Category: Reckoning 9

Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis

these threads capture the shadows

and force them to account for the silence

these threads bind your sight to the sob

—Alejandra Pizarnik

1

Creo que sueñas con una persona cuando la piensas demasiado, Wagner says. Todo el tiempo, todo el tiempo, todo el tiempo.1 It took over a year after Roni’s disappearance in the Sonoran Desert for Wagner to dream of his brother, but once they started, the dreams didn’t stop.

Wagner is Roni’s older brother, and after he left Chiapas for the states, Roni decided to come too. He called Wagner from the tiny border town of Sasabe, Sonora, just before he began the trek across the Sonoran Desert into the US. He knew the guide would take him on a route called El Cerro Elefante, Elephant Peak, after a landmark that won’t be found on any map. Years before, Wagner had made the same journey, so he offered Roni advice. He says Roni was happy. Ponte muy abusado2, Wagner told him. Esto no es un juego3. Wagner never heard from his brother again.

Except in dreams. Inside the purgatorial nature of ambiguous loss, the disappeared are suspended for their family members in a space between life and death. Dreams offer both a mirror of the terrible uncertainty families find themselves in and an escape from it. Dreams are the only space where the missing loved ones can be experienced anew, where they can be present tense. And unlike dreams of the officially dead, dreams of the missing can be interpreted as messages from some corner of the world where the missing loved one is caught and alive.

Ojalá que este sueño me durara, Wagner says. Quisiera tener un sueño largo de dos, tres horas. Ponerme hablar con él y preguntarle todo.4

I listened to Wagner’s story in a podcast produced by the Colibrí Center for Human Rights as part of their Historias y Recuerdos project5, which records oral histories from families whose loved ones have disappeared in the Sonoran Desert. The Colibrí Center facilitates networks for families of the disappeared and works with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to match DNA samples they’ve taken from families with DNA taken from remains recovered in the desert.

For the Colibrí Center, success occurs when a match is made between a family and a set of remains. Colibrí’s work is to solidify death, to bind the missing to an end. The match rescues the dreamer from the dream’s uncertain origin.

2

A year after I first moved to Arizona in 2008, I worked for a conservation corps whose range covered the entire state. Our first job took place in the Coronado National Forest on the US-Mexico Border. Near the military town of Sierra Vista, a huge, white Border Patrol blimp hulked above us while we worked. We were tasked with finding mountainous piles of backpacks, shoes, clothing, water bottles, and discarded tuna cans in places where guides would have groups of migrants stop and ditch their belongings. We would locate one of these piles, then stuff everything into neon green, ultra-thick trash bags to be evacuated by helicopters later and taken to a dump somewhere. They told us to shake out any shoes we found in case there were bones stuck inside. They didn’t say much else. It was the first time I began to understand the Arizona borderlands as a vast and indeterminate graveyard.

At the time of this writing, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) database contains the DNA of over 1,300 remains found in the desert. For six months after being found, the remains, often skeletonized by harsh desert conditions, are stored in refrigerated containers at PCOME. The holding capacity is always at a tipping point, and they have applied for funding to create a separate storage facility. If remains aren’t identified after 6 months, they are cremated, and each set of cremated remains is placed in a small, brown box. The small, brown boxes sit in a room on top of other small, brown boxes, stacked five feet high against all of the walls. Not all of the remains in boxes are unidentified, but since the repatriation process is very costly, and home countries often do not have or do not provide the funds, families might wait years to scrape together enough money to bring what is left of their loved ones home. And so the boxes of the cremated remains of people who have died crossing the desert, known and unknown, pile up in a room in a building near the air force base in the south of Tucson.

Beyond the city which contains this room, there are massive stretches of land empty and near empty of human life. Because large trees only grow on high elevation mountains, most of the desert is laid bare. It is often the land itself, its rolling and jagged rises and folds, which blocks lines of sight. In places closest to the border there is always the possibility that a dry riverbed or hillside might hold a femur, a jawbone, a desiccated corpse.

In the desert, people can disappear without a trace. Their remains may never be found. A set of recovered remains serves as a trace of a disappearance, but the identity of those remains may never be discovered. A set of recovered remains may never be matched with a family, and families may never find what remains of their missing loved ones.

A haunting permeates the Sonoran Desert, simultaneously in past, present, and future tense. The people who died. The deaths which are occurring. The deaths which will occur. And an even stranger grammar: future perfect. All of the deaths yet to be discovered. The deaths which, if their remains are found or matched with loved ones, will have been.

3

As they often do, the inscrutable logics of the border changed direction at the end of 2023. Suddenly there were hundreds of migrants camped out on the US side of the border wall, about 70 miles southwest of Tucson. Everyone was waiting for the chance to ask for asylum, and Border Patrol, which usually chases people down for crossing illegally, took their time coming around. The families, many with toddlers in tow, were left for days in the desert while Border Patrol refused to pick them up. Local aid groups set up a makeshift camp, and I drove down with friends to pass out supplies for a day.

The Trump wall is very high, and the dirt road which runs alongside it extremely steep. There are breaks in the wall where the construction is incomplete, and there are many holes which people have cut in order to cross. Three men in black balaclavas ran back to the Mexican side with an axe when we drove by. They were using the axe to make a new hole in a patch Border Patrol had made over an old hole. We waved to them, and they waved back. As we traveled, the sun shone through the slats of the wall in staccato flashes which made me dizzy.

It has been said that the Anthropocene is some sort of time travel, Bayo Akomolafe writes, in an essay6 on ancestry and apocalypse. It is almost as if we are looking back at ourselves from the devastation of a toxic, posthuman world, trying to understand our age. I closed my eyes while my friend drove, thrust myself into the future, and imagined the Sonoran Desert as an archeological site of the Anthropocene. Instead of confronting the climate crisis, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter turned the ecosystem at its southern border into a militarized graveyard, evidence of which could be found in the belongings of those forced to take the dangerous journey and the bones of those who didn’t make it. The wall still stood, in its patchwork illogic, a strange spine cutting the land, rusted out. Abandoned surveillance towers leaned askew like slowly falling skeletons. Piles of tires, once dragged to clear roads for footprints, rotted in the hot desert sun. A human of the future, I stood among the rubble of my ancestors, shivering at the traces they left behind.

One day, we will all have died, and we will all have lived in what Dionne Brand calls a vicious period7. Tucson, like all border towns, and the towns which bordered them, and the towns which bordered them, will have existed on the edge of a terrible brutality. As residents of the United States, we will have lived in an age, in an empire, which placed very little value on human life, very little value on life at all.

If families of the missing will have been suspended by this brutality in an ambiguous and oneiric present tense, the towns which bordered the brutality will have been suspended outside of a reckoning which should have been taking place as the crisis unfolded. Much of the general public will have had an amnesiac, dissociated, subterranean relationship to the crisis at the southern border. More, we will have lived in a world in which the general consensus of the Global North will have been that it would not receive the citizens of the Global South as they fled the worsening conditions produced by the insatiable economies of the North.

Whether this will have continued as the prevailing consensus remains yet to be seen, but anyone standing close to the border will have been warped by its logic, and we are all standing close to the border.

4

On a hot summer evening in Tucson I went to an event in the backyard of a border education organization. The crowd contained young people recently involved in immigration organizing and elders who have been working on these issues for the majority of their lives. We sat in rows of plastic chairs listening to local thinkers and community organizers share their reflections. It was hot, even for June in Tucson. The backs of our knees sweated, and a hole in the ground erupted with black ants.

It was shocking, someone acknowledged, how far the immigration movement had fallen since the early years of the Obama administration. No party stands with immigrants. Still, many of the people who spoke felt that a different paradigm was possible, and that if we could articulate and work for a logic of open borders8 and unbuilt walls9, then we could see it through.

The meeting had opened with a moment of silence. We were given space to think of the people indigenous to the land, to think of the people of Palestine, and of the people who have died trying to cross the desert. We were instructed to close our eyes, and we were called into presence. As sometimes happens inside a collective silence, the space seemed to expand beyond our edges. Time and space folded briefly so that disparate injustice and resistance could touch. We closed our eyes under the same sky whose darkness holds webs of families dreaming of their absent loved ones. We breathed the vapors of these dreams. I thought of Wagner’s voice reaching towards his dreams of Roni. Me da más fuerza, he says, Me da fé sobre todo porque lo veo en el sueño, lo veo bien.10

Solomon T. Hamza

Climate Change is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks

—Wallace Broecker

A lot is changing. A whole lot, and just like Nma, my mother, would say, I can feel it in my body. I can also feel these changes. Nonetheless, I think the changes have gone beyond feelings. I see and hear them everywhere and every passing day. At night, usually before dawn, the wind sings in that voice that resembles an ancient masquerade. It is very scary. Some years back, it used to be like a soothing whistle or flute, something susurrant, until the trees around danced in harmonious bliss to the alluring tune of the wind, spraying out their leaves to the ground when the show ended. Now the wind rattles our windows and doors, sweeps in different calibres of polythene bags and other assorted wastes into our compound, and keeps us half awake at night praying that it doesn’t pull off our roof.

I can also see it coming. In 2015, when I went to stay in far away Gusau, a town located in northern Nigeria along the Sahelian savannah region of the country with my aunt and her family, I couldn’t help but notice how different their environment was from where I was residing, how flat their landscape was, which stretched and stretched one’s eyes until all one could see was the Earth running into the light blue and wooly white sky. How devoid of trees those landscapes were—a scenario which I later learnt in school to be caused by aridity plus desert encroachment.

Gusau was usually hot, especially during the day, even during rainy season. Standing under the sun for too long would result in a nefarious headache to end your day. There were days you wouldn’t even dare walk under it. It felt as though you could stretch out your hands, jump up a little and touch the sun. The surest survival kits for such days were chilled water to quench the burning thirst in your throat and enough of the lukewarm water for bathing each time you felt stuffy and itchy. And coupled with all that, there was serious water scarcity. Morning meant piling up buckets and jerry cans in search of water either from open wells or pipe-borne taps. Long was the queue, fierce was the struggle, impure was the water that we could only use to bathe or wash clothes, especially water from the wells.

I fear the aridity is encroaching into our Guinea savannah region. I fear that the rash and hostile weather condition of Gusau has trailed me back to Nasarawa state where I live with my family. Every day, I pray that the heat and scarcity of water is just a slight change in weather—nothing more, nothing less.

I began to notice these changes in my community at the beginning of the year when I returned home from a one-year stay in Lafia, another town kilometers away from where I reside with my family. I live in a rural community that is fast becoming urbanized, but without the necessary social amenities. Houses are cramped into each other and we rarely have electricity to cushion the effect of heat on us. Probably because my community is densely populated, with almost everyone racing against time to make ends meet, most people are too bothered by the economic unfriendliness of the country, to focus their attentions on the changes. But I noticed them within two weeks of my arrival.

Everywhere was dry, and the air was whitened with mist and dry cold in the morning and brown with dust in the evening. I knew these were the prominent features of harmattan, but I felt it was unlike the others that had preceded it. At the turn of February, the cold, misty morning left and was replaced by windy morning, stormy evening and hotter afternoons. And I began to long for the rainy season to arrive.

My mother used to say that it is the romance between the sky and the Earth that birth rain: each time the Earth blows the sky a kiss, she becomes too overwhelmed and shed down tears of joy. What happens to the romance during dry season, especially moments when there was no power and the room was very hot? I would ask. She would point out places that were still having rainfalls in the country. She also added that in her childhood days, they experienced longer rainy periods, and rivers hardly carted away valuables like a heartless thief. A lot of questions kept bothering me: does this indicate we would be experiencing shorter but destructive rains in the future? or dryer and intensely hot heat periods?

In answer to my questions, we experienced irregularities in rainfall—months that were known for intense rainfalls recorded not more than 10 rains, excluding rainshowers when it drizzles for hours non-stop, which was unlike it. To make matters worse, other neighbouring places and towns down the River Niger were having more rainfall than our town. Nma usually would quip, “See, the rain didn’t fall again. There is too much killings in Nigeria for God to send us rain.”

“But it rained in towns and villages closeby,” I would reply. “Besides, we are not the ones engaging in the killings for God to deny us rain.” I know she was aware of the changes in climatic conditions, but since she was raised in a Christian home, her only justification for it was tied down to religion: God’s wrath on man for turning their backs on him, just like Sodom and Gomorrah, just like in the times of Noah. She knows nothing about global warming as the cause of the ever-changing climate. She knows nothing about the imminent effects climate change will have on us, especially countries located below the sub-Saharan Africa. She knows nothing about how millions of Africans were encouraging desert encroachment by cutting down trees for diverse reasons. So I joined her to pray and longed for the rain so that we would have water in our wells and our crops would grow robustly.

During my undergraduate year in the University where I was pursuing a degree in Environmental Management, we were taught that trees contribute immensely to rainfall and its distribution across each region, reasons why the rainforest zone of Nigeria, with so many trees, experiences more rainfall than the savanna and arid regions of the country.

My residence posseses few of these natural components of the environment: few intermittent rivers and fewer scanty trees. In fact, the fewer trees that had survived deforestation in the past, especially big trees that took up space, were going down for new-erected buildings. Fruit trees were countable because of how they become prey to stubborn boys when they start fruiting. This has resulted in fewer trees and hotter afternoons with nowhere to cool off, so you are forced to remain in your hot room, enduring the heat if there is no electricity.

To cap it all, the most ugliest experience is water scarcity. Shortage of water has become a threat to society. Wells are drying up, and it felt like our well was the first to empty its waters. We began to source for water in other open wells around. The first two weeks, we fetched in the afternoon or morning, until the interest of other water searchers began to materialize on the open wells. There were days we would go to the wells to find them dry, dirty and almost empty.

We re-strategized and started fetching the water at dawn before everyone else woke up. But that didn’t help, because the water seemed to be dwindling in quantity by the day, with or without competition from others.

One hot afternoon in the middle of April, I came out to find water to cool off because the weather was considerably hot and saw some children moving to and fro like ants with pails of water of different sizes on their heads. I traced them to their source only to realize it was a pure water bottling company—Truine Bakery and Pure Water Company—that was giving out free water to people. I joined the queue immediately.

Children were stopped from playing and asked to join in fetching the water. Every drop was precious. Everything that had the capacity to hold water was to be filled. Every trip counted, and so the more the heads carrying buckets of water, the sooner the house gets filled with it. One woman even remarked that weren’t the children the ones who consumed water the more? I didn’t agree to that, but I said nothing, listening to the conversations and the women asking their children the same questions: Are all the drums in the house filled up? What of the ones outside?

Soon, it got to my turn, and I took the water home, informing everyone about the turn of events. We too soon came out with our buckets and anything that needed to be filled with water.

And that became our own water cycle system—women fetching water in the morning while children roamed around in the evening looking for water. During school vacation, the children were saddled with the duties of sourcing water no matter the distance.

At the beginning of 2023, I got a teaching job at a private secondary school close to where I reside. I find it really tasking, nurturing the future leaders of the country, but what I found more tasking was getting up very early for work after spending most parts of the nights fanning myself with an old magazine to assuage the heat and the body itching that follows to the barest minimum. At school, the other teachers and I usually inspect the children and accord severe punishment to the defaulters—those that are improperly dressed. It reduces the level of nonchalance and wayward dressing amongst the students. We do this every morning.

One fateful Monday morning towards the end of February, I was inspecting the children for improper dressing. A junior student was without her neck tie. I asked her, why didn’t you knot your tie? and she began to play with her fingers, whispering. I lowered myself to her face level, bringing my ears to her mouth. “My mother asked me not to because of my heat rashes.”

“Is that so?” I knew most of the students had series of pranks up their sleeves, so I called another student—a female—to check to see if it was true or not. They both returned, with the other student confirming the heat rashes. The intense heat of March and April was already rearing its ugly head during the cold harmattan season of February.

The changes are becoming more pronounced. The coldness hangs in the air in the morning, reluctant to leave. The scorching sun sizzles and claims dominance of the afternoon, keeping everyone indoors. Most evenings find mothers crooning for the children to leave the prevalent sandstorms when they are not searching for water. It is taking a toll on everyone.

Maybe one of these days, I will bring it up in my classes. They may have noticed the slight difference in the weather, and it would be a lot of help to them knowing measures that could help them in our climate changing world. It is not too late to teach them about tree planting and nurturing more trees. We all are stakeholders of the environment and it is our responsibility to preserve it. The future is ours to take, and unless we get it right now, the narrative will remain the same, even as the climatic condition continues to change.

Maud Powell

“Finding meaning in grief does not mean we’re over the loss or okay with the loss; it means we can find a way to honor the love, even in our pain.”

—David Kessler

Streaks of wet dirt mark the floor beneath our circle of chairs—a sure sign of farmers gathering during the Oregon winter. A vegetable grower laments the missing crawdads she once hunted with her father in Lake Washington as a child. A farm intern chokes up about a news story on rainwater no longer safe to drink. An older cattle rancher talks about relationships lost to the politics of climate change. “My nephew doesn’t call anymore,” his voice strains, but he tries to make light. “At least he’s stopped asking for money.”

I sit with these farmers, asking them to share their most personal climate losses. There’s the beloved hydrangea that perished in the heat dome of 2021. The centuries-old Western hemlock, shading generations of family picnics, that finally succumbed to beetle damage. Fireflies in the Midwest are now uncommon, one woman says.

“The most magical part of childhood . . . nearly gone.”

The lake where one rancher brought his kids to fish is now too warm to sustain vertebrates. I talk about leaving our farm, Wolf Gulch. Like waves pounding the shore, the losses are relentless, one after another, lined up beyond the horizon. We sit in collective heartbreak and I wonder if this gathering is helpful, healing. Afterall, my own climate grief feels oppressive at times.

My husband Tom and I first learned to farm in India’s high desert in 1997. Our host family irrigated fields of barley and potatoes from ancient ditches fed by glaciers. We fell in love with agriculture and, soon after, settled in Southern Oregon to start a farm. Our vision: to create a profitable business on marginal land—land on the edge—knowing that property with reliable water and fertile soil was becoming scarce. Humans need to get scrappy, we reasoned, and in our heady idealism, we thought we’d lead the way. We also believed that environmental problems could be traced, at least in part, to the hyper-mobility of our culture. It’s easier to wreck your own backyard if moving is an always an option. We vowed to pick a piece of ground and root down for the long haul.

We bought property in the Siskiyou Mountains, rough with steep slopes, weeds and brush. Wolf Gulch, the land’s water source and namesake, was intermittent, running underground for long stretches of the creek bed. Though the property was not considered farmland, we forged ahead. We dug three large ponds to collect winter rains and designed a gravity-fed irrigation system that required no electricity. Our daughter, Grace, was six months old when we moved there. Four years later, I gave birth to our son, Sam, in the bedroom of our house.

We embraced permaculture and applied its principles to our new farm. Permaculture, a holistic, nature-centered approach to stewarding property, aligned with our practical, ecological worldview. We purchased a subsoil plough and ripped furrows in the fields so the soil could hold more water. We learned to plough along the slope’s contour to encourage moisture to fan along the furrows and keep the soil in place.

That first fall, Tom and I found the property’s largest incense cedar. I craned my neck to see its tippy-top. Elegant branches of lacy needles dappled sunlight hitting the ground. We potted up scores of saplings from under its generous canopy and replanted some on a landslide to restabilize the hillside. Others went in hedgerows between the farm fields, a few into the ground torn by the heavy equipment used to build our ponds. Before long, that single incense cedar’s offspring grew all over the property, providing shade, habitat for songbirds, refuge from the wind, and a toehold for the soil.

Each fall, we seeded cover crops to help the soil hold more water. Thick, viny mats of crimson clover, hairy vetch, milky oats, and annual ryegrass blanketed the ground all winter, then, by late spring, decomposed into mounds of rich humous. Within ten years of production, our fields, once a heavy red clay, boasted a foot of black topsoil. Tom began to refer to the soil as his third child.

“Your favorite?” I teased.

We planted trees between fields to shield crops from the drying north wind. Hedgerows of conifers, fruit trees, and nitrogen-fixing shrubs provided food for us and the birds, as well as glorious summer shade. Permaculturalists call this ‘stacking functions’—one design feature that offers multiple, interconnected functions and benefits, creating a sort of ecological poetry. It’s an approach that is efficient, true and, in the end, beautiful.

Before we bought the property, Tom noticed a red fir growing in a gully. Red fir typically grow at higher elevations, above 4,000 feet, so it seemed out of place—a break in the forest’s pattern. I loved imagining how the fir came to live near our valley floor. I told Sam and Grace this story:

Perhaps a hundred years ago, a young woodrat lived on neighboring Red Mountain. One summer, a forest fire burned through her home as she was eating the seeds of a red fir cone. She fled the mountain with the cone in her mouth and found refuge on the slopes of the Little Applegate River. Once she saw the abundance of madrone berries, she dropped the fir cone. A seed from that cone grew into our beautiful tree.

Then came our first brush with drought. In 2001, the valley received a third of the average winter rainfall. Our ponds dried and cracked, rendering them useless as sieves. We invested in plastic pond-liners, an expensive but foolproof solution to the cracks. We transitioned to irrigating with drip tape, which uses about 30% of overhead irrigation. The pond liners worked, and we were back in business.

In those early years, I spent hours walking the landscape. I longed for intimacy with place. In 2003, Grace and I discovered western columbine growing under the incense cedar. Sam was not talking yet, likely asleep in a backpack or stroller. It was the only native columbine I’d seen growing on the property, so I made a habit of walking there each spring when it was in bloom, usually a week after lupine appeared along the ditch trail.

For the twenty-five years we lived at Wolf Gulch, we grew organic food for thousands of people and trained dozens of new farmers. We raised our children and created vast networks of human, animal, soil, and plant communities. In the winters, I directed community theater and organized neighborhood musical events in our little valley. Some winters brought less than average rainfall, but we’d made our farm resilient. Or so we believed.

Then several winters of low rainfall and months of record-breaking temperatures ensued and the creek dried up completely. Tom kept the crops irrigated by shortening watering intervals and harvesting early. We transitioned from growing vegetables for a Community Supported Agriculture program to growing vegetable and flower seeds, both of which need less irrigation in late summer. We chose the seed varieties labeled drought-tolerant. We adapted. We made do.

The next few winters passed without much rain. April, notoriously damp and cool, teemed with brilliant, sun-drenched days above eighty degrees. While acquaintances marveled at the dreamy weather, a pit lodged in my stomach. One night that month, lying in bed, Tom told me that some of the trees in our forest were stressed. Drought and beetles.

“The incense cedar and red fir are both dead,” he said, voice flat.

I had stopped visiting those trees once the kids grew into teens, preferring instead to hike up on the ditch trails. But they held such fond memories and were fixtures in Sam and Grace’s early childhoods. It was like the news of losing close relatives.

We began to notice scores of Douglas firs dying in the woodlot. I prayed for a wetter May. One blustery Wednesday afternoon, we received a tenth of an inch of rain. June 2021 marched in with the ponds lower than ever and alarming forecasts. An unprecedented heatwave arrived. Medford hit 117°. Atmospheric conditions created huge areas of sweltering heat trapped under a high-pressure “dome”. For twenty-five days straight, the high temperature did not fall below 95.

Tom moved into triage mode, stretching the last of our water to keep plants alive. We took unheard-of measures—using a domestic well to irrigate commercial crops and buying water from town. Trucks rumbled up our half-mile driveway to deliver a few meager inches to the ponds. Farming is notoriously hard. We always knew that. Add drought and relentless heat, and the work becomes demoralizing and untenable.

In July, Tom leaned against the kitchen counter. It was after dark. He looked depleted.

“It’s too hard,” he said. “I think we need to move if we want to keep farming.”

I’d thought the hardest parts of our work were over—raising kids and building a business. We’d invested everything into our family, farm and land. Now what?

I wanted to persevere as we always had. In August, I lay awake wondering how we could store more water. Maybe we could collect rain from our roofs during the winter . . . but the tanks only hold 2,000 gallons each. What if we pumped rainwater from the tanks into our ponds all winter long, every time they fill? I shook Tom awake, eager to talk. He was confused and groggy until I explained my idea.

“It’s a good idea,” he said. “But I already do that.”

Our neighbors rallied around us, offering leases, leads on property, and boundless empathy. Still, I remained terrified. All the work we’d done to protect and steward Wolf Gulch, the lengths we’d gone to store water—none of it could shield us from climate collapse. We were left with the difficult question of where to call home.

Meanwhile, in India, the farmers who mentored us were no better off. They faced the disappearance of glaciers that fed their ditches. Our grief, shared with farmers around the world, means less food security everywhere, and the unraveling of once-vibrant agricultural communities.

The mental health impacts of climate change on the general population are well-documented, but with little attention on rural, agricultural populations1. Also, farmers are less inclined to seek out support and mental health services than the general population2. Yet we are perhaps the most vulnerable to climate anxiety and grief—our attention is fixated on the weather. We spend our days interacting with plants and animals and notice even subtle changes in the environment. We also suffer from excessive heat, more extreme weather events, and wildfire smoke.

Grief most commonly involves the loss of a loved one. In complicated deaths like murder, accidents, and suicide, grievers often experience anger, powerlessness, and regret. Why did this happen? What could I have done to prevent it? Ecological losses are similarly complicated. One moment we rage at politicians and oil companies, the next feel guilt for personal choices, and the next: abject horror in the face of scientists’ predictions. Parents and grandparents agonize over the losses to come.

Tom and I grappled with our future while the heat dome held fast. We had to face it: The forest was dying. The creek would not return. We needed to leave. I learned that British Petroleum knew and intentionally covered up the severity of climate change for thirty years. Rage. Then, guilt: Wolf Gulch was on hospice, and we were abandoning it to face its end alone. Only heartless cowards leave a person on their deathbed. I could barely keep track of my internal landscape—the cascade of emotional states shifted by the hour.

Some griefs are more acknowledged than others. All cultures have rituals for the death of a family member. Of course, this doesn’t make the loss of a loved one easy, but the social support provides a space and tools for the griever. Other losses are not as communally acknowledged, do not have avenues for expression or even a shared vocabulary. This is known as disenfranchised grief. Climate grief is considered a disenfranchised grief because in most cases, social and cultural supports for processing it does not exist. We are in new territory.

My dear friend Zoe, a mental health counselor and staffing manager for a climate foundation, offered to lead a ceremony at Wolf Gulch before we moved. Twenty close friends and neighbors gathered at our house and hiked to the dead incense cedar in silence. We took turns sharing memories about our time on the farm. Zoe led me through a ritual of shattering a ceramic bowl with four hammer blows, each blow a specific loss— the loss of my children’s home, the loss of land that fed us, the loss of trees, and the loss of the creek. I kept the shards, and next year, I will reassemble them using gold glue in the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi. Kintsugi represents non-attachment, acceptance of change, and taking the pieces of our grief and reassembling them with care and beauty.

Climate grief is overwhelming in part because it is ongoing. Losses are cumulative. We have already lost so much, we hardly dare fathom what’s to come. Climate therapists encourage grievers to break through the numbness by articulating one specific loss. Focusing on a single grief—giving space to acknowledge both the gratitude and grief for a place, plant or animal, is a way to catch the tail of the massive climate grief beast. From there, we can begin to feel more, connect with others, and act.

During the ceremony, we honored the red fir and the incense cedar. Those trees helped me find my bearings in a sea of Doug fir and ponderosa pine. They’d sparked my imagination and my children’s. The cedar has become a snag, home to millions of insects and dozens of birds. Grace, now a biologist managing piñon pine forests in northern New Mexico for climate adaption, cored the cedar and told us its life story in rings, precipitation, and heat units. The fir is now a nurse log. In the coming years, plants will sprout along the decomposing bark of its flank. My friends and neighbors thanked us for the chance to acknowledge climate loss in community. I was heartened by the honest expressions, deep sense of solidarity, and ritual.

The month before we moved, my childhood best friend Jess asked me to send her a Ziploc of Wolf Gulch soil. Jess teaches ceramics for a living in a small town in Vermont. A few weeks later, she mailed me back a vase made from the soil. The vase’s outside is rough, simple, and scored, the inside beautifully glazed with swirling green and blue. It sits in the windowsill of our new farmhouse.

Back in our circle, the farm intern wipes his face and looks around. His eyes say it all— “This is so much. Too much, maybe.”

A natural human response to unresolved loss is “numbing out” and paralysis. Let’s face it—climate change is terrifying. So the impulse is understandable. But researchers tell us that people who speak openly about their climate distress are more resilient, more likely to act, and benefit from connecting to others. We need to find ways to talk about it. Especially farmers.

I switch gears.

“We’re all resilient,” I say. “Or we wouldn’t be here in this room. We wouldn’t still be farming.”

The flower grower says she lobbies her county politicians. “Local is where we can make a difference.”

The vegetable grower uses breathing techniques to regulate her nervous system. One man plants native trees to feel better.

“I go to the gym,” a beekeeper quips.

An urban farmer engages in guerilla wildflower planting—throwing handfuls of seed into empty lots and waiting to see what emerges in spring.

“It gives me hope for unexpected outcomes,” they say.

Another woman tells us a story—she had been farming with a group of friends in California in 2016 when a catastrophic wildfire scattered them to different places. Whenever she smells smoke and her lungs ache, she texts her friends from the California days. It’s her cue to stay in touch. The rancher admits that he sometimes hugs his cows for solace.

We are in this together, and we’re more resilient when we speak openly about how climate change is affecting us.

In 2020, David Kessler, a colleague and collaborator of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, added a sixth stage to the lexicon of grief: meaning-making. Kessler argues that finding meaning beyond the stages of grief most of us are familiar with—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience.

Holding climate grief conversations with other farmers has given me a chance to transform my loss into something vital. The response has been overwhelmingly positive—any reluctance to talk quickly melts into connection and empathy. After the gatherings, farmers exchange numbers and ask when we can meet again. By sharing the specificity of our love—for fireflies, crawdads, hydrangea, an ancient incense cedar—and by witnessing each other’s loss and resilience, we find greater meaning in our grief and harvest the energy we’ll need to keep farming.

Tom reminds me that Wolf Gulch was never ours, that we took on the exquisite burden of stewarding it for twenty-five years, but of course it will carry on without us. The land will be here long after we are gone. We leased farm property from friends down the road, moved closer to town, and plan to sell Wolf Gulch next spring. We are still farming.

Now it’s Grace who tells me a story, a new narrative about how the forest is not dying but changing. The red fir and incense cedar may have died, but others will come to replace them in time. Animals, like the woodrat from Red Mountain, and the wind, will carry the seeds and acorns of piñon pine, manzanita and black oak—trees that are better suited to heat and drought. They will take root and build lives at Wolf Gulch. The forest is adapting. There is a new generation leading the way.

Sources

1. Howard, M., Ahmed, S., Lachapelle, P., & Schure, M. B. (2020). Farmer and rancher perceptions of climate change and their relationships with mental health. Journal of Rural Mental Health, 44(2), 87—95. https://doi.org/10.1037/rmh0000131.

2. Hagen, B. N. M. et al. “Farmers Aren’t into the Emotions and Things, Right?”: A Qualitative Exploration of Motivations and Barriers for Mental Health Help-Seeking among Canadian Farmers. JOURNAL OF AGROMEDICINE, [s. l.], 2021. DOI 10.1080/1059924X.2021.1893884. 

Purbasha Roy

It is my good fortune to have seen elephants from childhood. Many would imagine I had grown up near a sanctuary, but that wasn’t the case. We lived by an iron-ore mine, and forests surrounded every colony we lived in. The townships we lived in were made by cutting through forests and hills. The roads consisted of ups and downs. Walking with our heavy school bags always felt cumbersome. Life was difficult but enjoyable before internet culture swiped the whole earth inside itself.

The truth is, I lived among elephants since my early days, from when a child begins to pile moments as memory alive, still breathing. We lived in a lowland house. It took about fifteen cement stairs to reach the front garden of our house. In the autumn, when the festivities began, the mahouts came riding, asking for money, rice, potatoes in exchange for the elephants to raise their trunks. And to give rides, especially to the little children. What everyone knew was that the mahouts came from some far state of India. One sweet thing was that each elephant had a name. The mahouts called them by it like humans. Usually they came in numbers of three or four. Every mahout had his own elephant.

I was maybe seven or eight years old. My mother had everything prepared, along with vermilion to smear on the elephant’s trunk, for doing so was considered to bring good luck to the family. Maa asked me to accompany her, though I was very scared of its large, large size. Maybe Maa was trying to remove the fear from me. I went along with her till the lowest stair and stood there unable to go closer. I watched her apply vermilion to its trunk. Then she descended and handed me the bowl containing the jute bag she brought to give the mahout, and returned, forwarding the bag towards the elephant. The elephant understood this and raised the bag to the mahout. After the mahout emptied the bag, the elephant brought it down, placed it in Maa’s hands. The mahout kept exhorting me to have a short ride, saying it won’t harm you. It loves children. I kept nodding my head, no. After the elephant left, I felt relieved, the way a climber feels hugging a tree that still stands stoic after a storm has passed by. One thing that attracted me was the elephant’s small eyes and what I felt were dried tears. This made me ask my mother, does it cry, because its body is tied? Maa must’ve answered something to pacify me. I don’t remember her words. That incident then, now a memory, is as precious to me as light is to a pane of glass.

I was probably ten when, one evening during summer vacation, we heard chaos. We lived in double-lined, single-family detached quarters. The quarters were on either side of the roads, and faced each other. The houses were in a seesaw pattern, ours on the lower end, the road running through the middle. Each quarter had enough space to grow tropical trees and plants. Ours was filled with guava, blackberry and mango trees, many plants like hibiscus of different varieties, and marigolds and common day flowers. In the rainy seasons, the rose balsams filled up whatever space was left vacant.

Between our quarter and another ran a pitch road through which the elephants passed. Following my brother, we both sisters mounted on the iron gate to get a clear view of the road ascending to another colony as they walked through it. In the middle of the elephants’ course was a home that had a huge jackfruit tree with ripening harvest. The elephants broke its tall branches so easily, one wouldn’t believe it if not witnessed. This was very new to us. Our whole colony was stunned by this adventurous happening. No one dared to close in on the elephants until two motorcyclists, being oversmart, passed them at a close distance. Something thrilling always has a risk factor. This angered the female elephant, for the way she turned to face them was quicker than two blinks. Slowly, after eating whatever they could find from the quarter gardens, they moved onwards, on their way to their home: the forest surrounding our place.

As the elephants discovered our colony could provide food to satisfy their hunger, their visits became frequent. They went where they chose with a large number of human eyes on them. Something strange happened: the dogs began barking at the elephants whenever they came. It was believed that this was an instinctual anxious response for the perceived threat from those tall and heavy animals. Another belief was that dogs bark out of excitement. Whatever the reason, the commotion heightened and took time to quieten down.

Often we planned outings to the local bazaar to buy things or to visit the small eateries present here. This place in its smallness contained everything at a walkable distance, one small market and every shop confined at a single place. The news of the elephants’ arrival at any corner of the town spread very fast. We had to cancel our plans for the elephants’ presence here and there.

After several visits with his mate, the male elephant began coming alone. Who was there to tell us what fate had the female elephant met? Or had it gone to some other forest? The male elephant would eat what it found and then leave; this occurred so often that everyone’s interest dwindled, only remaining cautious of its presence for safety.

After the long vacation of almost two months, our school reopened. We saw a house wall broken down on our way to school. The hole on it seemed like a big, unrefined O. Our friends told us the family that lived there made rice beer in large quantities. The elephant had broken into the stock room and drunk all of it. We had the knowledge that rice beer made people drunk. This was a common phenomenon here. Sadly, many families suffered ill health, poverty and anxiety because of it. Our young minds contemplated how the elephant must’ve walked drunk. We laughed beyond our bodies. Now after years, I feel the horror of what could’ve happened that didn’t. The elephant’s large trunk encroaching on the room—what if someone was sitting inside and the elephant got hold of the person? These kinds of incidents made us learn to adjust to their arrivals, though the elephants were not mentioned in the newspapers, only in pamphlets circulated by the company’s head among the employees, requesting them and their families to be wary of the elephant’s presence.

Eventually, the people began cutting down trees that bore fruits the elephants loved. How this process of cutting down trees began I don’t know. Maybe the way the elephants disheveled the tree branches inspired someone to cut down the entire tree. And then this became a common reaction to the elephants’ intrusions. With no food supply to settle its hunger, the male elephant lessened its visits. This continued for a span of four or five years, and then its arrivals ceased. We sometimes talked about it, and then we forgot in life’s busyness.

With time, my siblings and I had to relocate to nearby towns for our higher education. Once, returning, we happened to hire a car. It was noon in the hot month of May. Suddenly, we saw a large male elephant reaching into the back of a truck. We saw it was pulling out gunny bags filled with potatoes. This had created a traffic jam. Baba told the driver and us to close the car windows. Power windows were not very common in those days. The driver had little experience regarding this, as he was coming down from a city. We did, and began sweating, but there was no other way. Baba told us, it’s the same elephant that roamed in our colony. We saw the truck’s driver and the helper standing on the sidewalk cutting sad faces. We felt bad for them, and simultaneously for the elephant? How hungry he was. His hunger had forced him out of the receding forestline. We humans have a composite architecture. We desire almost everything, and at the same time we want nature to achieve compatibility with our actions. How is a balance possible when one is stretched beyond the margins?

My brother asked, “How do you know, Baba, it’s the same elephant?”

Baba answered, “Here, these days, a forest officer has been appointed.” He had told someone my Dad knew. This male elephant leads a solitary life. It roams, eats whatever it finds and then returns back to the forest. It is not harmful, but it’s better to take precautions, the forest officer had added to his advice for common people.

The next day, the newspaper headlines read, “New traffic police in town. What dedication!” The photograph was of the elephant eating potatoes. Accompanying it was another photograph of the gunny bags scattered around the vehicle. This kind of news became frequent, so we began to make our journeys by train.

In my sophomore year at senior college, one day the newspaper headline read, “The traffic police has been electrocuted”. There was no nearby utility pole, just a tall bamboo stalk dug into the earth. This narrated the whole story. The headline broke our hearts. Many days of our lives which the elephant had filled now felt emptied in a moment. The elephant’s tusks had been removed. Overnight, the poachers had taken them. Maybe it was they who had frightened it, to fulfill their malicious plans.

I don’t know where the tusks are now, what artifacts have been made out of them. If it was a cold-blooded murder, are the people who committed it behind bars? Or are they still roaming in search of another innocent animal to die in their trap just so that they can make a few more bucks. Bugs? Yes, actually bugs, not the hard-earned money people earn legitimately. Criminals such as them have minds filled with poisonous bugs.

Of course, we have stayed in close proximity to nature. We have seen wild boars, various kinds of snakes, velvet spiders, to name a few. Now too, a wide ground lies before the quarters of the flat we stay in, though there’s no wilderness. Grasses grow in their own way, then fawn, and then again in monsoons they turn green; a cycle to which the eyes, the body have got habituated. Some days, we go for walks along it. It’s nice and soothing, but not what it used to be in childhood, the forestline and the magic of living around it. The varieties of black-colored bird, carnivorous, feed themselves termites from the holes present at one end of our garden. The others were the large-sized cranes that stayed in the high-altitude trees: what did they eat? From where had they arrived in our township? No one had any idea. They just arrived and settled at my place. We didn’t have a camera, so after several Google searches, we couldn’t find out. Now, they are nowhere to be seen.

But more than anything we have seen or encountered, the elephants were the most memorable part of our lives since childhood. Seeing any elephant on the screen or in sanctuaries conjures up the ones we saw.