiological changes. Solastalgia and climate grief are commonly recognized as depressive responses, and individuals experience similarly high levels of stress when experiencing solastalgia as they might when experiencing depressive responses [11, 13]. Those who experience solastalgia or climate grief may experience an inability to regulate their levels of a stress hormone called cortisol [14]. Cortisol activates the body’s fight-or-flight stress response by releasing sugars into the bloodstream and increasing heart rate and blood pressure [15]. Continuous activation of the fight-or-flight stress response from the uncertainty and threats that environmental changes pose can cause sleep disturbances and negatively impact the immune system’s ability to function [14]. Negative impacts on the immune system’s functionality can make one more susceptible to infectious disease [16]. Experiencing chronic stress can also have negative effects on cognitive performance because it can cause the brain to atrophy [17, 18]. A few examples of negative effects on cognitive performance include a decrease in attention span, difficulty retaining memory, or struggling to problem-solve [18]. Additionally, feelings of helplessness and lack of control that commonly arise from solastalgia or climate grief can inhibit one’s motivation or ability to interact with others and perform daily tasks [14]. In turn, these neurophysiological effects of solastalgia and climate grief can influence our behavioral responses toward climate change and its effects.
Despair, Defer, Deny: Climate Action and Solastalgia
Solastalgia can cause several emotions — fear, anxiety, stress, insecurity, powerlessness, etc. — that affect a person’s relationship not only with their unstable environment but also with themselves and others [19]. Solastalgia often brings about guilt and a sense of personal responsibility for the causes and effects of climate change, leading to behavioral responses to relieve those feelings. In other words, one may feel as if they are responsible for their changing environment [9, 19]. This combination of guilt and personal responsibility can impact behavior in two different ways. It’s important to note that regardless of where responsibility lies on the societal level, on the individual psychological level, these are the responses that someone affected by solastalgia or climate grief may exhibit. In the attempt to eliminate their individual impact, one might make drastic lifestyle changes like converting to veganism, saving extensively-used products, or using candlelight to save on electricity. Alternatively, someone might defer the responsibility of climate change as a defense mechanism, allowing them to relieve whatever intense stress, conflict, or anxiety they are experiencing [9, 20]. They might place blame on older generations, larger corporations, or governmental actions, rather than taking responsibility themselves. These defense mechanisms can evolve into full-blown climate change denialism in order to decrease experienced guilt or stress [20]. People may also choose to isolate themselves from social activities, which may result in diminished social support from a community [3]. Just as individuals are impacted by solastalgia and climate grief in these ways, entire communities can collectively experience negative effects.
Reading the Landscape: Effects of Solastalgia Across Communities and Cultures
Solastalgia can be triggered by varying pressures of environmental change and the dread that arises from anticipating worsening conditions [3]. There are three main categories of loss that can evoke solastalgia or climate grief: acute physical ecological loss, disruption of sense of place, and anticipated future loss. Natural disasters or extreme weather events are considered acute physical ecological loss [3]. ‘Sense of place’ refers to the distinct characteristics and emotional attachments people experience in terms of place [21]. The disruption of one’s ‘sense of place’ and personal identity with respect to their environment is considered a loss of environmental knowledge. Finally, there’s the anticipated future loss due to environmental changes [3].
Let’s consider a real-world example that explores these three types of loss. Mount Merapi is an active volcano located in central Indonesia. In the last 3 decades, the volcano has erupted multiple times, most notably in 1997, 2006, and 2010 [22]. Due to these frequent eruptions, nearby communities like the Cangkringan village experience solastalgia from the anticipation of losing their environment in the near future [23]. Those who had already witnessed an eruption during their lifetime may be especially distressed because they already had to adjust their lifestyle, cultural practices, or simply no longer felt comfortable in their altered environment [23]. The 2010 volcano eruption of Mount Merapi, in particular, severely affected the Cangkringan village and other surrounding villages in the volcano’s reach [25]. Approximately 2,200 families were displaced from the damage to their homes and 400,000 total people were internally displaced because of the dangerous lava flows that resulted from the eruption; this is an example of acute physical ecological loss [24]. Due to the destruction and displacement caused by the volcanic eruption, residents showed pronounced solastalgia because they no longer felt safe and comforted by their home environment and were physically removed from their homes [25]. Additionally, Indonesian residents continued to experience distress even two years later, as farms, roads, housing, and rice fields still remained extensively damaged. After experiencing acute physical ecological loss, the Cangkringan village people felt a disruption to their ‘sense of place.’ Volcanic dust coating the roads served as a constant reminder of the damage that had ensued, and made the surrounding environment seem foreign. Construction activity and modifications to farming practices also contributed to the disruption of sense of place, because it required potentially major lifestyle changes [25]. Even a slow disruption to sense of place can cause stress just as great as one as sudden as a volcanic eruption.
‘We used to read the landscape. But now it changes, you have to guess now. Everything changes, [making] it so hard… You never know, it just change[s] like that, even the tide… Like before, you know what [was] gonna happen. So hard now, guessing all the time, through [the years] from 2000 [it] is sort of getting worse. I think it start[ed] changing in the 1980s, the changes start[ed]… [I] am sad at home, think[ing] about the good old days, we always talk about the good old days. Now everything is changing, even the trees, you can see changes in them, even the fruits, like before, we haven’t had mango season’ [26].
Expressing their own solastalgia, residents from Erub Island, Australia, a region devastated by rising sea levels, recounted their experience with anguish. Just from minute changes to their surrounding environment, residents of Erub Island felt sadness and fear in the face of such change as it threatened their sense of place [26]. They may also experience eco-anxiety in anticipating the future loss of their sense of place as these changes continue to occur.
Climate change affects us all. However, the threat to our ‘sense of place’ and development of solastalgia or climate grief can vary between ecosystems and communities. Certain groups are potentially more vulnerable to solastalgia — like Indigenous peoples, farmers, mountaineers, people with disabilities, people of color, older people, women, and children [3, 5]. For example, the Fulani people of Nigeria, Africa experience greater solastalgia from changes to their environment due to their dependency on the land that facilitates their way of life [4]. Younger adults have also shown to be more susceptible to climate grief because of the generational pressures that have been placed upon them [10]. Generational pressure comes from older communities off-loading the responsibility of resolving the issue of climate change onto younger communities [10]. In addition to this pressure, these younger communities concurrently grapple with climate grief, which exacerbates the stress from pre-existing issues like food insecurity, overcrowding, and poverty [3]. Disruption of ‘sense of place’ can present differently in wide-ranging communities and groups of people, but as the effects of climate change increase in severity, it will become a familiar feeling to us all.
Looking Back and Moving Forward
The mental health effects of environmental change are real and pressing to society as the threat of climate change continues to grow. These effects manifest in numerous psychological issues, including depression, anxiety, and chronic stress, that can influence our behavior towards environmental change. Individuals can develop behaviors and attitudes towards climate change that reflect their need to relieve themselves of said stress or other negative feelings. It’s important to acknowledge, however, that everyone experiences different forms of loss and environmental change, and may maintain unique relationships with their environment. The effects of solastalgia will impact certain groups disproportionately, especially those who have a direct connection with their natural environment and value sharing their space with it.
Climate change is an ongoing issue that will continue to grow in severity if humanity refuses to take meaningful steps to fight it. Those not directly affected by the current consequences of climate change are often reluctant to push for change, reflecting a human-centric perspective versus the environmental perspective we need. Nevertheless, as the effects become too large and frequent to ignore, the distress of experiencing and anticipating it all could motivate a greater effort to fight climate change. Perhaps then, we might make some headway in the right direction.
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