Ecological Spirituality can be a Path to Authentic Hope, if we Grieve for the Climate Crisis, and for the Life we Thought we Wanted
By Amanda Patt

The problems facing the world right now, the litany of environmental and social problems, are hard to bear. We feel despair, anger, and apathy. It hurts to engage deeply again and again with this very heavy material. And so it should. Use that pain, as it is fuel.

What is this pain fuel for, you might ask? This pain is the direct fuel needed for us to start the healing process for ourselves and for our society. The pain we feel is really the pain of love denied, of connection severed, of responsibility unacknowledged, and of growth not yet attained.

Meaningfully addressing climate change and social inequality must happen together, because they are respectively the inter-species and the inter-personal expressions of the same basic wounding.  The solutions to our biggest problems will not be fundamentally technical, economic or policy-based, they will be biological, communal, and relationship-based.

Look at the words on the signs we carry: water, earth, animals, plants, rise, change, defenders, action, life. Now listen to some of the words we have said here today: honour, survive, privilege, community, oneness, together, serve, hope, love.

What we are talking about here is, at its deepest level, spiritual. The climate crisis – in all its manifestations – is perhaps the biggest call in human history for our collective spiritual evolution.

Our adults and our elders tried to give us a better world, they tried: from electricity and fancy devices, to medicine and fancy educations, from big houses to fancy cars, from global foods to fancy vacations. They tried to give us everything they thought we wanted, everything that they themselves thought they wanted. They didn’t realise that there would be consequences.

As it turns out, the consequence of having access to seemingly endless amounts of everything manufactured, is the loss of so very much of the life that once grew on its own. This leads us back to the pain we feel, bearing the weight of knowing, and yet not knowing, how bad this climate-change-and-biodiversity-loss catastrophe is going to get.

There is purpose in that pain, in our pain. What is needed now is for us to grieve. We need to have the courage to grieve the life we thought we wanted. We need to grieve the values we thought we wanted. We need to move in-and-out of the complex weave of authentic grief for the what we have done to our living world, and for the possible futures that we have lost.

Adults sometimes tell us that we are so brave for speaking up. It is not us that will have to be the bravest, although future living conditions may become grim to nigh impossible. No, it will be the adults who will have to be the bravest of all, for they will have to do something that they have been staunchly opposed to even considering having to do: they will have to change their deepest values.

The breaking of a worldview is perhaps the most painful thing a human being can be asked to endure, as a worldview is the frame of reference for how we relate ourselves to the rest of the universe. The breaking of any relationship is deeply painful, but the breaking of a worldview is uniquely agonizing.

We-the-younger-generations, we must bear our own pain for the world in such a way that we move through our own grief and into a place of health. On the other side of that grief, is an authentic kind of hope. This hope – based-in reality, love and continuing to live well – exists not despite of, but rather be because of, the presence of immense loss.

We need a kind of hope which is grounded in the deeply painful realities of our world, but, yet is active and keeps us in constant change for the better. By working through our own climate grief, we invite others into their pain, and thus, into their own experience of love. Ultimately, we invite them into the possibility of knowing their own changing values more deeply than they otherwise could have done.

Through our collective grieving, we can reconnect to: ourselves, humanity, and our oneness with all life. What is being asked of us at this moment in time is that we re-learn a deep, reciprocal relationship with ecology. What is needed now, is an ecologically-based spirituality.

People say that it is political will that is lacking, or that economic and technological tactics will be enough to address the climate crisis. I don’t think either of these things is deep enough, or universal enough, to reach the root of the problem (as these are both measures of extrinsic – and thus divisive – values). I think that the only thing that is going to reach deep enough into our pain to allow us to start healing, is going to be that which is sacred.

Though many people now, and indeed much of the younger generation, do not identify with any religion, faith group or spiritual path, framing the climate crisis in light of it being a fundamentally spiritual issue is, I believe, both truthful and necessary. We talk about honouring the living water and land, of serving the plants and the animals, of loving humans enough to help ourselves survive in community, and of rising-up to act as one; we are talking about spirit.

And this, is why reconciliation is so important. Our First Nations, despite genocidal pressures to do so, they have not lost the connection between their way of life and their spirituality. To find within ourselves connection to self, to humanity, to all biology, to the land itself, is central to a meaningful understanding of what reconciliation is. That understanding is a necessary foundation on which to build renewed and respectful interaction with other nations i.e. to reconcile ourselves to right relationship with our First Peoples.

I study environmental restoration. I know that we will never be able to restore the full, rich, interconnected, functionality of ecosystems that we destroyed in the past. Yes, there is much that has been irrevocably lost, and so, there is much to grieve for. But there is nevertheless a great deal of life remaining. Therefore, there is a great deal of living exuberance to be brought back into relationship with itself. There is a great deal we can do to help ourselves to heal, and in so doing, help our ecosystems to have the space and the time to heal the wounds that they may.

We MUST grieve the consequences of the world we thought we wanted, so that we can heal our fractured worldviews and begin again to value the intrinsic worth of relationship to other living beings. This IS the work we must undertake, as having authentic hope in the face of ecological pain, is inherently the most deeply spiritual task we could be asked to undertake.

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I’m Amanda Patt, a student at the University of Victoria, in Geography, Environmental Studies and Environmental Restoration. I started my degree back in 2007, but I was gone from school due to depression and other mental health issues for almost eight years. I came back to UVIC in January 2018 to keep working on my degree and to keep being a part of the enviro-social movement which is my passion in life. I went to the Youth Rising Climate Justice Rally on Feb. 15, 2019 at the Legislature in Victoria, British Columbia. This document is more-or-less a recreation of the words I said when I spoke at the climate rally this past Friday.