Beyond Climate Grief: A journey of love, snow, fire and an enchanted beer can

By Jonica Newby

How do we find courage when climate change overwhelms us emotionally?In this magical, often funny and deeply moving personal story, award-winning science reporter Jonica Newby explores how to navigate the emotional turmoil of climate change.After researching what global warming will do to the snow country she loves, Newby plummeted into a state of profound climate grief. And if she was struggling, she wondered, how was everyone else coping? What should parents tell their anxious kids? How might we all live our best lives under the weight of this fearsome knowledge? Then reality outstripped imagination as her family was swept up in the apocalyptic 2020 fires.Featuring illuminating conversations with singersongwriter Missy Higgins, comedians Charlie Pickering and Craig Reucassel and business leader Mike Cannon-Brookes, practical advice from psychological and scientific experts, incredible accounts from everyday heroes, plus inspiring stories from the climate strike kids,Beyond Climate Grief provides guidance and emotional sustenance to help shore up courage for the uncertainties ahead.It reminds us of the love, beauty and wonder in the world, even amidst disaster. And how we all have a touch of epic hero in us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742245171

Book preview

acceptance.

The Beginning

Now … and before

I started this book in one voice and finished it in another. I started this book in one world and finished it in this one.

When I set out in October 2019, I had a clear enough plan. But within weeks, our world began to slide deeper and deeper into an altered state as nature hit us with first one then two black swan events: biblical events of fire and plague. The book – and I – had to change with it, but the theme, of how we deal emotionally with the climate-induced changes ahead, could not have become more starkly, viscerally relevant.

But I’m ahead of myself. Let me begin with the trigger, the incident that compelled me onto the personal quest that became this book.

My birthday was exactly one week after the 2019 Australian federal election. Having invited six friends to dinner that night, I finished shopping and sent a quick reminder text covered in smiley faces and champagne emojis. A text pinged back. Sorry can’t, I’ve got the flu. Another ping. So sorry, I forgot your birthday. After the election, I just had to get away. I need time out so not calling anyone. I’ll give you a bell next week. Have a great night.

My first thought was, Louisa, how could you? What about all this gluten-free food? The second thought was genuine sympathy. I got it. Louisa, who had taken her dogs and run for solitude after the election, was just as sick as my friend with the flu. She was suffering an acute case of climate grief.

I too had felt ill on the night of Saturday, 18 May 2019. Late in the evening, I started to shake, and then I started to cry. I could not stop crying. For half an hour the soul sobs just kept on coming. I was at my little beach cottage on the south coast of New South Wales with my long-time partner Robyn Williams, and when I walked out onto the deck to be under the stars he came and held me hard, comforting himself as much as me while I sobbed as if someone dear had died.

It would be fair to say this was a pretty extreme reaction to an election. I’m not young, I’ve seen elections before. And I genuinely believe that in Australia, the regular yin and yang fluctuations of government have served us pretty well over the years. No, this grief – these soul-wrenching sobs – wasn’t about politics. This was about climate. This was a moment when hope – hope I’d subconsciously held for months if not years – was dashed against cliffs of helplessness. In another year of floods and droughts and other climate disasters, had Australians really voted against taking any meaningful action on climate?

Despite my years as a science reporter, climate grief is a term I only heard for the first time in 2018. I’d seen it in the eyes of many of the scientists I’d interviewed around that time. More and more were falling prey to it as the predictions from increasingly accurate modelling turned from worrying to alarming. In late 2018 I was hit hard by it myself, to the point where I visited my doctor seeking antidepressants.

Anger, denial, depression, hope, more anger, sadness, determination. A roller-coaster of emotions, and I’d felt all of them. If I’m struggling with climate grief, I wondered, how is everyone else doing? What should parents tell anxious kids? What’s it like for scientists? Worse still, coral scientists? How about farmers? How are the kids themselves managing all this news? How can we live a good and happy life under the weight of this fearsome knowledge?

This is what came to me on that strange birthday: we have yet to address the scale of our collective emotional responses to global warming. We are hitting some sort of threshold, and we could do with some help.

What helped me was the realisation that these were emotions of grief, and to accept them before supplementing them with others: humour, courage, joy. And, above all, love. My breakthrough? When I realised that you can love a place as much as you love a person. It struck me suddenly how similar my feelings were to when Robyn had cancer a couple of years before. There were points when I couldn’t know if the outcome would be life or death for him. Bravery was needed then. Fear and pain overwhelmed sometimes. But you keep going. Because while there’s life there’s love – and there’s always, always hope.

I’ve had to develop some of my own tools for living well while navigating profound emotions about the climate emergency. But there’s a lot more wisdom out there – inspirational people with ideas and experiences that can help us keep our balance and our enthusiasm.

So this was my pledge: to seek out those people and their stories, prise out their coping tips, and ask them if there was a pivotal moment when they learned to harness their climate emotions. I’d ask the incredible Anna Rose, who was partly raised on a farm and now helps farmers come together for climate action, about courage. I’d talk to Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who has dedicated his life to the miraculous underwater world of coral and must now watch it slowly die, about acceptance (and fighting for what can be saved). I’d venture beyond my familiar realm of scientists: I’d talk to famous comedians about humour, musicians about creativity, psychologists about climate anxiety, business leaders about inspiring visions, disaster specialists about denial, kids about outrage, parents about pride in being part of the solution.

At least, that was the plan.

That still happened. But events have turned this into a far more personal memoir. I know I’m not the same person as when I started. The wisdom I garnered on what became an epic odyssey into climate emotions didn’t always come from the directions I’d expected, as first my community, and then my family, had our lives bludgeoned by the summer’s catastrophic fires.

I never thought I’d be writing on recovery from ‘disaster brain’.

But again, I’m ahead of myself.

I have been a science reporter for two decades and before that I was a veterinarian. While I’ve covered many topics, two themes have dominated my work. The first is climate and the transition to a new and infinitely better energy system. The second comes from my life as a vet – an abiding fascination with how brains work, and what makes us do the things we do. About 20 years ago, I had an epiphany on that point – that far from emotions being something to be avoided in a logical brain, emotions are the fundamental base of all brains. That’s why this book is unashamedly about emotions. At their most basic, in everything from amoeba to humans, feelings make us seek out what’s good for us and avoid what’s bad. Without emotions, we don’t move, we don’t pass on our genes, we become extinct.

Emotions evolved to drive us to act.

The emotion that dominates the climate conversation is fear. And I understand why. It’s what scientists feel. When I read that the Himalayas have lost a third of their ice in the last 40 years and that the melt is accelerating, I feel physically sick with dread. But in the context of climate, fear may not be the best motivator. It’s short term and it can’t be sustained; fear works best with more immediate threats. Chronic fear becomes anxiety, which instead of activating, can paralyse.

Fear just doesn’t work well at a personal level. I’ve interviewed disaster psychologists who make it clear that deep down none of us ever think disaster is going to happen to us.

But there is one emotion that can be with us all the time: love. As Indigenous Australians have known forever, love of place can be as powerful as love of people. So think of your special place, a park, a river, your farm, your neighbourhood, your community, your animals, your family, your world. What would you do to save the things you love? You’d do whatever you could. Because while there’s life there’s love – and where there’s love there’s always, always hope.

So to my first story: to a place I love so deeply that the thought of its possible fate sent me into such a dark depression that I struggled to get out. A sparkling, enchanting, magical place that has filled my fantasies. It’s the place where I truly learned the meaning of climate grief.

This is the story of my love for snow.

Grief

My love for snow

A tale of magic, adventure,

love, despair, and the fight to save winter.

Long ago, to nearly now …

I’ve always wondered why I fell for snow because I grew up on a beach on the edge of a desert, about as far from snow as you can get. Perth, Western Australia, 3000 kilometres from the nearest mountains – frankly, 3000 kilometres from anywhere. So you’d think I’d be a beach babe. And I was. But as a little girl gazing at the white sand and clear blue water of Cottesloe Beach, somehow it was another white landscape that captured my imagination. A land of dramatic peaks and frosted statues, of sleighbells and dragons and high-stake adventures and the ever-present possibility of magic. My mind was being captured by snow.

Well, perhaps it’s not so surprising. Children’s fairy stories are full of snow. Climb through a cupboard and you’re in wintry Narnia. Practise the Heimlich manoeuvre on a princess and she wakes as Snow White. Then came Lord of the Rings, which blew my tiny pre-adolescent mind. The book, strangely, felt like an introduction to adulthood, despite the hobbits and elves. It was a serious, sobering realm where fear was a constant, death was real, and courage came from ordinary individuals simply persevering; the scenes of the heroes trudging through a snowy landscape somehow underscored the sense of a whole world in peril.

There is something about snow that speaks to us viscerally. Perhaps it’s the combination of danger and beauty. The fragility of a snowflake versus the thrill of a frozen mountain peak. The transcendent calm of waking to a white world versus the deadly reality of a raging blizzard. It’s the purest, whitest thing you’ll ever see in nature. And it sparkles, like fairy dust. No wonder it makes us believe in magic.

In my family, there was also a more personal story. You see, my grandparents were Norwegian and this is the story my grandmother told me.

At the beginning of World War II, my grandfather was a handsome fighter pilot. When the German air force invaded Norway, my grandfather escaped by flying his squadron to land on a frozen lake. That night, the villagers came and covered the planes in white sheets. Disguised as snow, they couldn’t be seen by the Luftwaffe’s planes as they flew overhead. The next day, the men of the squadron were able to continue their escape.

I was pretty small when Granny told me that story, and I’ve since tried to verify it with my mother and uncle. Mum had never heard it told in that way, but my uncle confirmed they often landed planes on frozen lakes. Maybe Granny told it to us kids as a fairy tale, but that’s the story my brother and I remember. So in a sense I always felt my grandfather was saved by snow.

When I finally saw snow, aged eight on a family holiday in Norway, fascination fell straight into love – my little brother and I couldn’t stop trudging up a small hill with our toboggan before gleefully sliding down.

Fast forward and I grew up, moved to Sydney, and got a real job – as a science reporter for Australia’s flagship TV science program, Catalyst. The magical side of my brain had been pushed aside by a solid scientific training. I had a veterinary degree grounded in evidence-based thinking, and now had the opportunity to explore a mind-blowing range of topics. For 20 years I interviewed top scientists, sorted fact from fiction, and brought cutting-edge discoveries to the general public. Cloning, nanotechnology, gravitational waves, the female sex drive! I also covered emerging worries about global warming, and was as aware as anyone of the stakes. But I never felt panicked. On the contrary, I was often excited about our future, reporting on breakthroughs in solar and home batteries, the great new technologies that would gradually replace ageing power stations.

But what of the love story? Well, honestly, it had a setback. I was working really hard, and snow and I hadn’t seen much of each other in a while. Then I hit one of those significant birthdays – you know, the ones where you assess all your life choices. I wasn’t getting any younger. If I was ever going to get to know snow better, I was going to have to make an effort.

So from 2010, every second weekend in winter I made the long drive from Sydney to the snow on Friday night and back again Sunday, all while working flat out on Catalyst. My fantasy world was back and I was in love all over again. Only this time with a very specific snowscape, Kunama Namadji, as the traditional Ngarigu custodians call it (Kunama means ‘snowy making’, and Namadji means ‘mountains’, Ngarigu woman and linguist, Professor Jakelin Troy explained to me): Australia’s Snowy Mountains.

The Australian Alps – of which the Snowy Mountains are part – are extraordinary. Precious. Filled with their own wild Aussie magic. I’ve seen kangaroos puff cold morning dragon breaths, echidnas waddling across the snowy slopes. And the trees … The snow gums are stunning. They twist and turn in glorious bonsai-like shapes, branches glittering with chandeliers of ice-coated leaves, bark glowing with ruby reds and silver and gold. They’re the opposite of our eucalypts germinated by fire; true alpine snow gums are germinated by snow.

I remember the first time I was taken up on touring skis. I honestly felt I’d been given the keys to a secret kingdom. Everything about it made me joyful, excited, emotional. Above the treeline was a stark rounded landscape, punctuated by dramatic tors of sculptured granite. Like Mars – only white. Swooping down into the aptly named ‘Enchanted Forest’ of snow gums felt like flying. The photo of my exhaustion at the end of it, my proud gleeful smile, says it all. I had just had one of the best experiences of my life.

You will have equally emotional stories about your special place – your beach, your forest, your farm. The point is how powerful these feelings are.

But they were separate, this fantasy world and my real world of science reporting and logic. Until they began to clash.

It was late 2016 when, after fondly farewelling my time with Catalyst, I decided to indulge in a dream snow holiday to Japan, aka Japow!

‘This is the life!’ I thought when I got there. I was skiing powder for the first time, visiting onsens, hanging out with Swiss ski instructors on holidays … hang on. What’s a Swiss ski instructor doing here on holidays? It’s January, his busiest time of year. Laughing, I asked my new friend Axel. He shrugged and said, ‘I wanted to see some good snow.’

‘Are you kidding? You mean there’s no snow in Europe?’ I spluttered. He explained Switzerland had had a green Christmas that year. I was shocked.

Later that week, half the Great Barrier Reef died. I’m a science reporter. I knew what that meant. Most of that dead coral was never coming back.

This was the moment the abstract concept of climate change became concrete for me. I did not know how to even begin to process such a profound loss. As I looked around, it suddenly hit me that my sanctuary, my magical white kingdom, was also painfully vulnerable. Especially in Australia, where our mountains are so low, snow has nowhere higher to go. Reality and fantasy had well and truly collided.

In hindsight, it felt like global warming had walked up and kicked me in the stomach.

Returning home to Australia, I struggled to care about whether keto diets were good for you or if humans would go to other planets – the staples of science reporting. It just didn’t feel meaningful. I was worried about snow. Finally I figured, I’m a science reporter, for god’s sake. Why don’t I just science the shit out of this?

So I did.

For the next year, I set myself a massive personal quest to find out what was happening to snow, not just in Australia but worldwide. In the process, I thought, why not develop and write a potential documentary feature film called Saving Snow? Surely this was a useful action? And I’d had a fanciful thought that maybe wasn’t so fanciful. As a kid I’d fantasised about being a hobbit on an epic adventure, but maybe that was what we were all living right now. Would the forces of darkness – literally black coal – overwhelm the forces of light – white snow?

That was the magic side of my brain talking. But the logic side was scared. I really didn’t want to face what I might find. In real life there were no guaranteed happy endings.

As my research progressed, though, it did feel more and more like stumbling into a modern fantasy world. Before long, I came across the fabulously named Protectors of Winter. In late 2017, I went to America to see them.

Meeting Jeremy Jones did nothing to dispel the weird feeling of tumbling into a fable. He even looked like a fantasy hero – dark wavy hair, square jaw, soulful eyes – and he did superhuman things. Like jumping from a vertical peak in Alaska and bouncing down thousands of metres supported only by a flimsy snowboard. In 2007, he became so concerned about what global warming was doing to snow, he founded an organisation to bring together the outdoor industry to lobby for meaningful action. He named it Protect Our Winters or POW. Like a superhero organisation. And it kind of is.

We sat down to chat on a perfect crisp December afternoon near Lake Tahoe, with the soaring white Sierras in the background.

‘Snow is without a doubt one of the truest loves of my life,’ he told me in his soft Californian drawl. ‘I am happiest when snow is falling. It’s just awe-inspiring. If you think about the fact we strap these boards on our feet and slide down these mountainsides with total ease and precision, floating on infinite amounts of snowflakes where no two are alike, I mean, that is a fairy tale. If that’s not magic then I don’t know what is.’

But he’d been watching the magic fade in the ski towns that surround Lake Tahoe. Seasons were becoming more erratic, with huge dumps some years, and others, nothing. Rain instead of snow. Bare earth. ‘Those winters left me with internal scar tissue,’ he sighed. ‘It’s not just me, it’s the whole community.’

Jeremy was shocked by how much things had changed in just ten years – way faster than he had imagined. The US snow season had shortened by 34 days since the 1980s. Whole towns across the western part of the country were full of people who not only shared my love for snow, but relied on it for their income. Economic modelling by POW showed snow was worth over US$20 billion and directly supported 200 000 jobs. More than that, snow was a way of life. And the future of that life was uncertain.

‘Do I have moments when I grieve?’ He looked up at me squarely. ‘Yeah. I mean I’m wired as a human being to be optimistic. And I’m very good at finding something positive to look at. But how are we electing climate deniers when we’re in the eleventh hour on climate change? When we have all the solutions we need? Yeah, I grieve.’

‘But somebody needs to save winter,’ I murmured, equally distressed.

‘Yeah, someone has to do it,’ he sighed again. ‘And I would say of all the things I’ve done that’s what I’m most proud of, Protect Our Winters. I have basically created a platform for people to come together and fight and I’m surrounded by amazing people. We are uniting the outdoor industry to come together to fight for climate change.’

Under Jeremy’s tireless low-key leadership, POW had over 100 000 members across six countries, though its heart was in the United States. As a result of its actions, ski resorts were cutting their emissions to zero, big equipment and clothing companies were joining, and hundreds of Olympians and snow sports stars had trained up to educate and lobby on Capitol Hill. Especially in the snow states, POW had become one of the most effective climate lobby groups in the United States – probably because, being fronted by all those heroic-looking skiers and snowboarders, it appealed across traditional political lines.

‘I don’t want to imagine a world without winter,’ he said to me suddenly, desperately. ‘What’s it going to look like when my kids are my age? What’s it going to look like when my grandkids are my age? That’s where stuff gets terrifying.’ He stared straight at me. ‘I want to be able to look at my grandkids and tell them we gave everything we had to slow down climate change. And right now, as a society we aren’t doing that. We can’t say to that grandkid, Well, we tried. It was kind of hard to move from this one path that we were on and move to this other path and people got mad at each other so it was just simpler to stay on the current path and … Winter was cool though. Too bad you don’t get to try it. But um sliding on snow was really fun.’ He shook his head.

Unlike Game of Thrones, winter isn’t coming. Winter is dying. But if anyone can unite the tribes to save snow, I believed strongly in that moment, it’s Jeremy Jones.

Leaving Lake Tahoe, I was a little shaken, even shamed by meeting someone so determined to give his all. I feared I’d never have the energy to do what he does. But I could do one thing, which was find the facts. So my next task was to seek out the scientists. What are the prospects for snow?

This small US trip was about seven months into my research, and was the only visit I could afford to make. But in