*”“The climate breakdown and biodiversity crisis has reached a point where I don’t think many people believe that we can recover anymore,” says Jessie Panazzolo, the founder of Lonely Conservationists, a group devoted to caring for conservationists.*
About “Recover”….. When I started out decades ago, conservation often sought to “preserve” this or that. In the years since, we’ve realized that landscapes and ecosystems are in a constant state of change. Since we are still an animal species, what about us? Are we, and the Earth of which we are a part, going through an evolutionary change? Maybe part of the trouble is we’re living through an inevitable planetary transition, one in which a major animal species is going to go through an over population correction…. (that would be us). What if this is in fact a *natural* process, and what’s happening to our species is just what happens to ALL species who overshoot carrying capacity?
*But living in a “period of decline” is incredibly hard — especially when we have no idea if our actions will, indeed, lead to a better world when we’re long gone. Conservation has always been generational work, depending on the faith that others will take up your cause when you’re gone, but that aspect of the work requires hope. And hope may be more difficult to come by. The outcome of working against such forces, Mohan says, is often burnout. “People giving up, just very quietly giving up.”*
“Giving up” = depression, one of the 5 stages of grief. But so is “acceptance”. Is there a difference?
I started out as a conservationist naturalist. I have a degree in the field, in fact. As a hobby the last ten years I’ve been doing a very amateurish study of mass extinction and the following recovery of biodiversity. At first it was a refuge for my eco-grieving soul. *We* might not survive. The various landscapes we know, with the particular collection of birds animals and plants we think of as “nature”, they might not survive (and many of us don’t realize those particular communities are relatively new themselves). BUT life *will* again explode across the planet in wonderful diversity. New communities will evolve in different landscapes. At first that was a mental construct I had to work to hang onto.
Not anymore. Now I really do think we’re an animal species going through a catharsis that may turn out to be an extinction process or an evolutionary one. The world *will* dramatically change, as it has dramatically changed many times before over geologic time.
What if part of the mental health problem is approaching the work with the intention of *stopping* a necessary and inexorable process, rather than doing the work to guide and shape it? The rigid oak might be toppled in the flood. The willow that bends keeps growing tomorrow.
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*”“The climate breakdown and biodiversity crisis has reached a point where I don’t think many people believe that we can recover anymore,” says Jessie Panazzolo, the founder of Lonely Conservationists, a group devoted to caring for conservationists.*
About “Recover”….. When I started out decades ago, conservation often sought to “preserve” this or that. In the years since, we’ve realized that landscapes and ecosystems are in a constant state of change. Since we are still an animal species, what about us? Are we, and the Earth of which we are a part, going through an evolutionary change? Maybe part of the trouble is we’re living through an inevitable planetary transition, one in which a major animal species is going to go through an over population correction…. (that would be us). What if this is in fact a *natural* process, and what’s happening to our species is just what happens to ALL species who overshoot carrying capacity?
*But living in a “period of decline” is incredibly hard — especially when we have no idea if our actions will, indeed, lead to a better world when we’re long gone. Conservation has always been generational work, depending on the faith that others will take up your cause when you’re gone, but that aspect of the work requires hope. And hope may be more difficult to come by. The outcome of working against such forces, Mohan says, is often burnout. “People giving up, just very quietly giving up.”*
“Giving up” = depression, one of the 5 stages of grief. But so is “acceptance”. Is there a difference?
I started out as a conservationist naturalist. I have a degree in the field, in fact. As a hobby the last ten years I’ve been doing a very amateurish study of mass extinction and the following recovery of biodiversity. At first it was a refuge for my eco-grieving soul. *We* might not survive. The various landscapes we know, with the particular collection of birds animals and plants we think of as “nature”, they might not survive (and many of us don’t realize those particular communities are relatively new themselves). BUT life *will* again explode across the planet in wonderful diversity. New communities will evolve in different landscapes. At first that was a mental construct I had to work to hang onto.
Not anymore. Now I really do think we’re an animal species going through a catharsis that may turn out to be an extinction process or an evolutionary one. The world *will* dramatically change, as it has dramatically changed many times before over geologic time.
What if part of the mental health problem is approaching the work with the intention of *stopping* a necessary and inexorable process, rather than doing the work to guide and shape it? The rigid oak might be toppled in the flood. The willow that bends keeps growing tomorrow.
One can only be ignorant for so long.