The Climate Grief of City Life

Living in an era of climate change means we live in an era of environmental grief. emotional phenomena inspired glacier funeral Also in Iceland, Oregon, and Switzerland. scientists reported feel a sense of shock and loss With each successive return to the Great Barrier Reef, new expanses of coral bleach and dry. Across the mining country of central Appalachia, mountains are cut in half and forests cleared to mine coal, and the pain is being felt in the following ways: Diagnosable mental health conditions.

You are less likely to see this term ecological sadness applied to Flooded New York City subway station or Heatwave forces Philadelphia public schools to close early or Dangerously scorched playground asphalt in Los Angeles. However, for most city dwellers, climate change is not caused by the collapse of natural geological formations, but by damage to the man-made infrastructure that makes up urban space and daily life. When that infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, whether by wind, fire, or floods, our habitat changes, which in turn causes a strong sense of emotional loss and instability.

Philosopher Glenn Albrecht has developed a vocabulary to describe the emotional experience of living in a changing climate. SolastalgiaFor example, it describes homesickness that arises from observing chronic environmental deterioration in one’s home. tiara trauma It refers to the intense pain of witnessing a degraded environment, such as a cleared forest or a stream filled with trash. The basis of Albrecht’s work is that humans are fundamentally connected to the natural environment and experience pain when the natural environment is damaged. To that end, his research tends to focus on rural areas, where the barrier between humans and nature often feels more porous.

We’ve built cities as fortresses against the forces of nature around us, but we learned the hard way that concrete creates far more delicate habitats than trees, grass, or dirt. I’m here. They are vulnerable to the wrath brought on by a warming atmosphere, increasing heat and struggling to absorb excess moisture, cracking and crumbling. “In fact, we fundamentally don’t understand that the cities we build are also part of nature,” Australian architect Adrian McGregor told me. “We operate and manage them, and they rely on us for imports to keep them alive. But they are also the largest habitats we have.” The United States In , approximately 80% of the country’s population lives in urban areas.

McGregor promotes the following theory:biourbanism” sees cities as a form of nature in their own right. This framework is influenced by geographers Elle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, who developed the concept of “antrom”. anthropogenic biomea human-shaped ecosystem. (At this point in history, the human body covers more than 80 percent of the Earth’s surface.)

“From a climate change perspective, cities are generally harsher environments than rural areas,” said Brian Stone Jr., a professor of urban environmental planning and design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. According to his research, urban dwellers tend to face climate change through an increasing number of common episodes. Heavy rains regularly flood certain street corners. of Light rail will be suspended This is because high temperatures put a strain on power transmission lines. summer drought kill the tree Provide shade at your local playground. For people who depend on all of these mundane elements of urban life, each of those episodes “activates much more climate awareness and latent grief than a great ice shelf cutting off from Greenland.” Masu.”

That’s because these small breaks reveal the fragility of our environment and portend large-scale collapse due to climate change. Perhaps the most notable example of urban climate disaster, sea level rise and wetland erosion contributed to the unprecedented destruction of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Floodwaters from the Gulf and Mississippi River flooded about 80 percent of New Orleans, knocking out major highways and bridges. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged. More than 1,300 people died and an estimated 400,000 people were forced to flee the places they called home for days or years, many for generations.

And what happens in the aftermath? Urban systems researcher Fuchsia-Ann Huber points out that while many of the flooded neighborhoods have been rebuilt, many historically black communities have been changed forever. A 2019 study found a trend toward gentrification in areas hardest hit by hurricanes, prompting urban scientist Richard Florida to observe “Catastrophic physical damage displaces existing populations. This makes it easier for developers to amass large tracts of land that not only meet higher standards, but can also be rebuilt for far more advantaged groups. This paves the way for a kind of mass gentrification.”

“The loss of residents who cannot return also includes social cohesion, a sense of community, and a sense of identity, all of which neighborhoods mean and represent in terms of human connections,” Huber said. told me. These invisible elements are key to our survival as humans and are an integral feature of healthy, functioning habitats.

Naturally, it became widespread and Long-term negative mental health effects It occurs after a city is hit by a catastrophic disaster like Katrina. One report found that calls to crisis help lines increased by 61 percent in the months after the hurricane, even though more than half of the city’s population was evacuated.

But less severe disasters also leave an emotional imprint on communities. In 2015, residents reported feeling scared after a landslide killed three people in Sitka, Alaska. send children to schoolwe newly realized that those buildings may be in landslide zones. Tenants of a low-lying public housing complex in Norfolk, Virginia, explained Storms that regularly cause knee-high flooding and cause fear and anxiety. When the town of Detroit, Oregon’s water filtration system was destroyed by the Santiam Valley wildfire in 2020, local residents I had a hard time trusting you. They reported that drinking water was safe. At least one Austin resident was affected by the 2021 winter storm’s disruption of the Central Texas power grid. “Premonition” For the winter that follows.

There is a valid argument that urbanization protects us both mentally and emotionally from much of the damage humans have inflicted on the planet. Climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek believes that our deeply muted emotional responses to large-scale ecological disasters are essentially the fault of the societies we have built. The idea is that many of us have been cut off from nature by the forces of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. As a result, she argues, we have lost touch with Earth’s diverse life forms, many of which have been quietly enduring the effects of climate change for decades.

That’s certainly a fair criticism of the modern situation. But our cities are also living things, and they are being disrupted by the instability of a changing climate. A flooded sewer system is certainly less dramatic than a lush forest reduced to trunks and branches, or a wave of dead fish washing ashore, but it’s actually more natural than we think. It reminds me that I’m getting closer.