How to Walk With Environmental Grief Without Losing Hope
A practice for carrying what feels too large to hold
The scale is too large.
I know this. You know this. Environmental collapse, species extinction, climate crisis. The full weight of it could crush any single person who tried to carry it all.
So I consciously try not to think about it.
Not because I don’t care. Because I care so much that the enormity threatens to paralyze me. We can only deal with what’s immediately in our abilities to handle. The rest becomes background static, a constant hum of dread we learn to live with.
But that static never really goes away. The grief is still there. The question becomes: how do we walk with it without collapsing into despair?
The Weight We Actually Carry
Environmental grief sits differently than personal grief.
Personal grief has shape. You can name it. You can trace it to a specific loss, a particular person, a moment when everything changed. Environmental grief is diffuse. Enormous. Everywhere and nowhere at once.
There’s also the complicity.
My retirement savings are invested in the systems causing this crisis. The education that allows me to write these words came through institutions built on extraction and consumption. The time I have to walk the Camino each spring? That’s possible because of capitalism that’s literally killing the planet.
I can’t change the past. I can only adjust course in the present for a hoped-for better future.
That’s the knot we’re all tied in. We’re not just witnessing environmental collapse. We’re participating in it, whether we want to or not.
Walking to Escape vs Walking With
There’s a difference between walking to escape climate grief and walking with it.
Walking to escape means using movement to clear your mind, to temporarily take off the weight of things beyond any one person’s strength. That’s valid. Sometimes we need that clearing.
Walking with environmental grief means something different.
It means celebrating what’s actually living around you right now. Not as denial. Not as distraction. But as honoring what’s still here, what’s still breathing, what’s still growing despite everything working against it.
When I walk, I’m not trying to escape the grief. I’m letting the natural world teach me how to hold it without being crushed by it.
What Joanna Macy Taught Me
Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy developed a framework called Active Hope that changed how I understand this practice.
Active Hope isn’t a feeling. It’s something you do. Macy teaches that Active Hope means staying engaged in climate action not by ignoring despair but by turning it into motivation for change.
The distinction matters enormously.
Passive hope says “I hope things work out” and waits for someone else to fix it. Active Hope says “I hope for a livable future” and then takes whatever action is possible, however small, to move toward that intention.
Macy writes: “Don’t be afraid of your sorrow, or grief or rage. Treasure them. They come from your caring.”
That line stopped me cold the first time I read it. We’re taught to pathologize climate grief, to see it as depression or anxiety that needs treating. But Macy reframes it: your grief is evidence of your love. Your sorrow is proof you’re paying attention.
The practice she developed, called The Work That Reconnects, follows a spiral. It moves through gratitude, then honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and finally going forth.
The critical passage is the second stage. Instead of privatizing our pain for the world or trying to fix it or push it away, we honor it. We let ourselves feel what we’re actually feeling.
That’s what walking with environmental grief means. Feeling it without trying to solve it.
What Trees Teach About Holding Space
You know what never yells at you? A tree.
Trees don’t lecture about your carbon footprint. They don’t shame you for driving a car or eating imported food. They don’t demand you fix everything before you’re allowed to rest in their shade.
They just hold space. Patient. Forgiving. Present.
This inspires me when I’m trying to hold space for students carrying climate grief. When a student comes to me, paralyzed by environmental despair, I don’t try to cheer them up or fix their feelings. I witness them. I let them feel what they’re feeling. I hold space for them.
The more-than-human world models this perfectly.
Walking with nature isn’t denial of what’s dying. It’s celebration of what’s still living. It’s paying attention to the resilience, the adaptation, the stubborn persistence of life finding ways to continue.
That attention urges us toward action in our individual ways. Not because we’re trying to save the world alone. Because we’re engaging in relationship, human and more-than-human kin together.
Otherwise we’re completely alone with the grief. That way lies paralysis.
The Paralysis Problem
Here’s what I tell students who are frozen by climate grief: you’re focusing only on the bad and missing the good.
That sounds dismissive. It’s not.
When you’re in a truly bad situation, a toxic workplace or difficult family dynamic, the negatives become so overwhelming that you literally can’t see that anything else exists. Your entire field of vision fills with what’s wrong.
Climate grief works the same way.
Yes, the crisis is real. Yes, the science is devastating. Yes, we’re running out of time. All of that is true.
Also true: there are signs of hope. Acts of kindness. Communities organizing. Technologies emerging. People choosing differently. Life adapting. Systems beginning to shift.
If you can’t see any of that, you’re not being realistic. You’re being paralyzed. There’s a difference.
Your Scale of Action
I can’t fix environmental collapse. Neither can you.
What I can do: write. Try to inspire. Offer contemplative walking retreats that help people reconnect with the more-than-human world. Hold space as a chaplain for students processing their grief. Teach the EcoSpirituality Certificate program starting in March.
That’s my scale. Your scale will look different.
Maybe you organize in your community. Maybe you change how your family eats or travels. Maybe you create art that helps people feel instead of numbing. Maybe you just keep showing up to work that builds something better, one day at a time.
Macy and her co-author Chris Johnstone write: “Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world.”
That’s the practice. Finding what’s yours to do. Doing it. Trusting that your small actions, combined with millions of other small actions, create the only kind of change that ever actually happens.
How to Actually Practice This
Here’s what works for me:
Walk without distractions. No headphones. No phone. Just you and what’s actually around you right now.
Notice what’s living. Not what’s dying. What’s growing. What’s adapting. What’s persisting despite everything.
Let yourself feel the grief. Don’t push it away. Don’t try to fix it. Just acknowledge it’s there. Your sorrow comes from your caring.
Ask: what’s mine to do? Not “how do I save the world” but “what small action is actually possible for me right now?”
Connect with others. Human and more-than-human. Isolation makes grief unbearable. Relationship makes it carryable.
Take your action. Whatever scale it is. Without judging whether it’s “enough.” There is no enough. There’s only what’s yours to do.
No practice works perfectly for everybody. But if you’re stuck in grief, you won’t get unstuck unless you do something differently.
Walking with environmental grief means moving. Not away from the pain. Through it. Toward whatever small piece of hope you can actually build with your own two hands.
What This Won’t Do
This practice won’t fix climate change. It won’t stop species extinction. It won’t reverse environmental collapse.
What it might do: help you stay engaged without burning out. Help you feel your grief without being crushed by it. Help you find your particular contribution to the work of building a livable future. Help you alleviate a little suffering or prevent more of it.
That’s Active Hope. Not optimism. Not denial. Just the choice to act based on intention rather than guaranteed outcome.
The path will hold you while you figure out how to hold the grief. Trees will model patience while you learn it. The earth will keep receiving your footsteps, one after another, moving you forward even when you can’t see where you’re going.
That’s enough. You’re enough. Your small actions matter more than you know.
Walk With Me
If this resonates, I invite you to subscribe to Where Insight Meets Earth. Each week I share reflections on contemplative walking, ecospirituality, and deepening kinship with the more-than-human world for seekers moving from digital overwhelm to grounded presence.
The EcoSpirituality Certificate program begins in March 2025. It’s designed to help you develop these practices of walking with grief, celebrating what’s living, and finding your scale of action:
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Walking beside you,
Jeffrey