How climate change is causing grief, anxiety and depression
CBC
Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.
Diana Violet Bird reaches for a rosehip as she patiently teaches her nine-year-old daughter how to forage for edible wild plants in the forest.
"When the flowers fall off, you get what's called a rosehip," she told her. "Rosehip is so good for you — it is medicine."
Bird, who is from Montreal Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, grew up in the boreal forest and has been foraging for decades. She learned the skill from her mother and is now passing it onto her daughter.
This year, though, there was little food to gather, after the province was hit by a deep freeze and then a severe drought — extreme weather events that are expected to worsen with climate change.
"This year was the first year … the fiddleheads where I usually pick were not good," said Bird. "That was the first time in 35 years that I have experienced that — and that's directly from climate change."
And as these events are reshaping Bird's world, she says she's left feeling devastated by the loss.
"I had to buy fiddleheads for the first time from a fellow forager. That felt so wrong to me."
The frustration and loss Bird is feeling has been dubbed ecological grief, or eco-grief. It's sometimes called eco-anxiety.
"It's our grieving and our emotions related to environmental loss," said Ashlee Cunsolo, the dean of the School of Arctic and Subarctic Studies at the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, who helped coin the term ecological grief.
"Whether it's farmers in Australia, or Inuit in Labrador, or people out on the West Coast with the forest fires, and in the Prairie regions with drought, we're seeing so many more experiences with ecological grief and loss — and the related senses of stress, of anxiety, of depression, sadness and loss."
Some communities are particularly affected by ecological grief, said Cunsolo, including Indigenous people, farmers and fishers. "People who are really connected closely to the environment for livelihoods and culture," she said.
Glenn Wright has also felt that loss. Looking out at the fields on his grain farm in central Saskatchewan, he's reminded of how this year's severe drought ravaged his crop.
Wright's farm is nestled between the communities of Delisle and Vanscoy, just southwest of Saskatoon. He has been farming for about 15 years on his land.
Intelligence regarding foreign interference sometimes didn't make it to the prime minister's desk in 2021 because Canada's spy agency and the prime minister's national security adviser didn't always see eye to eye on the nature of the threat, according to a recent report from one of Canada's intelligence watchdogs.