I’ve always had trouble sleeping, but in recent years it’s gotten much worse. I used to stay up deriving formulas on my ceiling before a calculus exam, or running through a piece of viola music in my head, to see if I had it memorized. Perhaps I was anxious, and rather than count sheep to infinity, I worked on my material. That’s what I’ve always done. Taking action has always helped me with anxiety.

Restored wetland supports a variety of life

But what I’ve experienced in the last few years is something else entirely. Now I lie awake at night and wonder if our town will have running water in August and September. Will we have a fire that burns down the whole town? Do we have enough water to fight a fire if it breaks out? Will bigger cities soon burn? What about Lake Oswego, or Portland, or Seattle? Or Ashland, a beautiful city nestled up against the Siskiyou Mountains, where there is little water and a lot of dry forests. Will my husband and I ever be able to vacation together during late summer? When I’m playing at music festivals in August, he has to stay home in case our town has to evacuate. Someone has to be there to pack up the animals and drive out. On moonlit nights I look around my room and wonder if everything I see will soon all be reduced to ashes.

Fire, though one of my biggest concerns, is not the only thing that keeps me up at night. While I love seeing everything come alive in the spring and bloom in summer, I have come to fear summer. Last year we had three days of 116F in June, in the once cool and rainy Pacific Northwest. What will this summer bring? Which plants will survive? Which trees? And which animals? Last June, a lot of nestlings died in the heat; friends found their yards littered with dead baby birds. A farmer friend lost half of her chickens, and another lost all of her rabbits. Will the swallows who come back every year to raise their chicks in our nesting boxes be able to raise their young this year? So much spraying happens on nearby farms that there are very few insects now, and our bats have disappeared. I don’t know whether they’ve died or moved away. Will we still have the frogs who used to fill the warm night air with their croaking?

Wild turkeys forage in our yard.

Most of what I’m describing here is climate/ecological anxiety, a fear of loss and devastation in the future, although in some cases that future is very near. If my town runs out of water in two weeks, that’s pretty near.

Eco Grief, or climate grief, describes the sadness over a loss that has already happened. I experience that too. I grieve that my childhood home, which had lots of big trees and wild places in the yard, was razed to the ground, with every tree chopped down and most of the yard covered with concrete or manicured lawn. I grieve the animals who are disappearing, going extinct. Can you imagine what it must be like to be the last one of your species? Imagine that there is no one on the planet who speaks your language, and you will never speak to anyone again. I imagine myself waking up one day, making myself a cup of coffee, taking it outside to drink on the patio, and suddenly realizing how silent the world is. I sit for a while, hoping to hear a car or a plane, or some noise that indicates the presence of other humans, and hearing nothing but sparrows and scrub jays and red-winged blackbirds. I look across the hayfields to the road and see no cars. Nobody is out for a walk. No one is mowing a lawn or whacking weeds. Then I begin to realize that I’m utterly alone for the rest of my life, and I will never speak to anyone in human language again. Imagine the loneliness, the desolation! That may be what it is like to be the last of a species. So I grieve not only the loss of other species, but also for the last members of each species.

Pristine wilderness in Montana.

My mother as a young woman.

Two months ago, my mother passed on. My dad, who is 92, wants to join her; he lived with her for 63 years, and he’s lost without her. My family is very close. We tell stories – we keep our lost loved ones alive that way. My grandmother would tell me tales about her older sisters and their suitors, and her ornery father who chased the poor swains away as he waved his shotgun, and I feel like I knew them all, though I only ever met one of them. My mother brought her Irish grandmother Bridget to life when she told me how Bridget would ask every child who came over to play if they had English ancestry, and if they did, she shooed them out of the house. Bridget’s first language was Gaelic, and my mother knew a few words, a single prayer.

I find myself grieving my whole tribe, as they die one by one, usually of old age. It feels to me like a species, my family species, is going extinct. We share memories, our own peculiar turns of phrase, and family culture. When we gather, we reenact old experiences, and someone says, “Tell the story about great aunt Josephine and how she put mercurochrome on her sleeping father’s nose!” or “How did Grandma Ambrose meet her husband-to-be for the first time?” We use their favorite sayings, repeating them to each other and smiling. By doing this, we reassure ourselves that things are still ok, that we are not utterly alone.

My mother. 

But what happens when there is nobody left with whom we can share the stories?

What do we do when nothing seems familiar anymore, because all of those beloved places have been bulldozed and turned into a shopping mall or a housing development?

What do we do with the silence that remains when bird species die off? Or the bats disappear?

For me, these questions spring from the same source, a well of loss and alienation, and I am struggling with it. I don’t want to feel my grief any less, because that would mean to me that I’m either becoming numb or those loved ones are fading away, be they family members or animal species or wild places I knew. I want it to stay raw and painful and closeby, but I also need to be able to function, so that I can make new memories and create new stories. While I love the past and miss it and would love to wallow in it, I need to find a way to keep living and enrich the present with all the beautiful things from that past. The trick is to find ways to feel less isolated and more balanced. I’m also driven to create a future worth living in.

Having drawn parallels between environmental loss and personal loss, I thought I would rely on my experiences in the personal realm to guide me, but there are major differences. Loss of older family members, while painful, is natural. Destruction of the environment is not. There is work to be done. While I cannot fight to save my deceased mother, I must fight to save species here on earth. And I must fight to save those parts of our culture that I deem worth saving. Music, art, and crafts come to mind. Our children and grandchildren deserve a world that still contains beauty, and the species around us deserve life.

The word “fight” makes me pause. How does one fight? Can I preserve the arts through violence? Obviously not. The same goes for my family culture and my ancestors, kept alive not by any sort of brawl, but by repetition, storytelling, cultivation. Artisanal bread bakers save their art by baking, sharing their bread with others, writing books about how to do it, and by promoting their art online. Artists sell their art at galleries and art festivals. We save various art forms by doing them, by promoting them.

But what does the word “fight” mean to someone who is trying to save species and the environment? In some cases, it does indeed get violent, when protesters clash with police at a rally to stop climate change or species extinctions, but many of us can’t engage in such activities, usually because these events occur far away from where we live.

Poppies growing in my garden.

Personally, I find my answer close to home, in my garden. I am lucky, I must acknowledge that. I have almost half an acre to work with. I have close to 400 species of plants, including trees, shrubs, annual veggies, even weeds in my yard. Every year, something fails, something dies, and something else thrives. My goji berry plant is not doing well, but my medlar tree and my sumac (not the poisonous type!) are flourishing. I started fifteen years ago with a nearly blank slate, and now my property is close to being a woodland. We grow more food than we can eat, so we give some away. We have a table with a “free” sign out front, which we fill up with produce, and people stop their cars and take the food. We have tons of mulch (in the form of leaves and trimmings), and some fuel as well. More creatures are moving in. The songs of birds in the afternoon are almost deafening. Our garden has truly earned its name as the Pollinator Sanctuary.

Our garden, burgeoning with life.

This can be done inexpensively. You should look up Bealtaine Cottage on Youtube – Colette O’Neill, the owner, has created a fabulous forest on three acres, with very little money. Here’s one of her videos from a few years ago. This is What 13 Years of Permaculture in Ireland Looks Like!

But many people have no garden, some have not even a stable place to live. For those in apartments, there are still things that one can do. If you have a balcony or small porch, you can grow in pots. It’s amazing how much one can grow in pots! You may be able to get a spot in an urban garden patch. At the very least, one can buy one’s produce from a farmers’ market. And finally, there’s guerrilla gardening. One may be able to sow wildflower seeds in an abandoned lot, helping pollinators, or perhaps plant something on a parking strip. I’d be a bit careful about planting small vegetable plants in a parking strip of a busy street – there’s auto exhaust as well as passing dogs who pee on everything they can – but one can plant flowers for the pollinators, or even a tall bush. I’ve started too many trees from tiny seedlings that I’ve found, so I’m considering finding some wild place to secretly plant them.

At this point, you may be wondering why I focus so much on growing food, for humans and other creatures. How does this help with eco-anxiety? First, growing one’s own food ethically will relieve the pressure on land used for farming, if enough people do it. Less demand for food raised on big farms means less land enslaved to the plough, and less pressure on the environment. Less tilling and cultivating means fewer animals and wild plants killed. Second, by promoting biodiversity on our little plots of land, we are helping wild creatures, creating places where they can live and eat. And finally, I find it healing to be outside, talking to the hummingbirds, ladybugs and bumblebees, caring for their habitat and food. I have been known to pet bumblebees in the early morning, when they are asleep on a zinnia. When new creatures move in and partake, it makes me happy. And yes, I don’t harvest everything; I leave some for others, even in my own yard. Ethical foraging rules always apply.

Food for both humans and pollinators.

Roses grown from cuttings from my mother’s rose bushes shade the chickens.

My mother’s peonies.

Finding a hummingbird perched in my witch hazel tree reminds me suddenly of the beautiful books of my childhood which my mother and father read to me, opening a portal to a world I had nearly forgotten, where beauty reigns and all creatures thrive. I am transported. I look at the little bird, and my eyes fill with tears. I thank him for all that he is and feel my mother close by, smiling.

Red peonies, one of my mother’s favourite flowers, along with roses.