Sitting Down to Dinner with Ecogrief:
Breaking bread for the loss of places, species, and planet in the wake of the 2018 U.N. Report
There’s a place I always go when I’m home called Soberanes Canyon.
In one of the canyons shooting off from Highway 1 on the road down to Big Sur, there’s a hike you can take through a redwood grove and up a ridge to a stunning view of the Pacific, before switch-backing down the ocean-facing side to the coast line. We started hiking it as a family about 20 years ago, and it’s become the kind of place that is a household name, a frequent destination, a family friend. It’s been the place for post-Thanksgiving hikes, post-break up hikes, and the place to take friends from out of town. When our dad died of cancer, it was a place my siblings and I went for quiet and forced deep breaths up mountainsides. I’d bring my journal and sit cross legged once I got to the top, and write letters updating him on life in his absence. My sister still carries her guitar to write songs by the creek that runs down the center of the canyon, with some side-eye from the serious hikers. When my therapist asked where I feel most safe, myself, all-of-the-good-things, a bend in that particular trail lined with redwoods is what came to mind.
And it burned. Or at least I thought it had. In the summer of 2016, flames exploded throughout Soberanes and surrounding canyons, taking down 180,000 acres — about the size of ten Manhattans. Sixty homes were destroyed. There was one human casualty, and the oldest, largest Madrone tree known to man was another. $260 million dollars later, the Soberanes Canyon fire was (at the time) the most expensive wildfire to fight in US history.
It was the same headline that has appeared more times than I can keep track of in the years since. The result of an illegal campfire, fueled by drought-drained undergrowth, the epic tinder box that California has become. The New York Times reported that “research found that wildfires are likely to worsen if steps are not taken to tame climate change.” Summer season is now fire season. Welcome to our new normal.
Once the trail re-opened, I learned that the real life fern gullies and creeks and old redwoods I had grown so close to were actually okay. The fire had mowed down the top of the ridge, but hadn’t descended into this one canyon. Visiting on a date, I fought back the feelings that were coming when we turned the bend that had come to mind in my therapist’s office. I was surprised at the relief I felt, and the refrain that went through my mind — “Good to see you, friends.” I sat down, and surprised the shit out of myself, and my now boyfriend, by putting my head in my hands and starting to cry.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve gotten close to the mechanics, the spirit, the tides, the chaos, the dynamism of grief. Through being with my dad as he was dying, and in co-founding The Dinner Party, a community of thousands of millennials who gather for potlucks to talk about their own experience with loss, how we sit with goodbyes has become one of the biggest and most captivating teachers in my life. And on that needle-padded trail, in the shade of branches on branches of boughs, my cocktail of emotions was weirdly familiar. This too was grief.
It didn’t take long for my inner judge and cultural conditioning to kick in. This is some Portlandia, hippie, “Libtard” stuff. This is some privileged, heterosexual, upper middle class, white-women-from-cities-who-like-to-hike shit. My 20:20 vision eyes rolled at my third eye real hard. I could feel my Brooklyn lineage that loved teasing me about my Californianisms, my on-again-off-again vegetarianism, loving the scene of me not just hugging, but crying over trees. In a word, a part of me responded to the grief I felt for this place with a real dose of fuggedaboutit
But what I was feeling was real. Real tears, and real heaviness of heart, and that really great feeling after a good cry. And believe me or not, it unfortunately is or likely will be real for you at some point too. The mental health impact of climate change — and our likelihood of grieving a place, a species, or way of life, or a future, related to environmental shifts — isn’t quickly becoming not an “if” but a “when.”
So much of our attention and energy around climate change has (understandably so) gone to the analytical: Al Gore’s charts, heat maps, data and policy. We’ve been busy arguing over who’s right or wrong, what’s real or not (🙄), tradeoffs and tariffs and technology. But while we’ve been busy dealing with the “tangible” stuff, there’s been a cost to our inner worlds, our communities, and things much harder to measure. Suicide rates are rising in correlation with temperatures. Negative news about the environment impacts the emotional wellbeing of 72% of millennials and over half of people aged over 45. Alongside the UN report from earlier this month, another key report was released, indicating that the impacts of climate change are likely to undermine mental health through a whole variety of ways we’re not even aware of yet.
And a real big slice of that pie is related to grief — of places, of species, of ways of life, of identities. Scientist Ashlee Consulo defines ecological grief as “the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.” My episode in the redwood grove? Not just a case of feminine hysterics. It was something that we’re probably going to be feeling a whole helluva lot more of as we learn not just how to stop climate change, but how to adapt to life on a warmer planet. And keep in mind, eco-grief as we’ve been referring to it, is a disenfranchised grief. It’s not held equally. The nations that have contributed the least amount to climate change are the ones on the cusp of being the most impacted. Homes and sacred places will be gone in this lifetime. See: Climate Justice Movement. Don’t look away.
While there are no climate scientists or environmental experts on The Dinner Party team by any stretch of our already quite wild imaginations, we do know what to do when there’s grief in the picture, and when there are conversations that are important but not being had. We’ve been building a new way, that’s actually quite an old way, of helping nurture communities of care for people who’ve experienced loss. Getting people to sit down, break bread, and talk about the subjects that can make us feel the most isolated — and see what sorts of friendships and stories come out the other end.
And, it’s working. Buzzfeed recommended us as the #1 thing to do while grieving, and in a recent survey from our participants, we heard that 3 out 4 respondents agree The Dinner Party has been a transformational experience. 96% would recommend it to a friend.
After my day up Soberanes Canyon, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether The Dinner Party could also convene conversations about loss of place and environment, whether from a specific environmental disaster like wildfires or hurricanes, or as a conversation more broadly. So we got to testing, and did what we know how to do best: dinner.
On a Saturday afternoon in Portland, I set unlit candles down a long table in a wooded backyard.
Our host and my co-conspirator Tom De Blasis — had opened up his home— for an evening we called An Honoring of the Trees: Life after the Eagle Creek Fire. The Eagle Creek Fire has burned a collective 50,000 acres of old growth forest in the late summer of last year. Over a busy Labor Day weekend, a 15 year old threw a firecracker from a trail, and off it went. No humans were killed, but four buildings were burnt, and it wiped out an incredibly pristine National Scenic Area that had been a precious retreat for so many.
Tom and I connected through a mutual friend, and he shared his frustration and sadness around the fires — with so much of the conversation sticking to the legal and justice aspects of the “case” (i.e. what the kid’s punishment should be, how much he should “owe” for setting off the blaze, etc.) and so little going to people’s personal relationship to the place and real grief over it being gone. It was hard to talk about the emotional side — some people got it, others uncomfortably brushed it off. So he had remained mostly quiet — the same kind of conspiracy of silence that leaves so many people with bit tongues and loneliness after a death loss, too. We decided to convene people who felt like they were grieving the loss of this place on the year anniversary of the fires to talk about what that year had held.
We started the day with a hike to the recently re-opened Herman Creek Trail, an area with “mild to moderate damage.” It was eerily quiet, with acres of singed trunks. Now, we were sitting down to our first dinner party to talk about the fires, and how everyone was doing with life “back to normal”, whatever normal meant to them now.
We kicked it off with some Cheryl Strayed, who ended her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail made famous in her book Wild in Eagle Creek.
I’ve watched with horror and heartbreak as the beautiful wilderness of the Columbia River Gorge has burned over these past several days. It’s still burning. Still expanding. Still raging into more beauty and life. The fire has decimated, among many other things, the trail and forest along Eagle Creek that I wrote about in the final chapter of Wild. It was ignited (by fireworks, lit and lobbed into the brush by a group of teenagers) very near the spot where I slept on the final night of my hike. I remember waking at dawn that last day on the trail and lying on my tarp, staring at the silhouettes of the endless, enormous trees against the morning sky and thinking, This. I will always have this.
Those trees are dead now. That forest won’t return to its full bloom again in my lifetime.
So many of my friends in real life and on social media have written about how devastated they feel about this fire. Lots of us consider the Columbia River Gorge our sacred ground — one friend called it her church. My heart is with you.
So many people have spent hours and days working to fight this fire and to help the people and animals directly impacted by it, and also to protect the buildings in its ever-shifting path. My gratitude to you for your service and sacrifice.
So many people have asked me to write about the fire and I can’t yet. I need to think a good while about what the loss of those trees means to me and to us — us in the Portland area, us in the Pacific Northwest, us in the United States, us in the world. It means something, but it’s too fresh for me to express yet what it is. I can’t spin it into metaphor or meaning; can’t claim that it’s anything but what it feels to me to be right now: a tremendous loss, wrapped around the realization that I was wrong. We won’t always have this.
Our guests that night were a mixed bunch. Some of the guests included: Author Apricot Irving, who evacuated from her home in the Columbia River Gorge and later wrote an in-depth reported piece on the fires; a woman who had moved back to the Portland area recently, and had struggled to read reports of the fires from her home-at-the-time in Austin, TX; and someone who had recently driven through the fires near Yosemite just a few days before, which brought lots of memories and anxieties flooding back.
The candles we set out became a way of physically introducing fire into — or omitting fire from — the conversation. As each guest shared their names, and what brought them to the table, and “where they were at” with the fires a year later, they could also chose to light — or leave unlit — the candle in front of them. Little, non-verbal touches can go a long way in communicating things that sometimes feel bigger than words.
And from there, the conversation covered all kinds of ground. There was laughter, and tears. And surprisingly to me, so many of the same themes that show up around our death grief dinners got passed around the table. Regret at having not been a more frequent visitor to the Gorge, and a bucket-list of places we might want to go before they’re gone. The frustration and isolation that came with friends questioning feelings of grief related to the fires, and the story of “get over it” that came from people without the same emotional connection to the place. The surreal feeling when roads opened back up and life “went back to normal” but the mountains were still smoking. The upcoming workshop on Living With Fire being led by a community group, and what it implies to accept that we now live with fire.
Later that week, I sat down with a different crew, co-hosted with Amelia Barlow and Matthew Stepka in San Francisco. Timed for the eve of the Global Climate Action Summit, we invited folks to “join us for a shared meal and a chance to talk not about the policies, strategies or science of the world around us, but about the emotional, social, and spiritual effects of eco-grief.”
This group was a mix of climate activists from organizations like Sierra Club, Avaaz, The Nature Conservancy — and folks not working directly on, but definitely climate-adjacent and concerned. We even had a guest decide to make the trip from Chicago — as an environmental activist, the personal struggle she had felt following the election was finally explicable to her with the language around eco-grief. The conversation touched on the increasingly complicated relationship to parenthood — and whether its responsible to bring new life into the world, and the heartache in that tradeoff; how people in the climate movement keep hope, and motivate teams, in the face of daunting data and political setbacks. And we talked about how the planet’s strength, and her ability to shake us off like a bad cold is a serious complexity to hold. We ended the evening around a fire pit til the wee hours, always a sign of a good conversation had.
In both of these evenings, we weren’t action planning or to-do-listing, but really listening. We were telling the parts of our stories that rarely get to see the light of day, and being witnessed in that. We were sitting with the unprecedented challenges we’re faced with, and not avoiding the fact at they’re leaving some of us feeling isolated, hopeless, or screwed. And while it might seem like fluff, making space to metabolize the fear, guilt, and grief around these topics may be the only way move past paralysis and into sustainable action.
In a trip back to Soberanes Canyon, I noticed the hillsides that burned the worst starting to fill in, and how plenty of people were back enjoying the trails. Nature has an amazing way of being resilient, and so do we.
But there’s a sense that — with the release of the recent UN report, and Hurricane Michael’s tear through the Southeastern United States — there isn’t a pretty bow to tie around all this. After these pilots, I’m also aware that there’s a lot unpacking to do — personally, and with one another — as we sit with what being half a degree closer to global warming really means. And what the description of our world as one with “worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population” — implies for our lives, and the places that keep us living.
We’re not climatologists or disaster recovery experts or people with MDs behind out name, but we are raising our hands to share what we’ve learned about grief on a human level to grief on this scale. We’re looking for partners to join us. If you work with a community that might want to host this kind of conversation, let’s talk about teaming up. If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what we’re doing, sign up here or below.
And in the meantime, here’s our manifesto, for those of you who are feeling it. You are not alone.
Sign up to stay in the loop on our work around loss of place and eco grief:
About The Dinner Party:
The Dinner Party is a community of mostly 20- and 30-somethings who’ve each experienced significant loss, and connect around potluck Dinner Parties to talk about it. We’re working to turn loss from a conversation-stopper to a conversation-starter, with the goal of transforming our most isolating experiences into sources of meaningful connection and forward movement.
We foresee a day in which people find amidst their deepest struggle the source of their deepest strength by connecting with others who’ve been there too, in an environment that’s accessible and familiar, and marked by deep connections over time; a day in which grief is free of stigma and silence; and in which those who’ve lived through loss or hardship, whatever its form, are recognized not as objects of pity, but as better listeners and better leaders, characterized by profound empathy, resilience, agency, and a commitment to living a life of meaning.
Since January 2014, we’ve grown from a few dozen people to more than 4,000, who meet regularly at 235 tables in 110 cities and towns worldwide.
Through The Dinner Party Labs, we’re experimenting with applying the methodology and spirit of having hard conversations about death and grief, to the loss of other things we hold dear. This September, we prototyped a series of dinners to explore loss of the environment — specific places and the climate more broadly — and the grief, shame, and other complicated emotions that come with it. It’s born from our desire to create spaces for the conversations that weigh on us but that can be hard to voice, to build the kinds of friendships that only #realtalk can bring, and deepen our inner-resources so that we can do a better job of living on and fighting for a changing planet.
