How We Grieve a Changing California

Episode Transcript

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Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. Yearly wildfires weren’t really a thing that I remember worrying about growing up in California. But I remember clearly when that shift happened for me back in 2017 when Napa and Sonoma counties were on fire. There have been so many fires since then. So what does it mean to witness that shift that’s happening? How do we wrestle with the fear and the uncertainty of what’s to come? To know and also accept that our beautiful state is not only changing, but in danger.

Erica Hellerstein: I was thinking about how I was kind of nostalgic for this other time, sort of this period of my childhood where I could live here without being perpetually afraid of fire.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That’s what today’s episode is about. You’re going to hear from investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein, who wrote a piece called Grieving California for Coda Story in 2022. Erica talks about how we grieve the California we once knew and how we can use that grief to fuel us.

Erica Hellerstein: California has always been sort of at the front lines of change demographically in the U.S., but also politically, Culturally, like we’ve always kind of experienced things a little bit earlier than other parts of the country. And you could definitely say the same is true of the impacts of climate change. 2020, I was around Truckee. There was a fire and it was very smoky and it was in August. I was walking my dog. There weren’t very many people. There was very heavy smoke. It wasn’t advisable to be out. And there was a man out, like sort of at the Bank of Donner Lake, just looking around in disbelief.

Erica Hellerstein: And he was from there and he’d grown up there and like this was very much, you know, his home. And he could not understand what was happening. I remember we had a conversation and he just kept repeating like, it’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to be like this. He was, you know, an adult older man. And just seeing that like visible anxiety and frustration and confusion and anger like all coming together just at the banks of Donner Lake in this moment. When he was going through it, like really embodied what a lot of people were going through and and feel like this is not how it’s supposed to be.

Erica Hellerstein: And yet, if you choose to stay in wherever it is, that might be how it is. That might be what the future is like. And like, what do you do with that? In 2021. I was just thinking about seasons and how my relationship to seasons in California felt like it was changing because in the past, growing up in the Bay Area, I always thought of that sort of like September-October period as the best time and in the bay because it was finally hot now. I was always absolutely terrified of those. Like I was feeling really scared because there’s this certainty that there will be fires.

Erica Hellerstein: I think a lot of people now approach that time of year with a lot of fear. And so I was just like, Huh, that’s interesting that my relationship with seasons feels so different, and I wonder if other people feel that way. And so I just kind of started talking to my friends about it. But I was thinking about how I was kind of nostalgic for this other time and nostalgia for, you know, sort of this period of my childhood where I could live here without being perpetually afraid of fire, literally just typed into Google. Like nostalgia, sadness, fire, just to be like, who’s talking about this? Because I also just didn’t feel like it was something I was hearing about.

Erica Hellerstein: Like we obviously heard about environmental consequences of fire and climate change and the physical health consequences. But the mental health part of it, like it was just not something that I felt like I had been exposed to conversations about that. So lo and behold, I found that there was this really interesting environmental philosopher who came up with his own word to describe the feeling of homesickness when you never leave. So the word is called “solastalgia,” Glenn Albrechtt, who’s this environmental philosopher, came up with that.

Erica Hellerstein: The way that he described this, you know, homesickness for a home you’ve never left because it’s changing so much due to the environment and climate change. Knowing that there’s someone else who felt the same way and felt that it was so urgent to come up with language to describe it felt very validating to me, like, I’m not the only person who feels this way. And I also began to learn that there was this very like new group of people that I had never heard about who were God, I guess I call them the climate givers, but they’re involved in this climate grief movement where they believe that grieving losses associated with climate change are very crucial to actually dealing with it.

Erica Hellerstein: I met with some of them and learned about their processes and they enter sort of a ten step program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. And the idea is to get people comfortable with thinking about the grief that they feel associated with fires and climate change and ultimately lead up to action, but that you can’t necessarily start with action if you haven’t begun to accept the grief that you feel.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Step one Accept the severity of the predicament. Step two be with uncertainty. Step three Honor my mortality and the mortality of all. Step four Do inner work. Step five Develop awareness of biases and perception. Step six Practice Gratitude. Witness beauty and create connections. Step seven Take breaks and rest. Step eight Grieve the harm I have caused. Step nine Show up. And step ten Reinvest in meaningful efforts.

Erica Hellerstein: I definitely identified with some of these steps and talked to people who started. The first step, which I found really profound, was just accept the severity of the crisis. And that is such a difficult thing for a lot of people to do because once you accept this, it’s like, what then? It’s accepting that the lives that we remembered from our childhood like that may not be the lives that our children have. And what do you do with that? Based on a lot of conversations I had with people, that’s kind of the hardest place to start.

Erica Hellerstein: But there’s something very unburdening as well about it, because part of it is that people don’t really talk about this that much. We grieve people we love when they die, and these wild places we love are dying and changing and like, why would we not be very sad about that? Why would we not be mourning? When I was in the depths of grief over the suicide of my best friend, I finally, like went to therapy after, like way too long, something my therapist said, which, you know, took me like, a long time to absorb, was you’ll miss how much you’re grieving because it’s an expression of how close you feel to this person right now.

Erica Hellerstein: And so there’s sort of this parallel, like the more acute the grief is, the more connected to the person you’re grieving. You feel because it’s closer to the loss, the grief that you feel is an expression also of your closeness to this place and how much you love it. And I did a lot of my interviews with people who are involved in the climate grieving movement. I just told them to bring me to a place where they feel their grief most acutely. And so we would go to these trails or the mountains or the ocean. And I’d never sort of intentionally gone to that space, those kinds of spaces, thinking about grief and climate change.

Erica Hellerstein: And it totally changed my experience. But I also felt like it was very important because it made me understand the stakes and think about the stakes differently. At a certain point in that arc of grief, I had to be like, okay, I really now do need to accept that this is a real loss. And now my acceptance of the loss means that I have to chart a future that doesn’t look like what I thought it would look like. And that’s terrifying. Now I need to think about accepting the place that we’re in and that collectively our lives might look different and the things that we’ve gotten used to.

Erica Hellerstein: And it’s very consumption-oriented lifestyle we’ve had where we just always think we can get everything on demand. Like maybe there’s actually consequences to that. Accepting that the status quo is unsustainable. For me was actually kind of weirdly liberating. Be like, okay, now I have to like make my life. And I have to think about the future differently. One thing I thought that was interesting about or useful about the way the Good Grief Network approaches the idea of action is it’s not like prescriptive. It’s not like action has to look like going to a rally for everybody or being involved in local politics or, you know, advocacy.

Erica Hellerstein: They approach it in a very open way. So everybody gets to decide what action means for them. So maybe it’s being a youth educator and dealing with the next generation. Maybe it’s being involved in the nascent and fascinating field of psychology that is really aimed at exactly some of these things we’re thinking about, and even integrating climate change into approaches and therapy. Or maybe you’re an artist. There’s not one way to be active in that. There’s not one way to be involved and in this and take action.

Erica Hellerstein: That’s kind of why I see accepting the uncertainty of the future as strangely empowering because it allows for reimagining our lives and our livelihoods and how we live. And it opens the door to change and trying to make that outcome a little bit better. There’s like almost a responsibility that we have to ourselves, our peers and our children to not be nihilistic. That’s like really, really our responsibility in some ways because it is, I think, so easy to fall into that. I guess I can’t not feel hopeful because that feels too nihilistic for me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein in conversation with KQED’s Erin Baldassari, who talked with Erica for the latest season of Sold Out: rethinking Housing in America. This season is all about the intersection of our housing and climate crises. And you can find Sold Out wherever you found the Bay. Erica’s piece, Grieving California, was originally written for Coda Story. We’ll leave you a link to that in our show notes. This two hour conversation was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca and senior editor Alan Montecillo, who scored this episode. Music courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions and FirstCom Music. The Bay is a production of KQED in San Francisco. I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.