Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss, by Stephen Harrod Buhner, White River Junction, VT, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022, 282 pp., $24.95, ISBN 978-0-9708696-7-8
In response to the Nazi political victories of the early 1930s psychoanalyst and social theorist Wilhelm Reich (who had the unique distinction of being expelled from both the German Communist Party and Freud’s inner circle) commented that while the left had a superior analysis of the relations between German and Japanese imperialism, the right had a far better understanding of mass psychology.
Reich’s observation resonates with the contemporary rise of global fascism. In particular, for this journal, it suggests that beyond the facts and causal analyses of the environmental crisis, ecosocialists (and eco liberals for that matter), would do well to study the mass psychology of the crisis: how we experience it emotionally, its effects on our sense of self and other, how it challenges our assumptions about the world, and leaves us with a nexus of anxiety, denial and avoidance, anger, depression and grief.
But since readers of this journal have their own emotional lives, and by the nature of our work and interests frequently expose ourselves to detailed accounts of the environmental crisis, we too have been emotionally affected.
The present book aims to help us understand what we face. Buhner is an unusual author for CNS. No doctorate or university teaching position; no leadership of an environmental organization or worker’s group or indigenous tribe. He was (died in late 2022), rather, a widely respected expert in the role of plants for health and in spiritual experience. His twenty-four books range over all aspects of these concerns, many being recognized with prizes; and he was highly sought as a teacher.
Buhner is of course not the first to raise the issue of our emotional responses to the crisis. The pioneering work of Joanna Macy (Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age) comes to mind; as does feminist psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan’s account of “emotional ecology” in Healing Through the Dark Emotions. There is the collection Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief (edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman), Andrew Boyd’s I Want a Better Catastrophe, and my own A Spirituality of Resistance and Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters.
That said, I found Buhner’s book to be the deepest and most important treatment yet. It is a heartfelt, personal, highly detailed and often deeply moving description of the grieving process. But – unlike most books on the spiritual/emotional dimensions of the crisis – it also embodies a sophisticated understanding of the economic, political and cultural context in which the environmental crisis unfolds.
A central theme is the ideological form of depersonalization, rationalization (in the Weberian sense), and psychic numbing. These arise when we treat the dreaded realities of the crisis in a dispassionate, unfeeling, simply analytic manner. Psychic detachment from the real world, he argues, is itself an essential element in what we are doing to the world. To counter this tendency in the reader, Buhner offers two long, highly researched chapters on the truly horrific details of pollution from plastics and pharmaceuticals. Amid a book focusing on psychology and spirituality, this is a surprising eruption. Besides the eye-opening contents of the chapters, they serve another purpose: Now, Buhner asks, how do you (the reader) feel? The reader is thrust back into a reflection on his/her own emotional experience, one prompted by the dismal recognition of the devastating effects of these relentlessly expanding forms of pollution. If we can make our way past our own tendency to detachment, Buhner counsels, we can take the first step on the difficult road of healing. As foundational assumptions about the natural and social future crumble, there is necessarily a time during which we simply suffer emotional devastation and serious questioning about how to go on.
Buhner argues that species, climate and landscapes we’ve known are dying. The source of this illness, while in small ways shaped by individual behavior, lies essentially in three places: corporate drive for profit, governmental support of that drive, and scientific/technical expertise in corporate service. It helps to be careful how we live, but no time should be wasted on blaming ourselves for not having an electric car or talking too long hot showers. Buhner thus avoids the tendency of spiritual psychology to ignore the economic and political consequences of global capitalism. Or to generalize about “humanity” without recognizing the vast inequalities of power that shape environmental behavior.
Buhner does offer some models of “getting through it”–rooted in his belief that we can come to terms with the pain, internalize it to shore up rather than cripple our being in the world, and get to a place where wonder at the totality of life on earth enables us to express love for that life whatever the future may hold. Embodying such love requires that we open ourselves to the age-old, but obscured and repressed for millennia, human ability to enter into experiential relations with the non-human world. Animals and plants, he assures us, not only relate to each other, but to us. In the richness of those relations lies a negation of the psychic numbing and detachment that fuels our destructive form of life, including the profit and power driven prerogatives of corporations and the state.
I found Earth Grief beautiful, powerful, and edifying. I recommend it to everyone who has felt the full scope of the environmental crisis and wants, at the very least, to encounter someone else who has faced the abyss of grief and has some insights about how to live with it.
As much as I respect Earth Grief, I do have questions about Buhner’s frequent reliance on some essential human capacity, one inborn beyond culture and history. In the classic sense of “romantic” Buhner believes that if we strip away the falsities of our civilization, we can find capacities that are natural, inborn: shared biological legacies from the complex interconnections of life that will enable us to re-establish our connections to the natural world.
I have my doubts. The capacity for a global, encompassing love – as opposed to care for family or pack or ecosystem partners – is a distinctly human capacity that must be socially cultivated. Just being “back in nature” is not enough, since nature is, along with its cooperation, also a scene of competition and transformation – a transformation in which, as we know, countless species have died.
That new species, as Buhner suggests, will replace the ones we’ve eliminated, may in fact be true. I doubt that the environmental crisis will wipe out all life on earth. But is that enough? Not for me. For our grief is not just for what we (and the world) have lost. It is also for what we as a species have done. And that grief cannot simply be assuaged by blaming capitalists, governments, and kept scientists. For these only have power, ultimately, because the rest of us let them have it.
The crimes of our species are ours – a shared source of responsibility, and – given our ongoing failures – of grief as well.