Nature Spirituality

In her recent collection of essays, Vesper Flights, English naturalist Helen MacDonald observes that awareness of the specific plants and animals in the natural world around you increasingly means “opening yourself to constant grief.” She is not alone in noticing the rising tide of grief that comes with awareness of climate change and its accompanying environmental devastation. The question of what to do with this climate grief is gaining momentum, because one of the increasingly salient features of our existence right now is the pain of watching the world burn. I am interested in the spiritual consequences of this grief and the possibility (and even necessity) of mourning as a spiritual practice in a largely secular context. MacDonald herself does not identify as religious, but she remarks that, when writing about environmental grief, she “kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing.” Her “secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like.”^1^ Spiritual discourse has the resources for touching this aspect of our present experience, and I argue that this discourse can and should be available, irrespective of whether one personally believes that spirituality and theology refer to metaphysical realities.

Drawing on the work of a small but growing number of scholars exploring the spiritual dimensions of climate change, I suggest that climate grief is a phenomenon with spiritual significance, and that mourning as a spiritual (but potentially secular) practice is a necessary step for honoring and dealing with “solastalgia.” Glenn Albrecht, an Australian of Sri Lankan and European descent, coined this neologism to capture the inchoate negative feelings that emerge as we observe the destruction of the world around us. A combination of solace, desolation, and nostalgia, solastalgia is “an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace,” as well as the “pain or distress” that results from watching that solace disappear and “the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.” Albrecht’s neologism came in part from the consideration that, for many Indigenous people, the scientific terms “ecology” and “ecosystem” “fail to capture the emotional and cultural dimensions of the human relationship to land.” He wanted to avoid the neocolonization of reading bioscientific terms into Indigenous systems.^2^

I agree with Lisa Sideris and other scholars writing about human emotional responses to the continuing destruction of life on Earth: neither blind optimism nor paralytic despair is the appropriate reaction to the state of affairs that has led to solastalgia. Rather, it is time to mourn. Paradoxically, this mourning, which may at first glance seem to be a giving-up, is an essential step toward transformation.