When I first started working in mental health, the whole notion of “coping” struck me as kind of feeble, a resigned acceptance of some permanent condition or state of things one would best be rid of completely. Merely coping with your depression or anxiety or OCD meant you knew deep down that those things were inextricable from your very being, some blot upon that essential goodness that in essence was you, by some important measure. Who’d want to go through life always knowing that about themselves, or believing they were stuck in such a way?
After a few years and much experience dealing with real people and real lives, as well as a lot more self-reflection, it became very clear that living on this planet, as perceived by our wonderful overthinking mental apparatus, has led to an existence whereby those who claim they never struggle with depression or any of the many other maladies of the mind (of which there are oh so many) are really kind of suspect. On the other hand, denial can be a powerful thing, perhaps the most effective of the mind’s many tricks and strategies, and of course complete denial of life as it is suggests that clinical condition we call psychosis. One euphemism from the old days for mental institution was “happy farm.” There’s something to that.
Some obtain a kind of ultimate escape from the difficulties of this world through the occasional religious epiphany: finding Jesus or Buddha or Scientology or hallucinogenic drugs or total absorption in some completely selfless life’s work, but all too often those fortunate few end up returning painfully to earth. At some point one realizes that resistance is futile, as the Borg so wisely pointed out on Star Trek.
I addressed some of this back in my very first post, that one about Thich Nhat Hanh. At that time I mentioned the wisdom of how in the short-term no coping strategy can beat simply doing something, though of course it must be something you love. For me it’s messing with bikes and riding them everywhere but of course going sailing or doing a jigsaw puzzle or listening to music or reading a good book or basically doing your own beloved activity whatever that happens to be is time-honored and as good as any therapy out there, though if you love just sitting around and thinking, be very careful. And having other people in your life and maybe also an animal companion – or connecting with the natural world in some other way – is equally as important.
Aside from coping with personal demons, there are the many challenges of facing what shows up every day in daily events, or as some call it, the state of the world, or “the news.” There are those who claim that this one is easy, as in simply ignoring that whole enterprise. This is just another aspect of denial and frankly impossible for most people, which is just as well. What is happening in the world around you will always catch up with you in some way, and your denial will not save you, unless you are genuinely “happy farm” material, which is no way out at all. One cannot willfully choose that option anyway in most cases, as the choice has already been made for you, usually before you were born.
As for coping with the state of the world and its many triggers for sadness and other uneasiness, let us pare down the many awful possibilities we all know all too well, such as war and famine and disease and injustice and corruption and so many more that are totally worthy, to take a look at the one that is likely the most consequential in this moment, which is climate change and how it affects every living thing, now and into the future. There are a few who claim it is not #1 in these matters, and they are fools.
If you are paying attention to this ongoing story (and you might claim you don’t, but that is just a lie you tell yourself), you should well realize that the picture keeps changing on a regular basis. Just when you’ve settled in your mind how this whole thing seems to be playing out, like when some new study or finding comes along that suggests things are slightly encouraging, especially as regards mitigating the worst circumstances-to-come – humanity weaning off fossil fuels and switching to alternative energy sources, people changing their lifestyles to use less energy in the first place, near magical future technologies that will suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and all that – rest assured that news will eventually arrive that is equally or more discouraging, especially when it comes to how fast things are changing for the worse. The current heat waves and drought currently making headlines all over the world are one thing; what is happening in the oceans is quite another, and much less dramatically obvious. Which gets me to our recent trip to Finland and Arctic Norway (chronicled at an absurd level elsewhere on this website), and the price one pays for not ignoring the news, when ignorance is a strategy I believe I claimed was futile and I’m standing by that.
Of course it doesn’t help that new gloom & doom studies and dire predictions about the planet’s warming seem to get reported with increasing regularity nowadays. If there is any topic worthy of constant reality-checking, this is that topic, but it might be an acceptable coping strategy to not pay attention to every single one, kind of a controlled denial, if that’s even what it is. Formerly I’d have nixed this idea, but now I don’t know, after reading the newest & gloomiest from this week, something timely & troubling and totally accurate, more than likely.
And it comes by way of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, of all places.
Of course coming from Finland this one focuses on rapid warming in the Arctic, one of the most troubling of gloom & doom themes and at this point one that has been well reported for at least a decade. The most recent news on this particular topic always seems to be more negative than any previous news, and this time is no different: their research suggests that the Arctic region is heating up at a rate than is four times faster than the rest of the planet, and not merely three times, as research has suggested thus far. What the difference might mean in terms of consequences remains kind of a vague proposition at this point, four times versus three might even seem kind of abstract and trivial, though of course it’s not, but it always comes down to so how will this play out? What happens now with the melting of polar ice and resulting sea level rise and should I worry more about the polar bears? And therein lies the question of what one might call emotional punch, at which point this writer must admit that sea level rise and its effects on human island and coastal populations wields a bit less power than witnessing an iconic (or any) animal species starving and drowning and then disappearing, which could happen when that ice cap is no more.
It won’t be pretty for humanity either, but people will migrate and redesign their seaside habitats or not live there at all. I think first of the wealthy in their luxury housing with fabulous “ocean views” and it doesn’t bother me a whole lot. So long Miami and Malibu! And good riddance, which is very unfair and simplistic but we’re talking emotional punch here. Of far more consequence will be what happens in places like Bangladesh and the Maldives, full of humans who’ve contributed little to the emissions that warm the planet, an injustice that has already been widely acknowledged, for what that is worth.
There’s been much progress in acknowledging how we’ve done this to ourselves, at least. But polar bears have played no role in their demise, and like all the now extinct victim-species of the natural world – the passenger pigeon and the wooly mammoth, the dodo and the great auk and so many more – they deserve a better fate and they’re not likely to get it. But there’s more.
That same Finnish report also found that there are pockets of the Arctic Ocean that are taking an even bigger hit when it comes to warming, specifically that region that lies nearest to Finland that runs along the coast of Norway and over across western Russia, the part known as the Barents Sea. If you take a look at a map of the Arctic Ocean circling counterclockwise around the edges, starting at the Barents gives you the Kara Sea, then the East Siberian, the Chukchi between Siberia and Alaska, then the Beaufort Sea and Baffin Bay, then the Labrador Sea, the Greenland, the Norwegian, than back to the Barents. And of all the Arctic seas we might have visited on our once-in-a-lifetime trip to the far north, the one we experienced was the case in point, the Barents, which then gets singled out by the Finns two months after our return. Which gets reported in the paper I happen to read every day. Gee.
One assumes you’ve been taking at least a casual interest in the photos of abundant numbers of stunning birds running along with this essay – or perhaps you’ve skipped the essay at this point and just looked at the pictures, which means you’re not reading these words, at all. At any rate, those are pictures of alcids, for the most part – common and thick-billed murres, and a few razorbills and of course PUFFINS, a species that needs no introduction. There are also shags (the all-black ones, a kind of European cormorant) and common gulls which are not alcids, but the point is that they are all breeding in vast numbers on Hornøya Island as they’ve all likely done for generations and did you know that Hornøya Island sits in the Barents Sea? Should I mention that the great auk was an alcid slaughtered to extinction by people of the 19th century?
Of course, a key factor in the survival of a species and especially when it comes to the local waters around breeding islands is an abundance of food, in this case small fish like herring and sand lance. Those super-cute calendar pictures of puffins with their beaks jammed with fish about to feed their young show aquatic species of this ilk. What happens when the waters warm is that these little guys (the fish, not the birds) split for colder water, which means away from the breeding islands now in those warmer waters. It has been a well-reported disaster how the small numbers of alcids breeding in the Gulf of Maine have experienced some very bad years lately and did I mention that the Gulf of Maine has been singled out as an area especially affected by warming waters? And now it’s coming to the Barents Sea. The sad results on islands in the Gulf of Maine have been described as “heartbreaking”. I should also mention that we spent a very memorable couple of hours in a bird-blind on Machias Seal Island in that same Gulf of Maine a few years back, at a time when every year was at least pretty good. Puffins and murres and razorbills walking around all around us, you’ve no idea how moving an experience that can be unless you’ve been there too.
So our recent walk around Hornøya Island brought back those memories, only this time there were thousands more birds and the noise and the visuals were much more impressive and dramatic and what’s going to happen to all that now? How long will it be before that scene starts to fade, until the spectacle disappears completely? Perhaps a very long time, though a 7X warming factor suggests rather rapid change, and humanity’s response in the short term to changing the course remains quite pathetic, despite all the hopeful rhetoric and commitments to have our act together regarding these matters by 2030. Or 2050, if even then.
Of course the birds will disperse to other breeding islands, at least some of them, just like the rich will find new seaside enclaves in central Florida and on the slopes of California’s coastal mountains, and the Bangladeshis will go…somewhere. And the polar bears will develop new diets and hunting techniques, or so some of us hope. And some of us despair or feel our hearts breaking, at least in moments. And then we cope in all the daily ways that work for us, and find hope in the fact that some species do sometimes endure in unexpected ways. And maybe this will happen with alcids, too, and all struggling species everywhere, not just those that are avian.
I once thought I’d be gone from this earth before push came to shove in these matters but when you think about it that’s a lousy coping strategy, really no strategy at all. Those now living were meant to witness this and all the ways it is playing out. If you’ve read this far, I make no apologies if you’ve discovered things that might complicate your relationship with puffins and how you react upon seeing that picture on your next calendar. To not go beyond the cuteness and the stunning visual aspect of what you see to what is happening to the species and all of its kind out there in the real world does the bird, if not the whole natural world at this point, a disservice.
The joys inspired by the natural world, of puffins and all the rest of it – even those parts that might not be so iconic – haven’t changed, and right there you’ve got a good start on coping with the pain and despair of loss, both real and potential. You wouldn’t feel the pain if you didn’t feel the love in the first place. It’s always been that way and there’s no way around it.
