Earth Grief – A Book After My Heart
David R. Weiss – November 10, 2023
Book Review: Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Raven Press, 2022.

Earth Grief by Stephen Harrod Buhner is a book after my heart. Purchased on a relative whim during Chelsea Green Publishing’s fall sale, I was (of course) drawn to the title which resonates so closely with my own intuition about what this moment requires of us. That whim proved providential as Earth Grief abounds with insight, wisdom, and love.

Buhner’s background includes a bit of everything. As the byline on the back cover succinctly summarizes, he is “the award-winning author of 24 books on plant medicines, Earth ecosystem dynamics, emerging diseases, and the states of mind and being necessary for successful habitation of Earth.” Not mentioned there but essential for this book: his knowledge of language and his study of death and dying.

Buhner defines Earth grief as “our feeling response to a communication from the heart of Earth urging us … to reinhabit our interbeing with the world.” (14-15) When we suppress this grief—whether in pursuit of scientific objectivity or pressed by cultural norms—we’re actually choosing pathology. Silencing the alarm we ought to be feeling in response to Earth’s wounds. If we instead allow that grief in, permitting it to move through us, it will awaken our deeper self and call forth our unique gifts as needed in this moment. Earth grief is thus a vocational compass, aligning our particular lives with the whole horizon of life.

Buhner writes with a sense of heartfelt urgency. Not because he thinks it’s still possible to avoid ecological-societal collapse (quite the opposite), but because he believes grief can guide us into and through that loss. The warmth of his writing reflects his intimate knowledge and infectious love of Earth, but also an equally genuine love of humanity. The grief he describes is personal grief. His for Earth; his for us.

Buhner says that we (in the West) learn to dissociate from an early age; we set our feelings aside as though we know the world better once we’ve silenced our heart. Taught to be wary of anthropomorphizing the world, we end up mechanomorphizing it instead (reducing it to a machine). He observes how many ecologists distance themselves from their feelings by moving from the immediacy of first-person voice into a more universal second-person voice or a yet more abstract third person voice when speaking or writing about the siege of nature going on all around us. Our world is daily being unworlded, but we are determined to remain calm.

First-person, Buhner would say. My world is daily being unworlded, but I’m being taught/pressured to remain clam. And that calm is killing me and my world. First-person speech owns the experience.

This is part of attending to a “climate of mind,” by which he means the defining ambience of a perspective—or a place. We can adopt a climate of mind that dissociates us from the unfolding disaster … or a climate of mind willing to feel Earth’s pain and grieve in response. Similarly, an old growth forest has a climate of mind that exudes its pungent complex harmony while a swath of clear-cut land has a climate of mind like an anguished scream of abandonment. At heart is the recognition that both people and place exist with rich emotional texture—and the erasure of that texture erases four billion years of evolutionary effort and wisdom.

But there’s nothing sentimental about that wisdom. Life longs to flourish (as whole): that’s what we sense in the old growth forest. But flourishing life involves, demands, simply connotes (without judgment) an abundance of death. That’s as true for us as for any ecosystem. So, let me resume Buhner’s preferred first-person voice. The core truth is that I live by the death of other things and other things will one day in turn live by the death of me. I might prefer to imagine utopias in which death isn’t necessary, but Buhner insists every deathless utopia is dystopian. “Death is not a flaw in the system, it is a feature. It is built into the system and it’s built into the system for a reason.” (201) So long as I refuse to embrace death as part of the bargain of life, I help drive the eco-crisis because that refusal tempts me to live without regard for finitude.

The crucial move happens when I admit that death is always at the table. From that moment on, I can begin to make choices that are responsible to the reality of life in which death is always inevitably present. I can begin to live wisely in a world that runs on the twinned—fully entwined—energies of life/death.

Unfortunately, for too many generations, and with far too much industrial inertia, human civilization has lived otherwise. While Buhner agrees the climate crisis is one consequence of this, he plumbs the depth of our dysfunction by looking at plastics and pharmaceuticals. Our unchecked reliance on both is just as ruinous for the planet’s ecosystems as the unchecked emission of greenhouse gasses. Both plastics and pharmaceuticals move through ecosystems with devastating consequences.

Plastics bond to rock, invade food chains, and take up residence in tissue across all manner of creatures from plankton to person. Most drugs leave our bodies (or animal bodies) or the crop/soil/water on which they’ve been applied without losing their potency meaning they continue to “work” elsewhere—disrupting in just decades finely balanced ecological harmonies achieved over millennia. The rampant use of antibiotics in particular has been teaching(!) bacteria how to survive modern medicine—learning(!) that gets passed from bacteria to bacteria. If the words “teach” and “learn” seem overstated for bacteria, Buhner might say that’s because the words “arrogance” and “folly” are understatements for human civilization.

Unsurprisingly, when he finally delivers his diagnosis, it’s terminal. Not necessarily for humanity, but surely for what we have come to call civilization. Human activity has so altered the systems we depend on that we’re headed for an entirely new normal. One that may well take centuries of upheaval before it finally settles in … so far from the normal we now know, that everything at present is at an end. Dying. An ending already underway. Reflecting on the image of a terminally ill spouse, he writes, “And maybe it is the same with Earth as it is with my beloved: if I am wise, I will reach out so that we can grieve together while there is still time.” (175) Only the warmth of his writing makes the heartbreak of such words bearable. Just barely.

To help orient us to the ending we face, Buhner explores the terrain of death from terminal disease to other instances of gut-wrenching loss. Death unmoors us. And the fact that this world—from ecosystem to social system—is ending, will do the same. Meanwhile, “Grief will be our companion on the journey because of what we have lost and because the losing will not end in our lifetime—nor will it end in the lifetime of our children or our grandchildren, or their children either.” (195) Ultimately, Buhner turns to the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (with whom he studied) to find guidance for traversing the territory of Earth grief. He recounts vignettes that highlight the wisdom of choosing to love and to serve in the face of death, concluding that “She [Kübler-Ross] did not find despair or apathy to be the final state of being that occurs when a person truly accepts the fact of a terminal illness. She found it to be something else entirely.” (240)

In the last thirty pages of Earth Grief Buhner explores what that “something else entirely” might mean for those of us living with Earth grief on the far side of acceptance. These pages are impossible to capture in a few words; you really must digest the first 240 pages to receive the wisdom he offers here at the end. I’ll just say this. Buhner holds an almost mystical (he would perhaps say an ecological-minded and evolution-fostered) conviction that we’re in radical relationship with Earth. I don’t use the work “mystical” lightly. His conviction hearkens to Augustine’s exclamation in his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” I’ve no doubt Buhner would trade “Lord” for “Earth” and say the same.

Because of this radical relationship the only way we can reclaim our fully human selves as we meet this approaching End involves learning once again to touch and be touched by Earth … opening ourselves to Earth grief. And perhaps even to something more. Indeed, in ways that will only emerge as this renewal unfolds, he suggests this renewal is healing for both people and Earth (and all the creatures in between). Not a healing that can alter this Ending, but a healing that can alter what comes next.

I was so moved by Earth Grief and felt such a kinship with Buhner’s work that even before I’d finished the book, I felt compelled to reach out and share some of my own writing with him. I found his website and as soon as I landed on the homepage I was met with his … obituary. Stephen died in December 2022. I was overcome—with grief. How fitting.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, “writing into the whirlwind” of contemporary challenges, joys, and sorrows around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, peace, and family. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in Writing into the Whirlwind at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.