Grieving for the environment, without saying ‘climate change’
After water submerged her family’s farm in June 2013, in one of the worst floods in recent Canadian history, Susan Heather took a pragmatic, can-do approach to the challenges – both physical and financial – ahead.
But when she learned that the mountain trails in the foothills of the Rockies where she long sought solace were wiped out, and that beloved High River, the closest sizable town to her farm in southern Alberta, was devastated, a deep sadness that she compares to mourning rose up in her.
“I remember after the flood thinking, nothing is the same anymore,” she says over coffee in her farmhouse on a recent day. “All my favorite places are destroyed.”
That refrain is becoming increasingly common, as weather patterns and natural disasters are becoming more intense. Academics have even begun to attach neologisms to the feelings: “solastalgia,” coined by an Australian philosopher
Where fossil fuels pay the billsFinding hope in community
