Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss

by Stephen Harrod Buhner

*2023 Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal Death/Dying Grief & Loss (Small Press) News reports appear every day now on the ecological state of our planetary home and the news is not good. Ecological systems are in terrible peril, species are dying by the millions, and global warming is getting worse. Increasing numbers of people feel the impact of this, feel some form of what is being called climate grief, ecological loss, or sometimes even solastalgia. Our species is entering a time of difficult and deep mourning. As environmentalist Leslie Head has said, “Grief will be our companion on this journey―it is not something we can deal with and move on.” It will be with us for a long time to come. Stephen Harrod Buhner takes the reader on a journey into and through that grief to what is waiting on the other side, a place that Viktor Frankl, Jacques Cousteau, Vaclav Havel, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and so many others have found. It’s where one becomes an engaged witness, alive to the losses that are occurring and the grief that is felt but is not overcome by them. Then he travels into and through the common feelings of guilt and shame (feelings that are put on so many but in actuality belong to very few) that come from ecological devastation. From there Stephen moves deep into what occurs when those we love die, when the planetary landscapes, forests, fields and rivers that are engraved into our deepest selves are lost, when we are forced to travel into the territory of death and loss and deep grief ourselves. Throughout it, Stephen draws on his studies with Elizabeth Kubler Ross and others who worked with the dying, his years as a psychotherapist, extensive work with the chronically ill, and deep immersion in and relationship with plants, wild ecosystems, and this living planet that is our home. At journey’s end what arises is not the optimism of false hope (as Greta Thunberg calls it) but a deeper and more realistic hope, one that is intimately entangled with gravitas and the journey through loss. It’s born from the heart’s integration of grief and a deep faith in the green world, in this planet from which we have emerged, and in the new life that comes with every spring. Stephen’s book is written with the exquisite prose style, intimacy, depth of insight, and engaged storytelling for which he is known. No one who reads it will remain unmoved or ever again feel as if they are alone in the grief they feel for what is happening to our home. 

Genres: Spirituality, Nonfiction, Nature, Plants

304 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2022

About the author

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an Earth poet and the award-winning author of ten books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers including Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. The greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather C.G. Harrod who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911.

Stephen's work has appeared or been profiled in publications throughout North America and Europe including Common Boundary, Apotheosis, Shaman's Drum, The New York Times, CNN, and Good Morning America. Stephen lectures yearly throughout the United States on herbal medicine, the sacredness of plants, the intelligence of Nature, and the states of mind necessary for successful habitation of Earth.

Stephen has served as president of the Colorado Association for Healing Practitioners and as a lobbyist on herbal and holistic medicines and education in the Colorado legislature. He lives in New Mexico.

from
http://www.gaianstudies.org/Stephen.html
and

http://www.storey.com/author.php?ID=5...

Reviews

[Janisse Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful book. I'm so grateful for S.H. Buhner's thinking and dedication to writing. His books help me enormously.

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I'm an ecologist. I'm a zillenial. I live with climate grief every day, and I have been struggling with how to handle that grief for years. This book did not help.

There were elements of it I enjoyed. He makes a great point about scientists being trained to obfuscate their ecological passion in their published work and thinking. I agree with his perspective on how much we learn over the course of our lives; for example, I liked the bit where he says, "Years of living sanded the sharpness off me [...] Only then did it become easier to see what's been right in front of me all along. All of us are fools, it just takes a while to not mind."

For people that are spiritually minded, this book may offer a lot to resonate with; personally, I found the writing style too frustrating to tolerate. The author doesn't appear to have much respect for his audience, or otherwise he has an inflated sense of his own importance. He uses persuasive tactics that are heavy-handed and manipulative. For example:

1. He touts the importance of interdisciplinary education/experience for a wholeness of perspective that is necessary to fully appreciate the level of destruction industrialization has wreaked on ecosystems of Earth. I agree with his argument, but I take issue with the manner in which he makes his point: On page two, his lists the "fields" in which he's had education/experience to garner the reader's trust in his credibility. His list is meant to overwhelm, as it's needlessly exhaustive and technical (and, to people with extensive training, obviously repetitive).

2. He repeatedly places his own writing in italicized blockquotes to lend an air of credibility/importance to his own words, which would be unnecessary if his words themselves were convincing. (I'm not oblivious to the irony of this list being in blockquotes, lol. I just do that for lists in Goodreads so that they indent, because there's no other way to do that.) He doesn't make it obvious that he's doing that, because he does quote other authors in an identical manner, with citations buried, and he'll blockquote himself immediately afterwards without clarifying that he's now quoting himself.

3. Your mileage may vary, but he writes with a style that personally irritates me. It reminds me of every conversation I've ever had with a man that didn't respect my opinions or respect me as a person. He uses his age as a cudgel, saying things that imply, "I'm older now, and this is what I think. If you don't agree with me, it's because you're young and just don't know enough yet. If you knew better you'd agree with me." As a younger person, that's infuriating to me.

This is not an exhaustive list of the tactics he uses, partially because I think this sufficiently illustrates the point, but also partially because I ran out of patience and DNF'd the book midway through.

Alternatives
I tried this book because the title and synopsis were a hammer on the nailhead of my interest areas. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with any other books on the exact same topic, but there are many alternatives on the same theme that are better written, and written with generosity of spirit. See, for example:

* Barry Lopez's Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
* The collection All We Can Save
* Spiritual Ecology
* Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark (one of my favorites) or Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (which I haven't read yet but intend to)

If you're considering reading this book, try one of these ^ instead.

Alternatively, you can try to combat your earth grief by reading nature writers whose perspectives on ecology fill the soul:

* Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire
* John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra
* Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh man, where to begin. Full disclosure...I am definitely suffering from some serious ecological grief. My job as a wildlife biologist has exposed me to the realities of destruction of the natural world over several decades so I have been suffering from ecological grief for many years. I really don't expect to find a way to fully get passed it given the state of the planet and humanities unwillingness to change the way we live our lives. So maybe I'm a lost cause and beyond acceptance of any sort of constructive ideas on how to live with or even reduce the grief I've been feeling. But this book, Earth Grief, by Stephen Harrod Buhner, could not have been more disappointing and useless for helping with the grief that hangs over me.

My suspicions were raised on about page two when Buhner spent a full page detailing/boasting about his qualifications for writing the book. He included a ridiculously long list of various trainings and experiences that he felt were relevant - a full page! Come on dude. He listed stuff like knowledge of the ecological importance of invasive plants, sound patterning in language and harvesting of wild medicines. It goes on and on for a full page. I've never seen anything like it. He didn't mention potty training or learning to ride a bike but just about everything else he had ever done with his life. So, right there on page 2, I was concerned this guy might be a whack job. I wasn't wrong.

He spent about 2/3rds of the book setting up his big bit of advice, which was that the diagnosis for the earth is terminal and we need to accept that. That was his big truth, humans have fucked up the earth so badly that there is nothing we can do and our civilization is doomed to fail in the not too distant future. Just throw up your hands because it's game over. He believes until you accept that you can't begin to grieve properly. Thanks a lot Stephen, that's soooo helpful. Thank god you have all those qualifications so that you can provide this incredibly unhelpful advice to those of us experiencing grief for Mother Earth.

Not that I don't pretty much agree that our civilization is doomed and that the evidence strongly suggests humans are incapable of changing course in anywhere near a meaningful enough way to save ourselves, but I didn't need to read 250 pages of your babble to realize this. What I (and I think many others) do need is a way to cope so that I/we can keep on with our lives and continue fighting for the significant change that is needed without giving up altogether as this book recommends. Just because someone receives a terrible diagnosis from their doctor doesn't mean they give up trying to get healthy despite bad odds, does it? Maybe at some point you end up getting on a motorcycle and doing one last ride, but that is not where we are at right now is it? I truly don't think so, despite Buhner's pessimism. At least I'm not willing to give up the good fight as he seems to be. Such a horrible book with no real advice, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, whether you are suffering from ecological grief or not.

I'm going to try Joanna Macy and Molly Brown's book on the subject, "Coming Back To Life", and hope for something more helpful. If I hadn't borrowed Buhner's book from a local library I'd be very tempted to fire it into the woodstove. Thanks for nothing Stephen.

[Celestin Büche · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 50 pages or so are powerful. His observations about how language, and scientific language in particular, are contributing to our dissociation from the natural world and ourselves are insightful and, in typical Buhner fashion, fantastically delivered.

However, from there on the book doesn't give much anymore. At best, he is recycling some of the concepts and stories he already shared in some of his previous works. At worst, he loses himself in rants and babbling.

In his timeless masterpiece Ensouling Language he wrote that one must pay attention so as not to pull too hard on the thread one is following when writing a book. Unfortunately, this seems what happened in Earth Grief . He wants to get his pain across so badly, that he ends up not getting any emotions across at all.
Also, I could feel that he didn't revise this book as closely as he did with some of his previous work. It felt a bit rushed at times, if not to say lazy (the citing is done with minimal effort, and much of the writing just isn't as crisp as I know he could make it).

So all in all, I didn't find this a good book. However, perhaps this is not so much a bug than it is a feature. Because as I see it, Stephen Buhner himself writes that he is getting old and getting ready to die. And this book is reflective of that process. The book itself feels old, feels ill, and is thereby, through the backdoor, transposing the message it seeks to convey.

[Brianna Beswick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book helpful not only for handling ecological grief, but also for revisiting the grief of losing a loved one. I wanted specific citations for some sections but overall found a significant amount of wisdom in this book and will be seeking out more material by this author in the future.

[Niels Devisscher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for everyone trying to make sense of these times and the sadness and grief that accompanies ecological collapse. This book was a big inspiration for my essay "Your grief belongs to the earth" https://nielsdevisscher.substack.com/...

[Jeannette · Rating 4 out of 5]

I joined the earth grievers while reading this book. My heart aches for Gaia, our planet. Buhner spells out all the ecological disasters, pollution, spoiling and loss. What can I say. The book was hard to read. I had to skip around. I admit to not reading sections or skimming to lessen the grief. I need to read the end again and feel more positive.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is critical reading...

[Dizzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

i really wanted to love this book! it started off strong and powerful, communication the devastating anger and grief of ecological disaster. unfortunately, i found the author’s repetitive ramblings to distract from his valuable experiences and ideas. with sharper editing, i think this book could be much stronger in terms of tone and conviction.