Place, Climate Change and the Experience of Loss

Abstract

Climate change leads to environmental transformations and destruction, which deeply affect individuals and communities living in vulnerable areas. There is a growing literature considering the ethical and political implications of climate change on people's identity and attachment to places. Separately, there is a body of research on the mental health impact of climate change, with many studies focusing on ecological grief—the grief felt in response to ecological losses. In this article, we will connect these two strands of inquiry. We will bring together insights from accounts of attachment to place and the experience of ecological grief, which will shed new light on the negative implications of climate change on places and people's connections to them. The study of ecological grief within climate research capitalizes on existing work in psychology on grief over non-death losses. There is growing evidence that people grieve not just bereavement but also losses arising from illness, incarceration, or infertility. A recent proposal is that what unites all these experiences is a sense of losing one's life possibilities. In the case of ecological grief, the heart of the experience is the loss of possibilities that were sustained by one's place. In this article, we will connect this insight with the emerging attention given by political theorists to the significance of occupying a specific place for people's life plans, and we will investigate how climate change threatens people's ability to sustain their traditional ways of life and their stability in life projects, constituting an incommensurable loss.