This commentary is by Elizabeth Courtney of Montpelier, an environmental consultant, a licensed landscape architect, a watercolorist and co-author of “Greening Vermont, The Search for a Sustainable State.” She was executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council for 15 years.
We learned from Tom Hanks in the 1992 film “A League of Her Own” that “There is no crying in baseball.” For that matter, we stiff-jawed Americans believe that there should be no crying, period.
Yet, today it seems there is an abundance of crying. Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about the crying that comes from joy, but rather the crying that comes from despair. We are not crying for the loss of a game, a loved one, or even a whole region of a country to flood or fire. We are talking about, in this instance, crying for the decline of species, for the unravelling of a civilization, the destruction of ecosystems that support human life here on our one and only planet Earth.
This forecast is materializing before our very eyes in the wildfires and floods across the globe, the melting polar ice caps, the warming oceans. It produces a trauma that causes us to feel grief and to express that grief with tears of despair. While there may be no crying in baseball, there is crying when it comes to the magnitude of the anxiety, stress and fear of the growing climate crisis.
The science is clear: If we continue to pump the black blood from the earth to fuel our time-limited joyride, as we have for the past two centuries, we will have created a climate that makes our Goldilocks-perfect atmosphere a nightmare. It is a nightmare that many scientists believe will lead to mass extinctions, mass migration and massive trauma for current and future generations — in particular, communities of color across the globe who have little to do with the planetary predicament we now face.
Whether it is a conscious awareness that the Earth’s climate is changing, or an unconscious, nagging worry we are weeping for, underneath the tears there is some good news: When we cry, we are on our way to taking action(s) to change or relieve the despair.
Let us not fear the tears. Let the tears flow. Crying does not have to be an end in itself; it can be an indicator and also a means to creative resolutions of the trauma and its associated grief and anxiety.
Research in the U.S. shows that one out of every 14 people meets the criteria for what is known as an anxiety disorder. The big trauma/grief issues of 2020 and 2021 have come from the threat of climate change, which is in part responsible for Covid-19’s death rate and its associated economic impact.
In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified and delineated the stages of the grief cycle in her book “On Death and Dying.” In it, she explains the bargaining process of her dying patients and their loved ones. They move from denial to anger, and eventually get to sadness with tears.
But their process doesn’t stop there. With the release of energy produced by crying, her patients moved to acceptance and were freed to get on with taking actions that abated their fears and lowered their anxiety.
Our planet has been given a diagnosis — it suffers a deadly disease called climate change. For decades, we reacted by denying the diagnosis. Then we moved into a semi-aware state of incremental action. Now, we are in a moment of crisis, and a growing societal collective is grappling with the dual, deadly mix of anger and anxiety.
It is time for all of us to take responsibility to manage our planet’s prognosis — we are at the edge of the precipice and a global transformational pivot away from the pollution-inducing gluttony of the Industrial Revolution is required. We must act quickly, decisively, significantly and equitably. And we must act collectively.
In Vermont this week and next, the Vermont Climate Council is holding a series of virtual events to hear from Vermonters about their climate anxieties and the actions needed to do our part and make a difference in abating this crisis over the next decades.
Find out more about this effort, the upcoming events and how you can channel the anxiety you might have into the fuel we need to power a habitable planet for the future here: https://climatechange.vermont.gov/getinvolved.
Let there be crying!