Climate crisis: Of disappearing snow and winters

When people trek to glaciers today, it may not be to stand in wonder but to mourn their passing. Glaciers across the globe from the US state of Oregon to the Swiss Alps have been sites for funerals as people eulogise once-mighty bodies of ice that have been pronounced dead. 

In 2019, such a ceremony was held at Iceland’s Okjökull glacier, said to be the first lost to climate change. Mourners unveiled a plaque announcing that all the country’s main glaciers are expected to follow in the next 200 years.

The psychological strain caused by the observable loss of iconic winter landscapes has been called “climate grief” by Panu Pihkala, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland specialising in eco-anxiety. Though for decades communities have experienced “uneasiness and discomfort at the changes in seasons” due to climate change, this anxiety has shifted to a grieving as snow and ice visibly recede, Pihkala explained.

Grief over the loss of winter will spread more widely as global heating increases. The North Pole, that mythical winter wonderland in the Arctic, is warming three times faster than the global average. 

In the not-too-distant future, cultural representations of European and Northern American Christmases, with people bundled up in hats and scarves skating on frozen lakes or sledging down snow-covered hills, could be a thing of the past.

Climate grief is difficult to overcome because it anticipates a loss that often hasn’t quite occurred, said Pihkalu. He notes that this year there was a lot of snow in Finland, but last year there was very little. This adds to an existing anxiety about wanting snow but not knowing whether it will ever come, a feeling that Pihkala noted has a specific word in Finnish, “lumiahdistus.”

Climate grief relates to “solastalgia” — a combination of the word solace and the Greek word for pain, algos — a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the psychic pain caused by the loss of environments in which we find solace. “As opposed to nostalgia — the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home — solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change,” wrote Albrecht and his co-researchers in a 2007 paper in Australasian Psychiatry. But with the observable loss of glaciers and snowscapes, this solastalgia has transformed into what some researchers call “ecological grief.”

These eco-emotions are also driven by deeper material and cultural loss. Indigenous people in Alaska, for example, are experiencing real fear as melting sea ices threatens communities both with displacement and the loss of what polar researcher Victoria Herrmann called “a way of life passed down from time immemorial.”

For the Sami community, who live close to the Arctic Circle, snow is their lifeblood — especially in terms of their traditional reindeer-herding culture. “If reindeer are not herded in hard snowfall or hard frost, the foundation of the whole livelihood fades away,” said Klemetti Nakkalajarvi, a Sami cultural anthropologist at the University of Oulu in Finland, in a lecture on climate change and the Sami people. 

“Climate change equals cultural change for many Indigenous people,” he said ahead of the UN climate conference in 2021. Having lived the Sami way of life, Nakkalajarvi said he sees “changes every day,” including the loss of language due to climate-related displacement.

The disappearance of mountain glaciers from Kilimanjaro to the European Alps also has a peculiar psychological impact. While there is a cultural attachment to mountains and their “multitude of different ecosystems,” glaciers make these landscapes “unique in people’s imagination,” noted Giovanni Baccolo, a post-doctoral researcher in glaciology at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy.