When my family first moved to our second house in Rolla, Missouri–the one where I am visiting my parents this month–in the early 90s, the yard backed up to an old farm. Much of it was pasture bounded by barbed wire and pockmarked with stands of shrubby trees. Cattle grazed nearby, and I remember startling a covey of northern bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) that scurried away into the underbrush when I approached.
“My” part of all this was the little wooded corner right behind our fence, part private property and part city. A trail led into a tunnel of undergrowth, sidling along the outlet for the storm drain on the street which emptied into the nearby creek. Once I emerged from the little wooded path, I could descend into the wetlands, or wander a rocky open area beneath a huge sycamore tree (Platanus occidentalis), before encountering the creek itself. I later learned it has the rather uninspiring name “Dutro Carter Branch”, and with its equally bland-titled neighbors, Burgher Branch and Deible Branch, it eventually flowed into the Meramec River by way of Dry Fork, and from there into the mighty Mississippi at the edge of the state.
The name might not have been much to write home about, but the time I spent exploring that fragment of an acre was incredibly formative for me. I was badly bullied, socially awkward and likely undiagnosed neurodivergent, and I had learned that “friends” might turn on you as soon as invite you to play. My solace was nature, and while at our previous house I mainly had open lawns and ornamental bushes to explore, this new place gave me much richer opportunities to explore a variety of habitats and their denizens.
Alas, it was not to last. “Progress” ever steamrolls onward, and the farm was sold to become yet another subdivision of large, expensive houses with plain grass lawns and isolated little trees. I hopped off the school bus one early spring afternoon in 9th grade to find that my wild haven had been bulldozed to the clay-stained ground.
In that instant I shattered.
A Lack of Support Structures
Mainstream American society doesn’t have the best relationship with grief. Other than a funeral, where you are supposed to comport yourself with sad dignity and somberness, grieving is largely something done alone, and while continuing to work at your job, go to school, and otherwise carry on with your daily life as normally as you can. You might not even get the time off to go to that funeral if you work in retail or other low-wage jobs where PTO is scattered like scant crumbs before you, and if your manager doesn’t think the deceased warrants temporarily excising you from the schedule, well, you have to choose between going to the funeral anyway, or losing your job.
There’s a hierarchy to grieving. Lose a parent or sibling? Well, of course it’s acceptable to mourn. But the less genetic material you share with the decedent, the harder it is to justify your loss. Once you leave the human realm, things get dicey. It’s only been in the past couple of decades that it’s become somewhat acceptable to grieve for the loss of a pet, and most of that grief is reserved for dogs and cats. Try explaining to your boss that you need a few days off to deal with the loss of, say, a pet snake or the carnival goldfish you’ve had for twenty years, and they’re likely to look askance (and deny your time off.) Never mind that humans are capable of pack-bonding with all sorts of living beings, and someone may love their parrot or tarantula every bit as much as their neighbor adores their dog.
But then there’s another layer of grief–that we may have for the loss of wild nature. This can be the extinction of an entire species, the loss of a particular habitat or ecosystem, or the impending threat of global destruction through anthropogenic climate change. We don’t have a structure for processing this grief; we barely even acknowledge that it exists, and many are in denial that it’s possible–even as we have experienced it ourselves. As I wrote in my book The Everyday Naturalist:
The devastation of nature worldwide has happened precisely because we have allowed it to become so impersonal that most of us don’t think twice about the damage being done. Those of us who do care often find ourselves needing to emotionally distance ourselves just to survive. (p. 15)
For me, the annihilation of my patch of woods along the creek was the first deep, acute trauma I remember experiencing. It was different from the daily harassment by bullies and the ongoing confusion I felt about my inability to make stable friendships. And it changed me for the worse for many years. Already dealing with undiagnosed Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I feel deep into depression. At the age of 13 I was also struggling with shifting hormones and the resultant changes in brain and body. The loss of my woods landed in my already tumultuous inner life like a firebomb.
No one really seemed to know how to help me. They cared and worried, to be sure, but no one thought to send me to a therapist. And even if they had, would any therapist at the time have recognized the ecological trauma that had torn me apart? Ecopsychology was just in its nascent stages in the words of Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth, which certainly hadn’t filtered down to a young, nature-loving teenager in rural Missouri. I was on my own trying to navigate what I was going through, and I often felt like I was the only person in the world who knew this deep, bleeding agony in my heart.
The Healing Power of Time and Experience
As an adult, one thing I’ve discovered is that other adults often forget that children don’t have the toolkit to deal with emotional ups and downs like we do. A toddler screaming because they’ve fallen down and scraped a knee isn’t being overly dramatic: it’s quite possible that this is the biggest, scariest, and most painful thing they have ever experienced. Likewise, teenagers going through a supposedly “difficult stage” aren’t deliberately trying to make life awful for the adults in their lives. It’s just that, like thirteen-year-old me, they’re fighting with the most challenging emotional and social pressures of their young lives while their brains go through phenomenal changes.
Over three decades after my first ecological trauma, I have the perspective to be able to look back and see how far I’ve come. I observe my errors and my desperate attempts to patch myself back together. Some of them worked, others were regrettable. But that happens to a lot of traumatized people, regardless of the source of the trauma. I don’t judge my younger self for those foibles; instead, I cradle that version of me gently, and see where each stage of healing was hard-won–as P!nk once sang, “Dug my way out, blood and fire”.
Today when I walk past the tiny shreds of my woods that remain on the edges of the creek that now skirts big houses on big lawns, I still feel the pangs of that initial collapse. It’s worse, in a way, knowing more about the ecology of this area than I did back then. Now I brush along leaves of young American elm (Ulmus americana), isolated bunches of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and the angular, layered seed heads of river oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), knowing them to be the tiniest remnants of what were once vast oak-hickory forests interwoven with tallgrass prairies.
But I am not defeated. I volunteer where I can to restore and maintain habitat, both in my visits to Missouri and back home in the Pacific Northwest. I educate and share and inspire others to become part of a better world in which we work toward healing our relationships with the greater community of nature. And I have begun in recent years to more openly integrate my training in ecopsychology–the psychology of our reciprocal relationship with nature–into my naturalist work.
That includes healing myself. Sure, over time, I have cobbled together a series of moments in which the wound in my soul has closed and quieted a little more with the passing years. But I’ve also gained context for my experiences as I left the small fishbowl of my childhood and swam out into a much larger, more varied world. One of the most important pieces of that was the first time I spoke with other people who had similar experiences to mine, where we could share the grief we had felt at losing some special natural place, or the shock of seeing a once-common species dwindle to nothing forever. These were almost always informal conversations, but when I began facilitating these discussions in community-level ecopsychology classes, I felt as though all of us were suddenly finding a home for feelings that had seemed forever out of place.
The Courage of Grief in Plein Air
We need a healthier relationship with grief–especially open grief–in American society. We’re already bad about keeping our feelings hidden for fear of seeming weak or dramatic or troublesome. We repress to our detriment, and yet often that feels like the safest form of self-defense in an empathy-deficient society.
People who care deeply about nature have had various epithets hurled at us over the years: tree-hugger, bleeding-heart, snowflake. It’s a way to dismiss our compassion and care for nature in a derogatory way, as though we’re too soft and weak for the real world. Yet I find that it is often the least emotionally developed people who are most likely to resort to insulting the open emotions of others.
As someone who has been on both sides of the counselor-client relationship many times, and who has fought tooth and nail for better emotional and mental balance, I maintain that it takes an immense amount of courage and strength to be able to openly show genuine emotions. We curb our joy and sadness, and anger is often the only feeling that is given full throated cry. Yet we are more complicated creatures than that, and the mess that can occur when we let our emotions run more freely is more often due to a lack of a structure in which to express them.
There is nothing weak about declaring love for your fellow humans even if you aren’t related to them–even if they are strangers. It is not weakness to show deep wells of compassion for other living beings too, whether the pets we share our homes with, or the wild animals, plants, and other life forms that populate this incredible planet of ours. To be able to wrap your love around an entire place, an ecosystem, a biome, the planet’s interconnected life support systems–that takes a bravery that many shy away from.
Grief and love are inextricably intertwined. The deeper the love, the more powerful the grief once the receiver of that love has gone. When we express grief, whether for a human or some other being in nature, for a species lost or a place destroyed, we are saying over and over again “My love for you endures even in your absence.” How is that weakness?
If you have been struggling with feelings of grief for some loss in the community of nature, whether because you have been made to feel ashamed of it, or you have trouble facing the trauma of loss, or because you don’t know how to express it, start with this: it is okay to grieve for nature lost. It is normal, it is healthy, and it speaks to how deeply your love runs for that being or place. If you choose to carefully open up that painful spot, examine it, find it a place to go instead of shoving it back down, know that you are engaging in something many people simply aren’t capable of. And if you aren’t ready for that yet? That’s okay, too. Simple acknowledgement is powerful enough on its own.
I cannot be your therapist. But you’re welcome to talk about your ecological grief in the comments. If you need help finding resources, please feel free to ask me.
