Earth Hospice

My life is steeped in thoughts of ecological crisis.  My ever-expanding knowledge of this ever-deepening crisis colors everything I choose to do, or not do.  The weight of our collective situation on this planet more often than not inspires sadness and frustration rather than a motivation to fight for our future. 

I think many others are in the same boat, although it can be quite difficult to admit openly that one doesn’t feel hope for the future.  How can one continue to fight for environmental or related causes if deep down you know that catastrophe is inevitable?  I ask myself this question on a daily basis.  Sometimes I feel like this question is drowning me – like the question itself and my fixation on it is preventing me from achieving the productivity that might actually allow me to accomplish something truly meaningful in this fight.

But the question is important – it’s at the crux of a deep split within the environmental movement right now.  Do we continue to use messaging that has the goal of inspiring hope for the future, or do we start talking about the hard truths behind changes to our planet that are almost certainly inevitable?  A younger generation is now trying to force a discussion about these hard truths – and many old school thinkers in the environmental movement simply don’t want to have this conversation – at least not publicly.  There is a pervasive belief within the environmental community that unless we sugar coat the issues, and present a hopeful message for the future, people will just give up.  If we lay out the true scale of our current crisis, these folks argue, people will become overwhelmed.  They will look away, and maybe even stop doing whatever minimal actions they were already taking to benefit the environment.

But is this true? Will most people really look away if forced to address these hard truths? The evidence presented on either side of this debate – hard truth vs. wishful thinking – is almost entirely anecdotal.  But regardless of the available supporting evidence, the debate presents an interesting philosophical conundrum for the individual who does come face to face with the hard truths of climate change and the 6th mass extinction.  What is the morally appropriate response?  If the individual has essentially zero chance of altering outcomes on a global scale – what does that individual do if they care deeply about the health of our planet?

I got a call from my mom last week that pulled me from these deep thoughts about the future.  Her cousin Sally Ann, who is a de-facto member of our immediate family, joining us for holidays, trips and family gatherings since my sister and I were kids, has been fighting cancer for the past few months.  My mom called to tell me that Sally Ann had decided to stop active treatment of the cancer and begin hospice care. 

Anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer can probably relate to this situation.  I remember very clearly the conversation that my mom, my sister and I had about starting hospice care for my father.  My dad had a few months without serious symptoms after he stopped his chemo treatments, so hospice care wasn’t immediately necessary after treatment ceased.  We knew what was coming because his doctors had already run out of treatment options, but it was impossibly difficult to accept this inevitability.  Hospice care represented an open acknowledgement that my dad’s life was nearing its end, and we simply refused to have this conversation for weeks after it became obvious that the cancer was taking its toll. 

I remember my mom returning from a doctor’s appointment with my dad and breaking the news to my sister and I that it was time to set up hospice care.  We had been looking everywhere for some shred of hope for recovery – experimental treatments, drug trials – but in this moment we were all forced to acknowledge that my dad’s fight against this disease was over.  He was going to die, and it was going to happen very soon.

We began with in-home hospice care, and all of us were very nervous leading up to that first visit with the hospice nurse.  Her name was Tammy, and she put us at ease almost immediately with her openness and deep compassion.  As she entered our home and introduced herself, she made it clear that she was there not just for my dad, but also for us.  She looked us directly in the eyes and asked the hard questions that we were so reluctant to ask ourselves. 

We brought her upstairs to the TV room where my dad was resting, and she demonstrated her tactful sense of humor, almost instantly getting my dad to crack a smile.  It was like magic – all of a sudden it was okay for us to talk about death.  The stigma associated with this inevitable outcome was gone, and the fear, while still quite present, was greatly diminished.

Tammy also made a point to pull us aside after each visit to share her perspective on how my dad was doing, and how much time he likely had left.  This insight from someone whose job it was to care for people in this exact situation was invaluable.  After a week had gone by, it was hard for us to imagine how we had dealt with this situation before Tammy started helping us.

Now it’s Sally Ann’s turn to accept this compassionate end-of-life care, and for her loved ones to also receive this added support as we all come to terms with the idea of continuing our lives without her unique presence.  As my mom shared this information with me, I was immediately brought back to that moment seven years ago when my dad was sick and we were forced to make that extremely difficult decision. 

But another thought crossed my mind as well; do we need hospice care for our planet?  Should endangered species receive some form of hospice care once a certain threshold is crossed and extinction is inevitable?

Obviously, it’s unclear what hospice care for endangered species would actually look like, but the decision itself to accept the inevitability of a certain outcome presents an interesting analogy.  Just as the decision to accept that a loved one will soon die is impossibly difficult, so too is the process of accepting that a species will inevitably go extinct.

In my more than four years of involvement in the effort to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise from extinction, I commonly hear activists involved with the issue state that they will continue to fight until the very last animal.  However, if it is clearly understood that this fight no longer has any meaningful chance of saving the species, this attitude seems unhealthy, and possibly even counterproductive.  Yet, I completely understand it.  I understand because I want so badly for the vaquita to survive, but I also understand it because making the decision to start hospice care for my dad was so difficult.

Despite how difficult it was to make the decision, once hospice care began for my dad, we all felt a wave of relief.  The decision was behind us, and we now had an expert to help walk us through the dying process.  There is no equivalent to this in the wildlife world – nobody holds this profession of hospice nurse for those species whose fate has been sealed, but haven’t yet left this world.  Should we have hospice care for endangered species?  Do we need an Earth Hospice program to help humanity through this unprecedented moment in history?

In the coming weeks I’ll be exploring this idea of Earth hospice in a series of articles here on the WLC website.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think – leave me a comment below, or on our facebook page for the Wild Lens Collective.