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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is Hanna Nielsen, ecopsychologist with the Good Grief Network and local practitioner of ecopsychology. Welcome to the show.

HANNA NIELSEN:

Hi, thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

So we've had a number of shows about this subject before, but I will, maybe folks will feel in their bones, things aren't going well, right? For our planet, for our society, for our country, there is a feeling amongst many, including myself, that we're just kind of careening towards the edge of a cliff, and we can see this harm that is coming to ourselves, and this is causing emotional distress among people. And so this show is gonna be about that sort of emotional distress, and what we can do about it, so that we can live more fulfilled lives where we can deal with that stress better, and that we can take action to reduce it in the way that we feel it, and then also reduce it as a society. So let's go into the basics of eco-grief or eco-anxiety. What are we talking about here as a psychological phenomena?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I think that eco-grief and eco-anxiety are probably some feelings that a lot of people have felt on some level or another in varying ways given the current state of the planet. Basically, it's a feeling of what it sounds like of overwhelm, anxiety, looking at the future of living during this time of the sixth mass extinction, of the climate chaos, climate crisis, and trying to, for a lot of young people, it's looking at how do we build and plan for a future when we're paying attention to the science and what's happening to the planet right now. And the grief that comes from that of actually acknowledging the harm that's happening not only to the planet, but also what that means for living a sustainable, healthy life moving into the future.

And so I think a lot of also what comes along with that is sort of this disconnect that many people see and feel between having that cognitive realization, those emotional feelings about what's happening, but then this disconnect between what's happening on a larger social scale in terms of responding to the crisis and that just the actions needed to actually respond to the magnitude of the crisis aren't happening. And so that leaves a lot of people feeling overwhelmed, helpless, disempowered, and not knowing how to move forward with those intense feelings. And so a lot of this also can be looked at through the lens of eco-psychology, which is what I studied in school. I just got my master's in eco-psychology and eco-psychology looks at how we evolved with the natural world as humans. And so we actually are part of nature, not separate from nature. So in traditional psychology, we're often just looking at how our psyche is impacted through our romantic or family relationships, but eco-psychology expands that and looks at how our relationship with the natural world also is impacting our psyche, how we can then repair that relationship to the natural world so we can live in a healthier, more sustainable way on the planet.

And so with that, that expression of eco-anxiety, eco-grief is a really natural response to being aware of what's happening on the planet right now with the climate crisis.

WHEELER:

So I imagine if you're a listener of the Econews you probably are familiar with feelings of eco-anxiety You probably or you may have felt them, but maybe this is a new idea a new term to you. Let me just say as as someone who teaches at Cal Poly Humboldt I I have definitely seen this amongst my students who will come to class and they'll say things like, well I just don't feel like there's a future, or that we're all going to die in the climate apocalypse and, like, what's the point of anything? It's it's like an existential dread. It's it's looking towards an uncertain future. That just does not seem bright and and so I will affirm if you haven't felt this feeling that it is it is very real, and one thing that you you mentioned was that this is particularly acute amongst young people. Do you want to expand on how it might or why it might impact young people differently than other generations?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting, because, I mean, we can look at young people as in high school students all the way up into people that are into their childbearing age, because there's a whole movement right now of people even questioning if they want to have kids because of the state of the world. And Britt Ray is a is an amazing resource. She wrote a book called Generation Dread that's actually about that about people questioning if they want to have kids because of the state of the climate crisis in the world.

And so I think it really has to do with trying to when you're a younger person, you're trying to grapple with building a future looking forward, what kind of world you want to live in, and then it looks really bleak right now. And some of the futures that past generations were told or promised, or this is the the path forward aren't really present in the same way that they used to be. So it looks like a very daunting thing to try to build a future right now as a young person and to try to grapple with a very unpredictable world that we don't know what it's going to look like. And we're seeing that more and more climate change and the climate crisis isn't something that's far off in the future. We're seeing the impacts in the everyday and I mean, we just had some crazy weather here, but we're seeing like mass flooding farther up north in Oregon and Washington, Montana right now and all around the world, just a lot of really unprecedented weather events.

And so I think that it's something that has been the impacts of the climate crisis are happening a lot faster than we were predicting. I remember I was, I got into the climate fields over a decade ago. And I remember this was my first introduction to the climate crisis working with an AmeriCorps program. And I remember that at that point, I was I was in my 20s. And I felt this huge sense of dread and overwhelm and just feeling of being alone. And these feelings because at that point, it felt like no one was talking about it. And then you're showing up every day and trying to plan for a future. And so I can really relate to what a lot of your students are probably feeling as well, except that now it's sped up and that we're seeing a lot of those impacts now and much faster than a lot of scientists were even predicting that we're going to start seeing some of these impacts.

So I think it totally makes sense that a lot of the younger generation is feeling that the intensity of that fear because when you're older, you have less of your life to plan for and you've lived a lot already. But when you're young, you're looking forward towards the future and planning and it feels like a very scary place when you're not with that level of unpredictability and uncertainty.

WHEELER:

Well, or like my dad would say, that's something that your generation is gonna have to worry about because mine's gonna be dead and gone. And he has a point there that the effects of climate change are going to be most acutely felt on the folks who are gonna be the youngest listeners here. They are going to experience a more severe form of climate change than we are as a millennial. So eco-anxiety, eco-grief, why is it that you, among others, break up this feeling from more standard kind of psychological diagnoses? We have like the DSM that can describe major depressive disorders and anxiety disorders. Why is it that this is distinguishable and why is that important that we kind of distinguish this feeling of eco-dread?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, it's important because it's acknowledging a response to a circumstance that is happening worldwide. And it's a quite natural response. So that's something else that I want to speak to is, I don't think the point is to try to remove the feelings of eco-anxiety or eco-grief. I think that that's a totally appropriate response to what's happening in the world. I think that when you have an illness or, or a sick society or something that is out of balance, it's appropriate to respond to that and to feel that instead of to ignore it and pretend that it's not happening.

And so, in fact, eco-anxiety, eco-grief is a really healthy response to what's happening in the world right now. And it's happening on a collective level at something that is impacting the whole world. And it's a, it's a response to a particular circumstance and event. And so that's why it's particular to just depression, or grief, which can happen for different reasons for different people. And this is, I think, important to look at separate because it's acknowledging it's giving people a framework to talk about it in a different way and not to feel kind of crazy in their feelings because many people are feeling it and it's appropriate response to the times too.

WHEELER:

So just as feeling grief at the death of a loved one or loss of a pet or whatever is an appropriate emotional response, this too is an appropriate emotional response. We are grieving a world that is changing. We are anxious because of that change because we have the forethought, we have the knowledge of that's going to cause privation and suffering for untold millions of people, billions of people. So it is a kind of a right emotional response. And at the same time, yet it can go too far, right? It can be debilitating where if you are, if you are afraid to go travel and see loved ones because you are concerned about climate footprints, or if you are just failing to take action, if you are stuck in a place because of your, of your anxiety or your grief, that is impairing your functioning in this world, is impairing your ability to take action on climate change at the same time too. So there is the appropriate side, and then there is a rightful desire to want to deal with these feelings in a healthy way, to get past them or to live with them in a way that invites more work, invites good work, invites community.

And so actually I just said invites community, I want to raise a gathering of folks, a cohort of people who you are bringing together to talk about these things, to deal with this in group setting. Do you want to talk about the Good Grief Network and your local cohort that's forming to build personal resilience to these feelings?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, absolutely. And I just really appreciate what you just said there. I mean, before I jump into that, I just wanna speak to that briefly of, yes, what I said is that it is an appropriate response to feel these things, but as you said, we can get stuck there. And what we need is support and resources and resilience building skills and community to help us be able to process, move through and be able to metabolize those feelings of grief or despair or anxiety into something that can then support us and help us move into action or just help us be able to process and not get stuck into that feeling of paralysis because of these challenging emotions. So thank you for bringing that up. And I think a big piece of that is having community and space to not be alone in these feelings.

And so part of that is what I've been doing is running these 10-step groups that were created through a network and we run these 10-step programs called 10 Steps to Resilience and Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate. And basically these groups are created just for that, for bringing a group of people together to be able to process and metabolize their heavy emotions around the climate crisis, to be able to move into meaningful efforts, but also to create a space to be able to build resiliency skills, to be able to help regulate your nervous system when responding to deep grief and anxiety and stress, which are appropriate responses, but we need to learn how to support our nervous system so that we can actually move through those emotions instead of getting stuck.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. Join me as Hanna Nielsen, eco-psychologist with the Good Grief Network and local practitioner of eco-psychology. So this show is gonna be about that emotional distress and what we can do about it so that we can live more fulfilled lives where we can deal with that stress better, take action to reduce it in the way that we feel it, and then also reduce it as a society.

NIELSEN:

So, the 10-step groups is a small cohort, and of 10 to 12 people, we meet over 10 weeks, and there's a different step that we work through each week for two hours every week. And it's a really beautiful arc that helps people be able to accept and move through and question some of their beliefs, and then at the end, the last step is reinvest in meaningful efforts, which looks at helping people kind of redefine what meaningful efforts means to them.

And also part of that is the community building element that comes with being with the same group of people together for those 10 weeks and building that level of safety and being able to be emotionally vulnerable with this group of people and not feel alone in your feelings. Because I think that I've run this program four times now, and sometimes it's been just with complete strangers, no one's ever met each other before, and it's just really beautiful how this program is set up to allow people over time to really feel safe enough to dive into some of these heavier emotions that can come up around the state of the world and the time that we're living in. And by the end, it's always felt like there's a community that has been formed, which I think is so essential to this time of being able to feel supported and build resilience is we need each other, we're social creatures and we're not meant to go through this alone, and so that's a big part of it for me is the community building element.

WHEELER:

So, this is part of the Good Grief Network, or you are certified by the Good Grief Network to lead these sorts of trainings. Can you talk about the Good Grief Network a little bit more and what the Good Grief Network is trying to accomplish through this work?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, absolutely. So the Good Grief Network is a peer support nonprofit serving individuals and communities experiencing ecological distress and collective trauma from social and ecological injustices. And they are trying to focus on building collective resilience to help people transform emotional overwhelm into meaningful action. And it was actually developed by Laura Schmidt when she was working on her master's program through the University of Utah. She was studying environmental humanities and she was realizing similar to what I was talking about before is that there's just not a lot of support for people in the environmental field for burnout. There's a huge amount of burnout for people working in the environmental world because of just facing the reality, but then there's not yet emotional support, psychological support.

And so she actually, through part of her master's project, built this 10-step program to try to grapple with this gap of how do we support people that are facing burnout and overwhelm because of the environmental crisis. And it launched in 2016, was founded by her and her partner, Aimee Lewis Reau, and they launched it just locally first in their community. And then since then, it's grown to now they, it's been facilitated over 85 times online and in-person. There's now over 160 facilitators globally that have been trained. So it has a worldwide presence at this point as well. And they have a lot of, they run online programs as well. And I launched the program in the community last year for the first time locally. I'd run it three other times online, but this was the first time I was able to launch it locally. And there was something that was particularly special about being able to do it in person as well within the local community that I really appreciated.

WHEELER:

So your convening is beginning this January, January 15th. What, what should people expect as part of this program?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, well first, just a clarification. So the January 15th is the timeline I'm asking people to apply by or reach out. I'm doing it a little bit different this year because I'm trying to actually schedule the cohort meetings based on availability of people. So first I'm trying to gather the cohort of people and then based on what works and timing, I will determine which days that will do it because that was something I found in the past is the timing was a bit challenging for people. We had it on Sundays and so I wanna make it accessible to people. So I'm asking people to apply by the 15th and then based on people's interest and availability, I will set the time. But basically what it will be is we will meet once a week for two hours a week with the same group of people. There's a participant packet that everyone gets every week that has a whole bunch of really amazing resources from articles to podcasts to interviews that people can engage with as little or as much as they like.

And I think maybe it would be helpful for me to share a little bit about the arc of the 10 steps. So the first week, the step is accept the severity of the predicament. So basically starting really just looking at the crisis and where people are at with that and allowing people to show up however they are. So this program is really not about trying to convince anyone of anything and that's the beauty of it. People show up and are at different steps in their journey with accepting the severity of the predicament or coping with the crisis and that's okay. It's really not about all being on the same page. It's actually about just creating space for people to express themselves and be heard. And so that could look very different for different people.

So the first step is accept the severity of the predicament. Step two is be with uncertainty, which is kind of goes back to what we were talking about before with the challenge of looking at the future as a young person is this is a huge step. Being with uncertainty is really important for being able to just build resilience for being able to cope with the crisis. Step three is honor my mortality and the mortality of all. Step four is do inner work. Step five is develop awareness of bias and perception. Step six is practice gratitude, seek beauty and create connections. And this is important too because I think another thing that can happen when one is feeling the intensity of eco-anxiety or eco-grief is it can sometimes feel or sometimes people have a hard time leaning into the beauty of the world or resourcing themselves in that way. And that is really important. And just as important as feeling the grief is also feeling that gratitude, that connection, leaning into community and filling up our cup because if we're just overwhelmed and drained and sad all the time, we can't actually reinvest in the world. So that's a really important step.

The next step, week seven, is take breaks and rest, which can also be a challenging step for people because within the society, the mainstream society that many of us live in, we're told that we need to be productive all the time. And this is really about stepping back and realizing that, yeah, we need to pace ourselves. We need to nourish ourselves. So a lot of these steps really ask us to question some of the deep assumptions that we've been told about what it means to be successful, what it means to live within the mainstream society that we live in. And it gives us a kind of practice ground to practice this together and resources to inspire us for that.

Step eight is grieve the harm I have caused, which is a nuanced and that step is more about looking at how a lot of the systems of the world that we live in cause harm and we're functioning within those systems. So how do we make sense of showing up and knowing that some of our actions may cause harm, but also not becoming paralyzed to an action because we all are so interconnected that that can be a really hard step to come to terms with. So that's a really interesting one.

Step nine is show up and looking at like what that means for each person. And then the last step is reinvest in meaningful efforts. And it's helping people redefine again what meaningful efforts means because I think there's also a certain narrative about what we're told about what meaningful efforts are in terms of showing up to make a difference in the world and maybe exploring that there can be more creative and nuanced ways to make a difference and that we all can find that in our own life.

So it's a really beautiful arc and there's lots of resources for each week. And then there's also, as I said, there's resiliency skills and nervous system regulation practices, meditations, mindfulness that we go into too because if you are engaging with this kind of deep work, it can sometimes feel activating or triggering and we need to also be supporting our nervous system too. And in general, when we're looking at the climate crisis, it can be very activating for people. So it's also pairing that with how do we support ourselves in being able to have enough support to actually ask these questions that this work is asking us and doing this work that we're being asked to do.

WHEELER:

So, it's important to have community and it's important to share this grief with others or to commune with others. Some folks might not be able to or might feel nervous about doing some sort of a group like this. So, what are some resources if someone wants to start working on themselves, working on their own eco-anxiety that you would recommend for listeners? Are there any books, podcasts, other resources out there that are a good starting place to begin this work?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that there are a lot of people that are starting to offer community spaces to dip into, well, a lot of like grief circles in particular to dip into holding space for people. And you're absolutely right, this can feel daunting, or maybe this is something that no one's been part of a cohort like this before. So it could feel overwhelming. I would say there's some great resources even in the community. There's a local woman, Laura Johnson, that has started a business called Arrestful Space. And she has an online ecological yoga practice for grief that you can do at your own pace. So that could be a really accessible way. And then she also holds monthly grief circles, which could be a way to just kind of dip your toe in to see how that feels to be in community in that way. There's another practitioner that has just started offering online grief circles too. Her website is, her business is Embodied Emergence.

And so there are some spaces there to kind of dip in. Myself and some other grief tender practitioners have been offering some different grief practices at the Unitarian Fellowship. And we're gonna maybe start offering some more in the future. So there's a lot of community offerings that are popping up. But I would say also, if you're just curious about this work with the Good Grief Network, there's even a book that they wrote, Laura Schmidt and Aimee Lewis Reau, it's called How to Live in a Chaotic Climate. And it basically, each chapter goes over each step. And so that's a really accessible way to kind of dip your toes in to and learn a little bit more about this work or go to the website, which talks as well, the goodgriefnetwork.org about the 10 steps and just get a little bit more information.

WHEELER:

If someone is interested in joining your next cohort, what should they do?

NIELSEN:

Yeah, so I'm just asking people to reach out to me through email and my email is Hanna Nielsen at Good Grief Network dot org, H-A-N-N-A-N-I-E-L-S-E-N or also they can follow me on Instagram because right now I'm in the process of building a website. I don't have it launched yet, but a lot of the work that I've been doing I always post on my social media. So my Instagram is Hanna Nielsen, H-A-N-N-A-W-R-E-N. And I've been also, that's another actually thing that people might be interested in is I'm going to start launching again weekly nature-based mindfulness meditations to help people connect to the earth but also just regulate their nervous system. And so that's a very gentle way to help support people that may be feeling overwhelmed about the state of the world is just coming to sit in community with others, connecting with the earth, helping just calm their nervous system with a mindfulness practice. So that would be a very low barrier kind of first way to kind of see how this work shows up.

WHEELER:

And we will also have Hanna's email on the lostcoastoutpost.com, where you can find show notes and it will also be in the podcast information area if you're listening to this as a podcast. Hanna, unfortunately we are out of time but I loved having you on this show and I'm looking forward to hearing how this next cohort goes.

NIELSEN:

Great, thank you so much for having me.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, listeners, join us again on this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.