Abstract
It is well established that ecosystems bring meaning and well-being to individuals, often articulated through attachment to place. Degradation and threats to places and ecosystems have been shown to lead to loss of well-being. Here, we suggest that the interactions between ecosystem loss and declining well-being may involve both emotional responses associated with grief, and with observable impacts on mental health. We test these ideas on so-called ecological grief by examining individual emotional response to well-documented and publicized ecological degradation: coral bleaching and mortality in the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. The study focuses both on one off events of coral loss and the prospect of continuing decline on the self-reported well-being of residents living within the ecosystem, visitors, and those whose livelihood is dependent on the marine resource: data from face-to-face surveys of 1870 local residents, 1804 tourists, and telephone surveys of 91 fishers and 94 tourism operators. We hypothesise that the extent to which individuals experience ecological grief is dependent on the meanings or intrinsic values (such as aesthetic, scientific, or biodiversity-based values), and is moderated by their place attachment, place identity, lifestyle dependence, place-based pride, and derived well-being. Results show that around half of residents, tourists and tourist operators surveyed, and almost one quarter of fishers, report significant Reef Grief. Reef Grief is closely and positively associated with place meanings within resident and tourist populations. By contrast respondents who rated high aesthetic value of the coral ecosystem report lower levels of Reef Grief. These findings have significant implications for how individuals and populations experience ecosystem decline and loss within places that are meaningful to them. Given inevitable cumulative future impacts on ecosystems from committed climate change impacts, understanding and managing ecological grief will become increasingly important. This study seeks to lay conceptual and theoretical foundations to identify how ecological grief is manifest and related to meaningful places and the social distribution of such grief across society.
Highlights
As we accelerate into the Anthropocene—a new era characterised by global-scale impacts of human activity on climate, biology and geochemistry (Waters et al 2016), we are increasingly confronted with the implications of significant changes to our natural surroundings
Our results suggest that this relationship may well be mediated through the concept of place attachment and place meaning
With around half of all residents, tourists and tourism operators, and around a quarter of fishers scoring their grief as an eight, nine or ten on a ten point survey-scale, it appears that people have already entered a period of grieving and mourning for the iconic landscape even though as much as 50% of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is reportedly undamaged
Summary
As we accelerate into the Anthropocene—a new era characterised by global-scale impacts of human activity on climate, biology and geochemistry (Waters et al 2016), we are increasingly confronted with the implications of significant changes to our natural surroundings. The psychological science of loss acknowledges the values that people place on the natural world and how these values are imperilled by global change, providing the basis for identifying strategies for acknowledging and managing grief as a natural human response to loss (Barnett et al 2016). Ecological grief has been proposed as the term to describe the emotional suffering associated with losses to valued species, ecosystems and landscapes (Benham 2016; Bartual 2017; Cunsolo and Ellis 2018). It can take many forms, differ across cultures, vary greatly among individuals, and even be experienced differently by the same individual each time a different loss is encountered. It can occur through disruptions to sense of place and place attachment, loss of personal or cultural identity, and ways of knowing. Leopold (1953) was among the first of many ecologists and conservationists to describe the emotional pain of experienced ecological loss, remarking that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018, pp 275–281)
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