Recently, M. from the podcast ‘The last fireflies’ which is held by a team of Romanian antispeciesist activists, had the courage to do with me a very difficult conversation on climate migration, climate grief and other types of disenfranchised grief, such as grieving non human animals. I am honored by their invitation and grateful for their will to hold space so gracefully for such hard topics. These conversations are needed so people who experience climate grief or grieve their beloved non human companions, start feeling less isolated.
The society nowadays suffers from pentho-phobia, a term coined by Nancy Psimenatou, which expresses the culturally embedded avoidance of death-related discourse about which she talks thorougly in her newly published book ‘Integrating Thanatological Education into Schools‘.
As written by the team of the podcast:
In this [Campfire Talk] we delve deep into a difficult, but necessary subject: climate grief. Our guest today is Elisabeth Dimitras, a neurodivergent queer soul activist and founder of the online antispeciesist website Ethos & Empathy. Elisabeth is from Greece, but had to move to Sweden due to climate change. She’ll tell us about her dreams, the story of her loss, what she learned about the mourning the living, both human and non-human, and about climate grief.
In the [Offering], Elisabeth will read us The Shambhala Warrior Prophecy as told by Joanna Macy.
Attention: The episode can be a bit emotionally heavy at times. There is a mention of suicide in the last half.
You can listen to it here.
(It can also be found on Youtube and Spotify but I prefer not to share these links)
I love the graphics that they are making for all their episodes. Here are some more:
One of the most common misconceptions about grief nowadays is that most people believe that grievers need professional support. The truth is far from that, though.
Professional support is only needed when the grief becomes unresolved. Oftentimes, people suffer from accumulated unresolved grief:
My favorite episode of their podcast is the episode 2, it’s the one on fireflies, who are also under extinction, sadly, due to anthropogenic reasons. Give a listen to it too!