How do we grieve for our natural world?

Synchronicity Earth CEO, Kirsty Schneeberger, reflects on the notion of grieving for nature and how 2020 has brought sadness and pain, but also a chance to reflect on our relationships with each other and with the natural world.

At the beginning of lockdown, as we shifted to the online world of meetings and daily team check-ins, for many of us the intensity of work increased almost without noticing. Unaccustomed to being at the desk all day without those moments of incidental free time – be it cycling to an in-person meeting or event, or going out for lunch, or walking across Waterloo Bridge to the National to see a much anticipated play – it suddenly hit me that I really missed that precious free-style thinking time and craved the opportunity to reintegrate it into my schedule.

Sharing this reflection with colleagues I thought it would be interesting for us to carve out time in our calendars to make space for free-style conversations on a variety of topics. The aim was to have a wide-ranging scope for these discussions and, perhaps, bring in some philosophical thinking. And so, our weekly Philosophy Corner sessions were born. Since April, and almost weekly, the team have brought to the zoom-space topics to discuss ranging from the link between zoonotic diseases (such as COVID-19) and planetary health, how to tackle the illegal wildlife trade, our values as an organisation and how we can ‘build back better’, understanding more deeply the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, how we would deepen our commitment to diversity and inclusion, and innovative ways to measure our impact.

More recently we had a special guest join us to lead the conversation and invite us to think differently about how we go about life and what we can learn from the ‘power of ritual’.  Casper ter Kuille, a dear friend and (in our more youthful days) fellow youth climate activist, articulated beautifully the value of giving meaning to habits in our lives, enabling them to transform into rituals.  Drawing insights from his recently published book The Power of Ritual, he shared with us his learning and experience of applying religious ritualistic thinking into day to day living, and how this can give us myriad tools at our fingertips to manage the complexity of modern living and help us to carve out space for reflection, thinking, slowing down.

Casper invited us to share examples of where we might already be ritualising things in our lives, perhaps without even noticing or calling them such. It was so uplifting to hear the team share stories of how important con