The Snowpack Has No Funeral

Wildfire smoke visualization courtesy of NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, August 2026

Mourning the World We Knew

Somewhere in the last several years, summer stopped being just a season and became something to brace for. It looks different depending on where you live, but the feeling is increasingly familiar. Wildfire season in the Mountain West used to be something you heard about; now it's something you plan around. Gulf Coast hurricanes have started stacking up back-to-back instead of arriving a storm or two a year. And in the Northeast, summer used to mean sweating through July without air conditioning and being fine; now it means fighting both the heat and flash floods that didn't used to be part of summer in the same way.

Heat domes and record highs aren't once-in-a-lifetime freak events anymore. They're becoming part of summer. We're losing the expectation that the climate will behave roughly the way it used to. And mostly, we're doing it quietly.

What strikes me is how muted the collective response has been given how big this is. Not because people don't know: most people do. Ask around and you'll find that plenty of folks who've lived through a bad fire season or a flood or a heat wave will tell you, correctly, that this is climate change. So the gap isn't information. It's something else. I keep coming back to the idea that it's grief, and that we're not very good at grieving something this size.

There's no funeral for a snowpack

Mourning needs somewhere to go. Usually that's a ritual, a room full of other people who also lost the same thing, some shared moment where everyone agrees: this happened, this mattered, we're allowed to feel bad about it. Ecological loss doesn't get any of that. Nobody holds a wake for a reliable snowpack or the version of August that didn't require checking an air quality app. The losses are slow and diffuse and mostly invisible while they're happening. It's hard to mourn something when you're not even sure when you've lost it. It just becomes background noise, and the grief that has nowhere to go usually doesn't vanish. It just comes out sideways. Numbness. Irritability. That strange flatness when the news reports another record-breaking fire season, and the impulse is to simply change the channel.

I felt this while spending time in Montana this summer. For weeks, the air quality sat at "Unhealthy," visibility dropped so much that mountain ranges that are normally right there, filling the whole horizon, were just gone. People were mostly stuck indoors. I'd pass someone in the store or at the restaurant and try to catch their eye, half-looking for some shared acknowledgment of it, is this really what "normal" is now, and mostly people just carried on. I imagine folks who've lived there longer have gotten more used to it than I have. But I remember feeling almost hungry for someone to just say it out loud with me, to be in this new reality together rather than each of us quietly carrying it alone.

There's a version of this that's even harder to look at directly: grief for the generations who'll live their whole lives with ever growing climate instability, not just pass through a hard season of it. How do you grieve something that hasn't happened yet? Some of it is small enough to point to: a summer camp cancelled for smoke, a trip rerouted around a flood. Some of it doesn't have a clean edge at all. It's the sense that as they grow up, they're going to carry more of this uncertainty than the generations before them did, more disruption. I think that's part of why this is so hard to sit with. It's not only the past we're mourning. We're mourning, in a way, on behalf of people who never got a say about it.

Knowing Something and Not Knowing It, at the Same Time

There is a useful distinction between denial, flatly refusing something is true, and disavowal, which is quieter and much more common: knowing something perfectly well and acting like you don't, without ever really bringing the two together. Almost nobody is a true denier anymore in the flat sense. What's everywhere instead is disavowal. I know the fires are worse. I have changed basically nothing about how I live. Both of those are true in the same person, and you can see the same pattern at a larger scale too, in how a state or a country can acknowledge a crisis publicly while its policies barely shift.

This isn't hypocrisy, or at least not only that, and I don't think it's stupidity either. What it looks more like is a defense, a way of holding something unbearable without getting overwhelmed by it. We can know something intellectually while keeping some distance from what it means emotionally. A mourner does something similar in the early stages of a loss too big to feel all at once: I know they're gone, and some part of me is still setting two plates for dinner.

A Grief Too Big to Actually Feel

There's also just the matter of scale. Climate disaster doesn't behave like an acute crisis with a before and after. It doesn't resolve, it just keeps going, one summer worse than the last, nothing marking where one crisis ends and the next begins. That's closer to an ambient, ongoing trauma than a single event, and the mind's defenses against that kind of thing are familiar: numbing, intellectualizing, distraction, doom-scrolling for ten minutes and then immediately looking somewhere else.

Underneath the numbness is usually something close to helplessness, a kind of infantile smallness in front of something too big to do anything about. Feeling that directly, without any defense at all, doesn't just feel bad. It can feel like it might undo you. And that feeling doesn't leave much room for agency either, which is part of the problem, because agency, the sense that there's something we can actually do, is exactly what we need to hold onto. Looking away isn't necessarily laziness. Sometimes it's a way of protecting ourselves from a feeling that seems too big to tolerate. And sometimes the defense goes in the opposite direction: an inflated, almost frantic sense of control, the perfectly optimized low-carbon life, the conviction that enough discipline or the right innovation will be enough. The behaviors look very different, but the helplessness underneath them can be surprisingly similar.

There's also something particular about this moment that makes avoiding it, one way or another, easier. The world already feels like it's in a kind of chaos. There are too many headlines, most of them pulling for attention toward something immediate and urgent. Those things feel close, immediate, in your face in a way climate change usually doesn't. Climate is diffuse; it's happening at the scale of decades and continents. The mind is going to pay attention to whatever feels most urgent right now, even when the diffuse thing may be the bigger threat in the long run.

Losing the Wilderness Twice

We were already losing something before any of this. Kids spend less time outside than they used to, more of it on screens. It's the same basic pattern, just in a much smaller form. There's a version of this loss that has nothing to do with global temperature rise. Someone I heard recently put it well: we used to climb mountains to be alone with ourselves, to ask the kind of question there's no room for in daily life. Now people mostly reach for their phone instead. That capacity for solitude, for asking yourself a real question with no one around to answer it for you, was already thinning out before a single fire made the news. Something that fits in your pocket had started filling that space instead, and it never asks you anything hard.

What makes this moment feel especially precarious is that the thing displacing our connection to nature, the phone, the reflex to look down instead of out, is now stacking on top of a second, much more literal loss: the wilderness itself is getting harder to reach. Trails close under smoke. Drought and fire shut down whole stretches of backcountry for months. Anything resembling untouched nature gets more expensive and harder to access unless you already have money. So the outdoors, with all the psychological benefits we know it provides, including the kind of self-reflection that can happen when you're away from other people and away from screens, is at risk of becoming something mostly available to people who can afford it. And that's happening at the same moment most of us have less practice than ever sitting still with ourselves long enough to actually want to go looking for it.

It's not only solitude in some remote, hard-to-reach place either. A city park can still give you a version of this, if you actually look: a whole ecosystem going on right there that most people walk past without noticing, like a tree that's been alive longer than any human visitor to the park. But that takes a capacity we've been wearing down for years, the ability to stop and pay attention to something that isn't asking for your attention back. The park is still there. What's disappearing is the person who used to slow down long enough to see it.

Our capacity for solitude and reflection is fading at the same time as the conditions that used to invite it. Open trails and clean air are disappearing, or costing more than a lot of people can afford. But even where it hasn't come down to money, where the city park is still standing there for free, we're showing up less able to use what's in front of us.

So What Does the Response Actually Look Like

If disavowal and unrecognized grief and defended helplessness are the backdrop, the last few years make a lot more sense. It's not that people are uniformly refusing to engage. It's more like an oscillation: a burst of alarm right after a flood or a fire or a heat wave, then a fairly quick slide back to normal once the acute crisis passes. We let the reality in for a moment, and then, when it starts to feel like too much, we pull back into something more bearable.

What's mostly missing is the thing mourning actually needs, some shared, ongoing acknowledgment that a loss happened and is still happening. Nothing culturally has really caught up to the size of what's being lost yet.

What Might Actually Help

If part of the problem is that this grief has nowhere to go, then what's missing is containment: somewhere for the feeling to land that isn't just inside one person, alone. Grief tends to move when it's witnessed, not when it's argued with.

Naming the loss plainly seems to matter: just saying, out loud, that a version of the world we were promised, and that shaped us, isn't coming back. Shame tends to make disavowal worse, not better, so anything that pulls people out of individual blame and into something more communal probably helps rather than hurts. Ritual helps too, in a fairly literal sense. Places that have built some recurring, shared way of acknowledging what's changed seem to have an easier time holding it than places where everyone's left to feel it alone and sporadically. And real engagement, actual organizing and policy work, tends to show up not once the helplessness resolves but once someone can tolerate feeling it without being swept away by it.

A climate activist I was talking to recently said something that's stuck with me since. He pointed out that every few years, for about a month, the World Cup does something almost nothing else manages: it pulls people together across every divide into one shared experience, this felt sense that underneath our differences we're actually part of the same thing. That unity doesn't come from guilt or obligation. It comes from having something that makes people feel like they belong to the same story. Climate response has mostly run on the opposite engine: individual guilt, private virtue, recycle better, fly less, do your part alone. That's a completely different psychological mechanism than the one that makes a World Cup feel like something you belong to. Maybe the missing piece isn't only behavioral or political. Those things matter enormously, and we need them. But maybe it's also narrative. Until there's a story about this moment that people can actually see themselves inside, the response is probably going to keep feeling like millions of separate, private reckonings instead of the collective one this actually calls for.

None of this cools anything down or puts out a single fire. Understanding why we look away, not as some character flaw but as an old defense mechanism doing what it was built to do, might be a first step toward grieving what's already gone and staying present enough to protect what's left.

-Catherine Comiskey, LCSW