Summary:
- Sophie Love’s first-person account of the compounding effects of the climate crisis on her farm and her family is devastating. We meet her husband, her son, their cows, their dog, as they work together to survive the cascading hardships of droughts, fires, COVID-19, and floods.
- As readers go on this journey with Love it becomes clear that many of the losses her family are enduring hurt so much because they are ambiguous. Ambiguous loss, a term coined by Pauline Boss, refers to situations in which we don’t quite know if we’ve lost something or how to move forward. Climate losses can often be ambiguous, with governments refuting the causes or impact and the deeper consequences of an ecological loss being much harder to articulate. Love even begins her article by inviting us into the ambiguity of not knowing what will happen to her farm or her marriage as a result of the barrage of disasters that her family, human and non-human, has endured.
- Evident throughout the article is the disconnect of this experience from the parliamentary narratives around the climate crisis. Love implores, “They are playing with our lives, with our future, with our children’s homes. Depression is treatable but the despair caused by their callous disregard for the real impact of their hubris can only be cured by a change of government, a change of heart.” Read the article in full here.
