Earth Grief by Stephen Harrod Buhner - A Review
Relief.
This was the unexpected response to reading Stephen Buhner's newest book, Earth Grief: The Journey Into and Through Ecological Loss.
Relief to hear someone telling the truth from a place of love, not using sterile language to cover or hide from what's so obviously here. Relief to know people have gone this way before, that even (and of course) earth has gone this way before. Relief to read the words of someone who loves the earth as deeply and devotedly as Buhner NOT imploring me or anyone to "save" anything.
As with his other books, Buhner's writing invokes dreaming, pulling the reader into the truth, into feeling, into really seeing what is before us. The work now, the real work, is turning around to face the gale, to be impacted by the never-going-backness of not just carbon emissions but microplastics and clear cuts and trillions of pounds of pharmaceuticals flooding the ecosystems of this earth. To wrestle with, and lose to, the reality of the coming antibiotic failure as earth's bacterial community exponentially mutates itself beyond the reach of modern medicine. The work now, Buhner acknowledges, is accepting our diagnosis.
Once we accept, we can grieve. And once we grieve, we can live. Similar to other soul advocates, Buhner acknowledges that we each carry something like a genius that has specific gifts to offer the world. What felt interesting in his take is that only through the doorway of full-bodied grief in acknowledgement and acceptance of what's being lost can that genius be accessed and lived in service of adapting to the immanent realities of this planet.
It's odd to be carried into such fierce territory and feel compelled to keep reading. It was heavy, but it felt so good to be connecting to a knowing that is always present but rarely acknowledged. It felt good to be on real ground.
The biggest takeaway for me at this moment is the way that facing the reality of unsolvable ecological devastation is forcing us to be reshaped. To become, in fundamental ways, different people. Buhner talks about the process people go through when they lose a loved one or a limb - the identity dissolution that happens, the chaos of the void in place of the solid life once known, and the movements of meaning-making that reshape us into new stories, stories that know and carry devastation.
Lyrical, poetic, tragic, raw. Relief. The real world beyond the screen and the slap and the stock market still beckons. Thanks to Stephen Buhner for the reminder.