In a recent issue of the American Psychological Association’s “Monitor on Psychology,” I was featured alongside my colleague, Dr. Neville Ellis, to discuss some of the important health and economic consequences of climate change. Specifically, this piece highlights the distinct yet parallel experiences of climate change among Inuit living in Northern Labrador, and farmers living in the Australian Wheatbelt. In these regions, lives, livelihoods and identities are intimately tied to land that is now shifting due to increasing climate change. In this piece, we discuss how people living in these regions are experiencing “ecological grief,” or mourning for the land itself, as a reaction to climate change.
You can read the full article on the American Psychological Association’s website here.
This article references a research paper on ecological grief that Neville and I co-authored, published in Nature Climate Change in 2018. Check out a previous post on this article here.
“Researchers and policymakers should take into account ecological grief when tallying up the worldwide effects of climate change and considering how to mitigate them. Those effects may be most apparent in highly vulnerable communities like those in the Arctic or Australia. But the rest of us will not be immune.”
Winerman, L. (2019, May). Mourning the land. Monitor on Psychology, 50(5). http://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/mourning-land
Ashlee Cunsolo, PhD 