This blue and white orb that Voyager spacecraft revealed, shimmering like a jewel among the vast dark bands of space, this planet that’s been greening for five-hundred-million years, this tumult of ingenuity, this bed of desire, mass of ambitions, playing field of gods—it all began as a great ball of fire. Earth congealed from a spinning ball of hot rock. A mere 4.6 billion years later, it teems with life.
An essential part of this complex thing called life is the ability of living beings to assess their circumstances and readjust them. River, wooly mammoth, malaria mosquito, house cat, Cleopatra, Ringo Starr, ruby-throated hummingbird, you and me—we all chafe at some conditions of our world and strive to make things more to our liking. One species among all the billions that have existed has gotten the entire planet into a terrible mess. Earth began as heat, and now we face the loss of much we love on our home planet, because we have overloaded it with heat.
How on Earth are we going to meet this crisis? Already some animals and plants are making biological adjustments to survive a hotter future. The beaks of Australian parrots, for example, have increased ten percent in size since 1871 because of a process called Allen’s Rule, which dictates that certain parts of an animal’s body become larger, so that they can evaporate heat over a greater area. Other species, like a pink salmon in Alaska, which now migrates two weeks earlier than previously, adapt by shifting the timing of their life cycles. Some animals, such as moose, frogs, and thousands of others, are moving farther north.
But how will we humans evolve? I can do my sustainable part by buying local foods, checking books out of the library instead of ordering them online, flying less. But how will I cope emotionally? Spiritually? How will any of us cope? How are we to respond to this unprecedented calamity? How can we live with the seismic shifting of ancient balances, the demise of so much life, the erosion of hope and expectations among young people? I know I cannot run away. I must face all that is happening and I must lament. Grief, after all, is appropriate in times of great loss. And yet, if I just pay attention, I can also praise this broken, beautiful world. I can find and make beauty, not despite the ravages of climate change, but in the very midst of them. And then, I believe, I can survive.
For every bit of life on Earth that I lament, I can—I must—find some way to praise.
Lament and praise for the land that holds us
The land that holds us is the entire composition of a place we love, physical and metaphysical, present and past, outside our bodies and inside our hearts. It is the long rim on the horizon where the sun rises and sinks throughout the seasons. The land that holds us is the waters, the hills, all those shortcuts we’ve found, the smell of lilac in the spring and chlorine in the public pool in summer. It is the sounds—roosters, motorbikes, calls to prayer, and, everywhere, children playing. The land is the memories that arise from bends in the road and the walls in houses. It is the people who move among these familiar forms.
Climate change now endangers the land that holds us, no matter where we live. As for me, I worry not only about the fierce winds that disarrange trees and down power lines, but also about the droughts, wildfires, heat, and tornadoes my friends are facing in their loved lands. Several have emergency bags packed for a quick escape. Some have already lost their homes. A woman I met sank into prolonged grief when wildfires destroyed the California home where she, her husband, and their children had lived for more than twenty years. That heavy burden began to lighten on the day she walked over the land with a friend. All the grieving woman saw was char and loss. But her friend saw something else. She would pause often to exclaim over green sprouts poking through the ash or point out the call of a varied thrush. “She was teaching me to see what was there,” said the grieving woman, “not what was missing, which was just a wonderful gift.”
Lament and praise for the inability to fix it
When hurricanes, floods, or wildfires collapse a town, few citizens are deterred from optimism once the shock of the loss begins to fade. They declare their determination to pluck themselves up, band together, and rebuild their community “back to normal.” Refusing to let tragedy conquer us is vital to the human spirit. But can we really fix, or even ameliorate, the many calamities of climate change, or must we start practicing a new form of acceptance?
“I accept the universe,” declared the nineteenth-century author and feminist Margaret Fuller. “Gad, she’d better,” quipped philosopher Thomas Carlyle. But William James understood what Fuller meant. In his response to Carlyle, reprinted in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he wrote, “If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission… or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?”
Enthusiastic assent? How do I accept the unacceptable? How am I to accept that storms and fires will get worse, animal species will become extinct, and all over the world desperate people will be displaced?
To accept a situation is to accept that it is happening, not that it is right. Acceptance of circumstances is the first step to dealing with them. Hospice director and author Steven Levine wrote that there often comes a point when a terminally ill person realizes that they must seek a different kind of healing, one intended not to repair a failing body, but rather to heal family relationships, embrace a new spirituality, or find long-delayed forgiveness of self or other. Accepting climate change means I fully acknowledge the reality of an unprecedented and frightening phenomenon. And it is my very inability to “fix” the problem that can open up for me countless opportunities to become more attentive to the grace of the present, more compassionate, and shrewder about the choices I make. I cannot fix the future, yet I can utterly transform the present. Acceptance does not mean submission.
Lament and praise for the mystery of animal nations
In my backyard, a small clump of purple beebalm has become an insect supermarket. I dug a few stalks from the garden of my previous home and replanted them here, but until now the plant has languished. Suddenly, it blooms, and its blooms beckon.
Yet my very exhilaration over the activity of a few insects on a few flowers saddens me, for I can’t help remembering the bee-life during summers when my husband and I rented a cabin on a lake in northeastern Pennsylvania. On one side of the dirt driveway ran a wall of rose bushes, and when the blossoms arrived, bees of all nations gathered. The communal buzzing was so loud we could hear it from inside the cabin thirty feet away. Kinetic with insect intention, the small white roses seemed to wriggle of their own accord.
Henry Beston wrote of animals, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.” Now these nations are under grave threat. Biologists estimate that up to thirty-five-percent of plants and animals alive today could become extinct by 2050. Animals are our ancestors, and they have modeled for us many miraculous ways of getting things done in their environments. They teach us humans what plants are good to eat and which to ingest as medicine. They demonstrate how to be attentive, patient, creative, and cunning.
A Diné (Navajo) friend told me about the gift a porcupine gave her grandmother. The woman had to walk a long way from her hogan to the spring to get water for the family. One day she heard a plaintive cry. When she went to investigate, she found a porcupine trapped between two rocks. She freed the animal, and when it sauntered off, it led her to a source of water much closer to her home. Even if we never receive such a direct gift, animal presence engages and enthralls us, from the polar bear most of us will never encounter to the cricket singing under the porch at night.
Gratefully I will take whatever I get. So out I go yet again to watch those few bees feasting at my flowers.
Lament and praise for the companionship of seasons
On a sheet of papyrus, a poet of Egypt’s New Kingdom (1550-1080 BC) compared his passion for his beloved with the rhythms of the seasons: “All the trees except / for me have shed their leaves / in the meadow. Only I / flower all year in the garden.” For millennia, the emergences and losses of the seasons have not only informed us when to plant and harvest crops, they’ve also provided insights about the ways of the gods and mirrors of the human heart. Three-thousand years later, we confront an “ecological mismatch,” in the words of British scientist Ulf Büntgen. “It means,” he wrote, “that millions of years of careful mapping that has allowed plants, birds, and insects to find and co-exist with one another, is drastically off, and becoming more so.” Now our poems turn to elegies, for as rapper Childish Gambino mourns “Every day gets hotter than the one before / Running out of water, it’s about to / go down / Air that kill the bees that we depend on / Birds were made for singing / Waking up to no sound.”
How can I attentively mark these unpredictable and alarming shifts? Around the world, ceremonies of the seasons have brought people into intimate relationship with the cosmos, the divine, their human community, and their own place on Earth. The ancient Egyptians greeted the annual flooding of the Nile by offering gifts to the river. From classical Greece to Medieval Europe, men and women sought to encourage the fertility of the land with festivals of ribaldry, excess, and lusty coupling. On the Hopi mesas, masked kachinas even today dance into the plazas, singing and shaking rattles, to make prayers for rain that will nourish the corn. Can I create rituals to honor the seasons as they arise, even in their cockeyed form?Can I open my arms to the snowflakes that swirl briefly in the air before dissipating? Walking in the dry bed of what once was a lake, can I pause to make a symbolic offering of water from my bottle? If so, may I become more observant, more grateful, more in communion with what is.
Lament and praise for the beloved faraway
We don’t have to actually go to a place for it to matter to us. People who have never been to the Arctic wilderness or the Amazon rainforest, and never will go, react indignantly to incursions of oil drilling and deforestation in those places. We need the vastness of the unknown, simply because it is unknown. It allures. American artist and writer Roni Horn is constantly being drawn back to Iceland. Experiencing unseen places, she writes, has enormous consequence for our psyche: “We need them as a way of balancing what is with what might be, and as a way of understanding the scope of things—of admitting that the things beyond us are also the things that define us. These are places that are both actual and acts of imagination. They function to keep the world large, hopeful, and unknown.”
Now, tourists try to get to distant, enchanting places before they vanish and in their eagerness bring fumes, footprints, and waste that hasten the very force they’re trying to outpace. At the same time, instant access to news delivers detailed information about earthquakes, floods, and fires around the world and their impact on the people who live there. I dream of a network of people who can respond creatively to such crises without doing further harm. It could be called, after Amnesty International’s Urgent Action Network, the “Urgent Beauty Network.” A friend of mine undertook such an action after the 2011 tsunami and the collapse of the Fukushima nuclear plant. He wrote out copies of a poem by Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese poet:
If you will let me
I will willingly wipe
Salt tears from your eyes
With these fresh leaves.
He then went round his London neighborhood and tied the poems to the blossoming cherry trees. People would have seen them. Surely they would have known what was intended by this message, gracing a species of tree for which Japan is famous. This small act did not come to the aid of suffering people far away, but it was an outward and visible expression of compassion for the beloved faraway.
Lament and praise for the ways we took for granted
In his 1836 essay “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked confidently that nature is so much bigger and grander than us mere humans that our influence on it could never be more than “insignificant.” Almost two hundred years later, we recognize how wrong he was. I miss assuming that nature will get along fine without me. Like most of humanity, I had taken for granted that, despite wars, rebellions, social and geological upheavals, and billions of births and deaths, the Earth would continue, reliably, to be the Earth. Species would adapt. Humans would evolve. The seasons would continue to usher one another forth. This rare planet would always remain our marvelously habitable home.
It’s not just the biology and meteorology of life that I have taken for granted and now risk losing. I have also taken for granted so much of what modern society has made possible, like buying with a click a new dress or the book someone recommended to me just moments earlier. I took for granted the delight of flying and gazing at Earth from the air, as if airplanes were magical conveyances, rather than major polluters. I took for granted the technology that makes possible my phone, my heat, gas pumps and email, avocados and mangos in my New York supermarket.
I weep for all that seemed possible and now is eroding and that erodes even more for those who were born in the generations after me. I weep for a future that held promise. I weep for all lives, miniscule and great, whose grave challenges and slow vanishing I can understand intellectually but in no way prevent. To accept the reality of climate change is to lament. That’s natural. It takes a little more effort to accept that, even here there is much to praise. The Earth goes on: creating, adapting, blooming, struggling, surviving. That much is certain. And even in the midst of so much loss, new friends and collaborations will form. People will fall in love. Creativity, ingenuity, heroism, and bravery will startle and inspire. Some jobs will become obsolete, while others will bring exciting possibilities. On a personal level, I will fine-tune my attachment to the world. I will be attentive to what we are losing, in person if possible, symbolically if not, and honor it with the kind of mindful, grateful love I would bring to the bedside of a dear friend who is critically ill. I will widen my senses to what remains and give thanks for its stubborn and creative endurance. I will expect, every day, to be amazed. ◆
This piece is excerpted from the Winter 2024-2025 issue of Parabola, GRIEF & GRATITUDE. You can find the full issue on our online store.
