Grief of climate scientists
Climate and earth scientists are acutely aware of the speed of climate and ecological breakdown and the dangers it poses to the health, safety, and survival of humans, other species, and ecosystems. They are burdened with the responsibility of communicating the science and dangers to decision makers, but their findings and policy recommendations are often minimized.
Being powerless to create the system change needed to maintain a safe, habitable earth, and lack of emotional support is causing mental health issues for many scientists. Some have witnessed the ecosystems and species they’ve studied and cared for be destroyed or go extinct, unable to save them because their policy recommendations were ignored.
Read a round-up of the headlines:
“The breaking point for me was a meeting in Singapore,” says Cerezo-Mota, an expert in climate modelling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. There, she listened to other experts spell out the connection between rising global temperatures and heatwaves, fires, storms and floods hurting people – not at the end of the century, but today. “That was when everything clicked.
“I got a depression,” she says. “It was a very dark point in my life. I was unable to do anything and was just sort of surviving.”
Cerezo-Mota recovered to continue her work: “We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn’t know. We know what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.’”
The Guardian, ‘Hopeless and broken’: why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair
“The diverse challenges of climate change are taking an increasing toll on professionals working in the Earth sciences. In particular, those who produce and/or communicate climate science information encounter direct and cultural pressures that can affect their emotional well-being. If the Earth science community is to successfully meet climate challenges, it needs a properly equipped, productive, and healthy workforce…
…Traditional norms of scientific rigor typically dictate that scientists remain composed and unemotional in their pursuit of knowledge; the admission of work-related emotional distress is sometimes conflated with weakness, character deficiency, or, worse, lack of scientific integrity and objectivity. This stigma amplifies fears of losing respect from peers, further damaging, rather than supporting, the emotional well-being of colleagues and community members [Friedman, 2014]. Hence, Earth science professionals may not be comfortable discussing their emotional well-being with colleagues and the community, avoiding the very networks that should be supporting them.”
Eos, The Emotional Toll of Climate Change on Science Professionals
“The seven scientists here document the impacts of global warming on the nonhuman world. Their work brings them face to face with realities that few of us see firsthand. Some are stubborn optimists. Some struggle with despair. To varying degrees, they all take comfort in nature’s resilience. But they know it goes only so far. These scientists are witnesses to an intricately connected world that we have pushed out of balance. Their faces show the weight they carry.”
NY Times, The Scientists Watching Their Work Disappear From Climate Change
“Arriving at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in October 2016, Tim Gordon thought he was living a dream. As a boy growing up in the southeast African country of Malawi, he’d covered his bedroom walls with Technicolor reef posters and vowed one day to explore those underwater worlds. The marine biologist was unprepared for what he found: a silent and colorless field of submerged rubble.
“Instead of documenting nature’s wonders,” he says, “I was documenting its degradation.”
Scientists like Gordon are grieving over the ecological losses they’re witnessing firsthand. They are worried about the probability of more losses to come and are frustrated that warnings about the dangers of unchecked carbon emissions have gone largely unheeded.”
Science News, How scientists wrestle with grief over climate change
“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…
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…
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.”
The Guardian, Climate grief is real – and I cannot keep watching images of our dying planet
More Reading
The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef at 'terminal stage': scientists despair at latest coral bleaching data
NY Times, These Climate Scientists Are Fed Up and Ready to Go on Strike
The Guardian, Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’
The Baffler, Tropical Depressions | Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan