We Should All Be Talking About Climate Grief  

It was 35°C, the last day of the university term, and my eyes were burning from the sweat pouring down my face. The conversation around me turned towards the climate – hard to ignore given yet another heatwave we were sweltering through. But it was swiftly shut down by a close friend of mine sat at the opposite end of the table. ‘We all know what’s happening’, she explained, ‘and there’s nothing we can do about it, so talking about it isn’t going to change anything’. 

There is a time and a place for conversations about climate, and perhaps that moment was not one of them. Yet her comment remained with me, producing a sort of numbness I hadn’t felt since watching Adam Kay’s Don’t Look Up (2021). In the film, there was an absurdity to the mundane conversation over dinner, of apple pie and coffee beans, that distracted from the obvious: the world was quite literally falling apart around them. An asteroid may not immediately be hurtling towards our heads, yet, in that moment, the parallel with the climactic scene of the movie felt uncanny. 

Eco-anxiety is not a new feeling, but this numbness, the sensation of total helplessness and individual insignificance in the face of the accelerating environmental collapse, was something different. It was no longer pure panic; it felt like grief. 

What is Climate Grief? 

In their 2018 landmark paper on ‘Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss’, Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis define the term ‘ecological grief’ as ‘the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses’. Grief most commonly manifests in the period that comes after a loss, after a specific end point has been reached. For those living in the frontline nations of the climate crisis, such as in the low-lying Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, direct loss is a lived reality, as geographic exposure sees homes swept away by rising sea-levels and water resources depleted by prolonged drought. But when discussing the climate in the UK, given our privileged seat on this global Titanic, grief may feel more anticipatory or what some may call ‘transitional’. This is because the process that will result in many irreversible losses is already underway. We just don’t quite know what it will look like yet.

In The Fourth Independent Assessment of UK Climate Risk published in May this year, the Climate Change Committee reported that ‘by 2050, under 2°C of global warming, [heat related deaths] could rise to 3,000–10,000 each year’, and that by the same year ‘current projections estimate a five billion litre per day shortfall of public water supplies in England’. Not to mention the loss of British wildlife, increasingly toxic air, and strains on food sources. Though adaptive measures can be taken to limit these projections becoming reality, it is no surprise that the looming prospect of an inevitable 2°C rise in global temperatures brings about anticipatory grief for all the loss we will not prevent and must experience. 

The more I learnt about this grief, the more paralysed I felt. And so, I did the one thing my friend told me wouldn’t change anything: I talked. 

Learning to talk about Climate Grief

The person I spoke to was Riley Forson, a legal professional and incoming Head Lobbyist at CAS International (Comité Anti Stierenvechten), an animal rights NGO in Brussels (please see her full biography at the bottom of this article). I was first made aware of Forson through her work for a collaborative learning forum called Legal Voices for the Future. From her valuable contributions there, I knew that she was an individual who could offer a unique insight from the inside-out. 

In our interview, Forson explained to me how ‘we can all love our planet in so many different ways, and so many of us are experiencing the loss of it in diverse ways. I really do think grief is important to acknowledge that love’. 

And just like love, every experience of loss is unique. There is both a strange beauty and tension in this. ‘How do we reconcile different generations’ versions of climate grief and environmental loss? Because my loss of a particularly special space will not be the same loss as someone who’s five years old and remembers it how it currently is. How do we achieve constructive reconciliation?’. Memory and perspectives on climate and space are variegated and complex.

An awareness of the tension between generations was a common thread throughout our conversation. Forson shared with me conversations she had had with her loved ones about the changing direction of her legal career and that of the global climate. As she did so, she explained how scary it felt that the expectations for her life were going to change because of the climate. The simple, yet daunting, fact is that this is not unique to Forson. Rather, it is true for all of us living through the climate emergency. 

Forson also added that ‘obviously, we are incredibly unlucky that we and the generation that will come after us will deal with the impact that the generations before us have caused, but we’re both blessed and cursed that we are more conscious of our feelings… We have done the work and the therapy that the generations above us haven’t. They can’t process any of these problems because they cannot realise they are problems – and isn’t this a sad place to be?’. 

This is one of the many changes which differentiates us from past generations and how we understand and react to the climate emergency. The evolution of opinion across generations is, of course, a hugely complex issue, but there is certainly something to be said for the changing nature of public dialogue on climate change that has directly affected generational attitudes. The first United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 1) was held in the Spring of 1995 – the Rio Earth Summit took place only 3 years prior. For those born in the last 30-40 years, we are the first to be brought up in a world where the climate emergency has dominated public discourse, has been mandated in schools, and for many, weighs heavy on our individual social consciences. 

Ultimately, for Forson, the seeming oblivion of previous generations it is a question of ‘ sleepwalking because they have sort of sleepwalked through all of it, but they’re also blind to it so they have no idea of all the bigger consequences all around them, whereas we are much more alive to those consequences’. After all, the younger generations have spent our lives being warned about them.

The somnambulism metaphor was informed by a conversational aside about Daniel Sherrell, an American political organiser and climate author, who describes it as the state of people who are unable to wake up to the full reality of climate change. And this was the very thing Forson was getting at. 

At the same time, this feeling of sleepwalking in the context of her own career begged of her a self-questioning: ‘how can I stand by my social values if I don’t go and do something about it?’. For Forson, doing something means stepping off the well-trodden track that has been set out in front of us – to do so one has to be awake to the realities that exist off that path. It requires climate consciousness. 

How do we navigate climate consciousness? 

What does being awake to ecological issues look like? And is constant exposure to them what is needed to maintain a state of alertness, to maintain a constant climate consciousness? Those who have spent any amount of time on Instagram or on the London Tube recently will be aware of Project Slingshot, an anti-factory farming awareness campaign notorious for their provocative guerrilla advertising tactics and tagline, ‘Don’t buy it’.

Seeing the horrific videos campaigning against factory farming that were similar to those now being put out by Project Slingshot made Forson think ‘I have to do something’. But she acknowledges that looking at these images and consuming this content can bring about a feeling of overexposure, inducing another form of paralysis when you know you cannot sit by and do nothing, but equally do not know where to start. 

And so Forson contended that ‘I do think it’s actually okay to take a step back sometimes and cut yourself some slack – and this is something I really had to learn. You don’t have to look at this every single day. No one is saying that you don’t care if you don’t look at these things every day’. 

If we want to enact positive change then the question we really need to be asking is: how do we uphold climate consciousness without it directly resulting in paralysing grief?

Before his passing in 2023, American eco-theologist Michael Dowd was advocating for a concept he would dub ‘post-doom’, the active process of ‘coming to terms with the collapse of GIC (Global Industrial Civilization) and the Biosphere we all depend on for life, then figuring out how to live with it’. A big part of this involves learning to accept and honour the grief that ‘awareness of this predicament brings with it’. It is not hard to identify the universal appeal of this pro-future, pro-growth and healing mindset.

If, as Dowd explains, ‘doom is the midpoint between denial and regeneration’, grief seems to be the thing that, when processed sensitively and channelled constructively, can carry us across. Rather than becoming another symptom of climate change, it becomes a tool to help us adapt constructively to it.  

Forson did not hesitate to admit that her ‘life would be easier, happier… if I didn’t care so fundamentally about animals, the planet, and human rights [but when you realise] there are all of these problems going on, that’s also a blessing because you realise there is so much more to the world than yourself’. Compassion will open you up to the outside world, but it cannot be pain free. 

What can we do on an individual level? 

The issue with ecological grief is not only that it induces paralysis, but that when left unaddressed on an individual level, the collective action which is necessary to tackle the root cause of the issue is impossible. Progress requires movement, and paralysis is its antithesis. 

Environmental sociologist Professor Stephanie Malin points to such paralysis being an unsurprising product of ecocidal extractive capitalism that serves a function in social control – any big polluter would leap at the prospect of such paralysis disabling any capacity for civic action. Someone who is paralysed merely by their awareness of the issue is, as a result, no better off than those blind to it. 

It is Forson’s view that the individual has ‘to take account of [their] feelings in a broader societal group. Be that your family, be that your friends, or the financial systems we operate in – you still have to go and operate in society’. You have to engage in a system, no matter how much you might dislike doing so, if you want to pick it apart. You need to ‘work out how you can exist [within such a system] whilst doing the least damage’. She stressed that to do so we have to be able to function on a day-to-day basis. We cannot allow ourselves to be paralysed. But how?  

Clinical Psychotherapist Cindy Chai acknowledged in a TEDx talk on giving language and validation to climate grief, that ‘even if we cannot fix the planet overnight, we can start by healing ourselves and each other’. This sentiment is something Forson closely shared. 

When she first joined Legal Voice for the Future (LVF), Forson was sat down by a member of the committee who told her ‘it is okay sometimes to be absolutely paralysed – that’s totally normal. Sit with it, feel it, and then think: okay, how do I pick up one foot to go forwards. Don’t think ‘Oh gosh, I need to run off the ledge and be flying…’, just think about how to take the first step. Why do you think that’s not enough?’

LVF provided that opportunity to open up on an individual level, to be honest with herself about the climate distress and upset she experiences, particularly from an animal welfare perspective. 

What I started to notice emerging from our conversation here was an emphasis on the need for this conversation itself: ‘talk about it, feel it, and acknowledge the feelings. Don’t be afraid of them, don’t be ashamed of them, and the more people you talk to about them the more you realise you are not alone’. It may seem a banal activity, a small thing, but as she said in a simple line that became her refrain, ‘doing the small things is just as important’ as they ‘add up to being a big thing’.  Simple acts of conversation have the power to give people back a feeling of control, a sense of individual agency that when combined empowers constructive collective action, irrespective of the scale that action takes. 

The challenge, however, in her experience has been ‘people who become very militant about these things as it made having those conversations much harder’. The likes of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion quickly spring to mind. For Forson, the tension derives from the fact the militant version of action leads to stereotyping of anyone who speaks up about these sensitive and emotional topics. It makes a conversation harder or more daunting to start as people are sometimes judging from the outset due to that militant approach. ‘But if you come at these very difficult, sensitive topics like you would if someone had died and someone was grieving, I think you open more avenues for understanding, for empathy, for dialogue […] I think it opens more space, and within that space it allows people who are going through those feelings of grief and anxiety and fear to express those more openly, and gives people the opportunity to reflect on it without imposing something’.

If, as Cunsolo and Ellis identify in their paper, ecological grief holds a ‘disenfranchised’ status for the very reason that it often ‘isn’t publicly or openly acknowledged’, the sensitivity in this approach is integral to opening up conversation. 

It is Forson’s belief that opening up this space to talk also allows you to grieve yourself and a version of yourself that could have been were you not called to other pursuits. In her case what her life may have looked like should she have chosen to remain at Macfarlaines. As climate change continually alters how we are able to imagine and plan our futures, it is only natural that we experience a sense of loss for what could have been. 

But the issue of urgency remains, and Forson acknowledged that perhaps mindful conversation is not the way of doing things urgently enough. 

Where do we go from here? 

Like many of us, Forson used to live her life constantly plagued by the looming prospect of ‘what if?’. ‘What if it doesn’t work out? What if it goes wrong?’. Yet cautious optimism offered the contention: ‘what if it all goes absolutely fine?’. And this cautious optimism is important if we are to not fall victim to the ‘hopium’ – ‘a comforting vision of the future that requires breaking the laws of physics, biology, or ecology’ – that Michael Dowd believed is being recklessly dealt. 

Without falling too far down that wormhole, what I can say is that hope cannot be allowed to obliterate grief, nor can we permit out grief to obliterate hope.

Grief and hope are not mutually exclusive. Striking a necessary balance between the two keeps us grounded yet self-aware in a way that diverts us away from all-consuming fatalism. 

Forson had called me from a hotel room having already been stuck outside Paris with the wildfires that week, only just missing the ones in Bordeaux. After an hour on the phone together, it was easy to say that nothing tangible had changed, that those wildfires were still burning. 

The outside world may look the same for now, but something had changed for me – in having our conversation, a weight had been lifted.

The ecological grief I have been holding was given an outlet which enabled me to push back against the paralysis and put together this piece. As Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba wrote: ‘Si je ne souffre plus d’éco-anxiété, c’est parce que j’agis’. I’m aware my own writing will not solve the climate crisis, but it may change one person’s perspective on how we approach it. And right now that is enough, because, if my conversation with Riley has taught me anything, it is that every contribution we make, no matter how small, is an important step forward. 

Full Biography:

Riley Forson studied Law at UCL before subsequently undertaking an LLM in International Human Rights Law at UCLouvain (Belgium) and a course in Animal Rights Jurisprudence with Harvard and the Non-Human Rights Project. She has a private practice background in litigation and dispute resolution at Macfarlanes LLP where she was associate for 3.5 years. Having recently left private practice, Riley will be working as Head Lobbyist at CAS International (Comité Anti Stierenvechten), an animal rights NGO in Brussels. She is also joining the School for Moral Ambition as a fellow on the EU Food Transition where she will be focussing on the EU Livestock strategy and EU Public Procurement and will be joining Eurogroup for Animals for a 6-month fellowship in their Food Transition Hub. She continues to sit on the Advisory Board for Legal Voices for the Future and is currently helping to write a chapter on nature risk for a new publication on nature risk for risk professionals being published by Routledge. Riley is an open ear for anyone who needs a chat about climate or nature grief. 

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