Published in Winter 2024
By: Maud Powell, OSU Extension Service Small Farms Program
A vegetable farmer laments the missing crawdads she hunted with her father in Lake Washington as a child. A farm intern chokes up as he describes a news headline about rainwater no longer being safe to drink. An older cattle rancher talks about relationships he’s lost to the politics of climate change. “My nephew doesn’t call anymore,” he says, his voice straining. Other people mention plants they’ve lost— a beloved hydrangea bush that perished in the heat dome of 2021, a centuries-old incense cedar that finally succumbed to beetle damage. Fireflies in the Midwest are now uncommon. The lake where one rancher brought his kids to fish is too warm to sustain life anymore. These are the voices of farmers asked to name a specific and personal loss they’ve experienced to climate change in a session on stress and grief at the Tilth Alliance Conference in Washington state in October. Like waves reaching for the shore, losses continue relentlessly, one after another, lining up beyond the horizon.
A growing body of literature and research documents the mental health impacts of climate change on the general population, but with little focus on rural, agricultural populations in the United States (Howard et al., 2020). Farmers are also less likely to seek out support and mental health services than the general population (Hagen et al., 2021). However, farmers extremely vulnerable to climate anxiety and grief— they spend working hours interacting with plants and animals and notice even subtle changes in the environment. Excessive heat and smoke make work unpleasant and dangerous, and farmers rely on the eco-systems in which they grow food and fiber.
Climate change can be terrifying and overwhelming. A natural human response to unresolved loss is denial, “numbing out”, and paralysis. However, research indicates that people who speak openly about their climate anxiety and grief are more resilient, likely to act, and feel more connected to others. Most grief research is based on sudden and isolated losses. In complicated deaths, including death by murder or suicide, griever often experience anger, powerlessness, and regret. Likewise with climate grief, ecological losses are preventable. Feelings and thoughts are highly complex and intense, spanning from rage at politicians and oil companies to guilt for personal choices to abject terror in the face of scientists’ predictions.
Some types of grief are more socially supported than others. All cultures have rituals associated with the death of a close family member. The appropriateness of grief, in this context, is recognized and validated through cultural practices and community validation. Of course, this does not make the loss of a loved one easy, but social support provides a space, and tools, for a person to deal with their grief in the company of others. In contrast, some losses are not communally acknowledged, and do not have a cultural context for expression. This category of grief is known as disenfranchised grief. Climate grief is considered a disenfranchised grief because in most cases, social and cultural supports for processing climate grief do not exist.
A new program out of Oregon State University’s Extension program is supporting farmers in recognizing the mental health effects of climate grief and providing spaces to express difficult emotions.
After sharing specific losses, the farmers gathered at OSU Extension’s workshop begin to brainstorm healthy strategies for coping with their distress. A flower farmer reports that she regularly lobbies her local politicians. “Local is where we can make a difference.” Another vegetable grower says he uses nervous system regulation practices to calm his nervous systems, like box breathing. One woman plants trees. Another engages in guerilla wildflowers plantings—throwing handfuls of seed into empty lots near her urban farm and waiting to see what emerges in spring. “It gives me hope for unexpected outcomes,” she said. Another woman tells us a story—she had been farming with a group of friends in California in 2016 when a catastrophic wildfire caused them all to leave and move to different places. She’s still sensitive to wildfire smoke. Whenever she smells smoke and begins to feel her lungs hurting, she texts the friends she had in California. It’s her way of remembering to stay in touch with them.
A sense of solidarity emerges as people speak about their coping strategies. The shared sentiment is that they are in this together and more resilient when they speak openly about how climate change affects them.