eco-chaplains are helping people grieving over climate change : NPR

TALENT, Ore. — When Diane Ware’s home state of Oregon proposed a natural gas pipeline that threatened local waterways, she sprang into action – leading workshops on lobbying state lawmakers, mentoring student activists and organizing lectures at her church.

But when plans for the pipeline were canceled, Ware, 78, found little pleasure in the victory. The retired elementary school teacher couldn’t shake the feeling that it may be too late to save a planet in deep peril – a prospect tinged with grief, anger and depression. Ware realized she had a case of “climate grief” – and needed help.

Ware is one of a growing number of people using the services of an eco-chaplain, a new kind of spiritual advisor rising among clergy trained in handling grief and other difficult emotions.

Each month, at the Talent Public Library, Ware attends Sustaining Climate Activists, a gathering of mostly retired adults led by an eco-chaplain. She went to her first meeting shortly after a wildfire swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2023. She was upset by a report that claimed news organizations had failed to link the wildfire to climate change.

“I just thought how on Earth are we ever going to get this problem solved if we can’t even talk about it and get good information from the newspapers that we think are the guardians of truth?” she said. “And then I just thought, ‘Wow, I am fried.’”

The roots of eco-chaplaincy  

The eco-chaplain is a 21st century invention, and while no one knows exactly how many there are, chaplaincy experts agree that the number is likely less than 100. There is no universally recognized eco-chaplaincy training, as there is for other kinds of chaplaincy, but a number of organizations offer training from Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and secular perspectives.

Today, there are chaplains working at the intersection of climate, grief and spirituality in the United States, Great Britain, Australia and Canada. Most develop their own ways of addressing the issue, from one-on-one therapy sessions to online climate grief circles and in-person support groups.

The demand to address climate grief, anxiety and burnout is growing, according to the Rev. Alison Cornish, the chaplaincy coordinator at The BTS Center, a non-profit in Portland, Maine that looks at climate change through a spiritual lens.

In 2017, the American Psychological Association defined climate anxiety as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.” Three years later, a survey by the association found that as many as two-thirds of Americans have suffered from it.

When BTS launched its first “conversation circle” for chaplains on the subject of climate in 2023, they were stunned by the response. They had expected 10 people to join; 80 applied. They came from disaster chaplaincy, spiritual care, hospital chaplaincy and university chaplaincy.

“They are asking how do we deal with regret, with complicity, with lament, with saying goodbye to species,” Cornish said. “They are creating rituals that honor all of those.”

The first eco-chaplain may have been Sarah Vekasi, who says she invented the role and title while a student at Naropa University, a Buddhist school.

Vekasi worked in coal mining communities ravaged by mountaintop removal mining. She was inspired by the activist, author and Buddhist philosopher Joanna Macy, whose “The Work That Reconnects” workshops focus on healing the environment.

In 2015, Rabbi Katy Z. Allen wrote “A Call for a New Kind of Chaplain” in the newsletter of the Association of Professional Chaplains.

“We are stuck here on our shrinking, warming planet that we love so much and depend on so totally,” Allen wrote. “We are all in the sort of place where a chaplain’s presence is needed.”

Eco-chaplains serve multiple generations of people. One consists of older adults dealing with personal losses of careers, aging friends and declining health and abilities. Many may also be mourning decades of environmental advocacy they feel has, for the most part, failed.

A second group is young adults frightened about the prospect of inheriting a planet beset by wildfires, floods and other cataclysmic effects of climate change.

“In one generation we have understandable idealism which is getting dashed on the rocks,” said Cornish. “And on the other end of the spectrum we have a generation of age and wisdom which is also experiencing a lot of loss.”

An eco-chaplain at work

On a chilly morning in January, Sustaining Climate Activists gathered in a library conference room.

“Just breathe normally,” the group’s co-facilitator, the Rev. Liz Olson, a certified hospital chaplain, said in a soothing yet commanding voice to the dozen people sitting with her.

“You can use this breathing any time you are panicking or worrying, knowing that we have this symbiotic relationship with the plants and the trees, and that as you are exhaling they are inhaling, and as you are inhaling, they are exhaling. We are always connected to the plants and the trees.”

A few seats to Olson’s right, Ware held her head erect and eyes closed.

Over the next 90 minutes, Olson guided the group as they shared whatever was troubling them. The ensuing conversation, which was confidential, included discussion of current events, personal health issues and relationships with family and friends.

Participants sipped coffee, nibbled homemade oatmeal raisin cookies, passed around a box of Kleenex and examined a color wheel with the names of hues replaced by emotions — fear, anger, loneliness and anxiety. They were a band of people committed not only to the same sweeping environmental issues, but also bonded by the pain of realizing their decades-long work to protect the planet had apparently made minimal impact.

In this meeting, no one mentioned climate change by name. But that did not seem to matter. When the meeting was over, Ware and others said the free, monthly meeting was a critical resource that helped buoy them in the long fight for clean water, habitat preservation, and a move away from fossil fuels.

“I need support in my grief process,” Ware said as she helped restack library chairs.

A judgment-free zone

Sustaining Climate Activists arose out of a sense of being overwhelmed. In 2016, several activists affiliated with Southern Oregon Climate Action Now, a non-profit advocacy group based in Medford, Ore., came together after the presidential election of Donald Trump.

“Trump’s election freaked everyone out,” said Alan Journet, who co-founded the Medford advocacy group with his wife, Kathy Conway. “Group members wanted a way to deal with fears and anxieties about climate and politics.”

By 2017, the support group was in place with Olson as the facilitator. Now, both Olson and another member who is not a chaplain take turns at the helm.

Conway and Journet — both retired educators — did not think a chaplain was required for the job. Neither is traditionally religious, but they knew Olson and thought her compassionate personality and passion for the environment would make a good fit.

Olson describes her Oregon group as “cerebral” and “woo-woo averse.” Many are former science educators. Some adhere to a specific faith — Ware is active in the United Church of Christ and another attendee is a devotee of Chinese philosophy. Others describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.

Olson, who is Buddhist, does not bring up religion or spirituality unless her clients do first. She is guided by a definition of spirituality followed by her colleagues in the palliative care realm.

“Spirituality is that aspect of ourselves that seeks to find meaning and purpose,” she said. “It is the way we experience our connectedness to the moment, to ourselves, to others, to nature and to the sacred.”

Diane Ware is a retired elementary school teacher who meets with an group led by an eco-chaplain near her home in Oregon.

Kimberly Winston/Kimberly Winston

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Kimberly Winston/Kimberly Winston

Ware, the teacher-turned-climate activist, remembers Olson’s exercises for breathing, coping and being with her feelings. Where once she had only sadness, now she has hope.

“It may not come during the meeting or right after,” Ware said. “But it comes, like a cat creeping on, when my whole being is ready for it. It returns me to myself with a different level of awareness and trust.”

Journet recalled how down he felt in 2020 after Oregon Republicans walked out — twice — on a piece of legislation that would have cut the state’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“It helped to talk to a group of folks who are sympathetic to the same things I want,” he said. “It helps me sort of recharge my batteries and say, okay, I am going to go back and try again, we are going to go back and try some more.”

There has been room for personal struggles, too. In the 1990s, Journet survived leukemia; when he received a recent diagnosis of a different cancer, he took his feelings of shock, fear, anxiety and anger to Sustaining Climate Activists. No one felt his sharing it there was out of place.

“We are complex beings,” Conway said. “Climate issues aren’t the only thing in our lives, so by opening [the meeting] to whatever is happening, you kind of have to get that out of the way before you can be productive in your activism about the climate.”

‘Science can only do so much’ 

Gabrielle Gelderman has found that to be true in her work as an eco-chaplain, too. In 2022, she wrote her theology school thesis on climate grief and its effect on young people. Since then, she has held “political and climate grief circles” online, reaching out via Instagram and other social media from her base in Edmonton, Canada.

Though Gelderman is Christian, she says she keeps her personal faith out of her work in order to work with people from a variety of backgrounds.

“I ask what is their ‘something greater,’ or their higher power, and how is that taking shape in your life today?,” said Gelderman, whose father was also a chaplain.

“What can you put your trust in? Your own intuition? The universe? God? Nature? We will follow wherever that conversation leads.”

Gelderman holds a climate grief circle via Zoom once a month, for free. She usually gets five to seven people. Some are repeat visitors, others come once or twice. Most are under 30, some are in school and most are “nones” — people with no traditional religious affiliation. All suffer from anxiety, grief, frustration and anger about the lack of progress on reversing climate change.

One client is Julia DaSilva, 25, a Vancouver-based climate activist who focused on fossil fuel divestment during her college years. At that time, DaSilva felt no matter how much she protested or organized it was never enough. She had trouble sleeping and her relationships suffered. If she wasn’t working on climate change, DaSilva worried, she was wasting time.

She knew people who talked about climate grief and climate anxiety — a subject she then found “a little silly.”

“I did not allow myself access to those feelings and channeled everything into working all the time.”

DaSilva graduated at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and found herself back at home in her parents’ basement. During this time, she started to believe in God for the first time. She struggled to balance her sense of spiritual rejuvenation with her belief that the planet is doomed. Where did she fit in this push-pull between things not seen and things burning?

“I was in this space of: I have to figure out what I am doing with my life and everything is breaking down,” she said. “You’re trying to start a life but what is the world that you are trying to start a life in?”

In Zoom meetings with Gelderman, DaSilva recited a long list of her climate fears and worries. Gelderman asked her to try enjoying the “sense of the possible” instilled by her new faith and to trust that she would find her place in it.

Climate activism, Gelderman told her, is itself an act of faith.

“That is slowly permeating my life,” DaSilva said. “We don’t have any good reason to think that things are going to get better and yet we do it. The world was a source of anxiety for me and that is always what I expected it to be. But now it has become something more. ”