Laura Marris: Sensing into our longings and the “age of loneliness” (Ep437)

Written By kamea chayne
“I started investigating loneliness as a helpful tool because if you’re lonely for something, you’re longing for it. It’s a way of knowing what you wish was present near you, what you would love to be around. ”
— Laura Marris

How might we listen to our hearts more and tune into this “age of loneliness”? What are some vital connections between our public health crises, the loneliness epidemic, and our eco grief and anxiety? And what are the possibilities of intergenerational longings — for things already lost and gone amiss that we may not even have personal relationships with anymore, but that we must nevertheless work to restore and regenerate?

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s host, kamea, speaks with Laura Marris about the heart-centered stories, learnings, and inspirations from her book, The Age of Loneliness.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The Yale Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, The TLS, The New York Times, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, a Katharine Bakeless Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Her first solo-authored book, The Age of Loneliness, was published by Graywolf in August, 2024.

Artistic credits:

  • Episode artwork by fuchsia (@alafuchsia)

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Laura Marris: The term Eremocene, meaning "the age of loneliness," was coined by natural scientist E.O. Wilson. The root Eremos is Greek, and it can mean a lonely person, but it can also mean a desolate place. That overlap between person and place made the term particularly interesting. It contains within it the idea of a reciprocal relationship: how we treat our environment is how it treats us back, which got me thinking about prematurely apocalyptic thinking. I found myself imagining that we’re already in the Eremocene and wondering if that’s really where we are.

I started investigating loneliness as a helpful tool because if you're lonely for something, you're longing for it. It’s a way of knowing what you wish was present near you, what you would love to be around. 

For me, it reframed ideas of ecological grief from something finite to something that was a relationship that could be negotiated. I see loneliness as a form of stubbornness or strength - a refusal to let go of something that’s no longer there. The Eremocene is one of those terms that makes me wonder about our era and how our ecological relationships might be renegotiated within it.

Kamea Chayne: People talk about how there is an increasing loneliness epidemic in many places today. But I wonder what we know about people's senses of loneliness or disconnectedness. And I know it's hard (because these experiences are so qualitative, personal and subjective) and so I don't think data can sufficiently capture these feelings and sentiments.

But if we were to take a pulse on our collective senses of belonging, connection, or loneliness, what are some key things that you feel could be helpful to consider to better understand the background of where we are today?

Laura Marris: I think one of the things that we do have a pretty good sense of and that there is data to support is that when people spend time around trees and water and they hear birds and they have experiences and encounters with other living beings, it's a predictor of positive mental health outcomes.

So there was a crowdsourced project that I was following called the Urban Mine Project, where they had people in urban space (just in any kind of city or town where people were living), take a picture of the ground where they were standing and then fill out a short survey about if they could see trees if they could see water, if they could hear birds, and then a very short survey of how they were feeling.

And one of the outcomes of that study was that people really can almost ground their loneliness in places where there are no natural surroundings. There's no grass or trees or birds. And so it did make a difference to people's outlook when they had the ability and privilege and time to spend in places where there's green space and where there are more-than-human communities. And so I think that is a pretty powerful thing that we know and that there's a lot of data to support. So we have that tool already.

Kamea Chayne: We also do know that in many places, rates of anxiety, depression and suicide rates are all going up. Rates of chronic disease are all going up. There are so many factors, but I don't think it's a stretch to connect these dots as part of the equation. Do you have anything you want to add to this connection between chronic disease, anxiety, depression, suicide rates, and lack of green spaces?

Laura Marris: I can only really share my personal anecdotal experience, which is the other half of the book [The Age of Loneliness], which focuses on community science projects. The Eremocene is where the book begins, in this alienated space of commuting and this idea of ecological loneliness. But then the other thread of the book that I began to investigate was people who do community science, people who do bird counts in winter and spring and people who go out and survey plants or survey horseshoe crabs in Long Island Sound. 

I found it was a very grounding and hopeful practice to spend time with community scientists who are working on the very unglamorous day-to-day actions of just going out, counting a certain number of horseshoe crabs on the beach near where they live and then doing that year after year. They have this long archive of sightings almost as a way of explaining or understanding what's going on in this more-than-human community where they live. And to me, that was a profound realization that there were real practical things to be done. And that also was something that helped me personally to get outside of the kind of space of apocalyptic thinking.

Kamea Chayne: Your book weaves these threads between loneliness and our ecological crises by sharing many different stories. You just touched on this, but I wonder if you can share some more examples of these experiences or stories of connection that stood out the most to you and the underlying messages or significance of thinking about our ecological crises through the gauge of connection.

Laura Marris: One of the books that I enjoyed reading as I was working on my own was Lisa Wells's book, Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World. And in that book, she works with a lot of people on the idea of ecological reciprocity. I live in Western New York in Buffalo, and so in the land around me, there's a very heavy post-industrial history here.

One of the people that I met as I was working on this book is a local artist named Chantal Calato, who did an oral history project with people and families who live around these sites of toxicity in Western New York, and the long history of toxicity here and how that has impacted people. She made a really beautiful installation of this piece. So you basically walk into a dark room and you see a little model of a house that's lit up in the centre of the room, but then all around you, it's a soundscape curated of all these interviews that she did with people who had lived around these sites of toxicity. 

I ended up walking through some of these sites in and around Buffalo with her, and one of the places that we went to was this place called Tifft Nature Preserve, which is right on the edge of Buffalo. It was a farm in the early days and then as shipping expanded in the Great Lakes, it became the end of the railroad line.

A lot of barrels of chemicals and coal just got dumped there at the end of the line where the trains were loaded and unloaded, so it became a brownfield that was then cleaned up and turned into a park. And when I was walking there with her, one of the things she pointed out to me was that there's this huge project there to replant native trees.

And so you can see all of these tiny seedlings over there with little plastic cylinders around them to keep the deer from eating them. And her response was “One thing that I'll be able to see when my kids are grown is that this forest will be taller.” And I appreciated her perspective on that. To be in a place of toxicity, to be in a space where the land has gone through a lot of harm, it's also privy to seeing its regeneration and all of these ways that the community here is trying to give back to it. So I've been grateful for that as well.

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate you sharing the story. And of course, loneliness isn't just an experience at the level of an individual. You also bring in what's called species loneliness, which I believe Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer also named. How would you elaborate on this idea of species loneliness and the possible impacts or experiences of aliveness that this has manifested in?

Laura Marris: Robin Wall Kimmer's perspective on species loneliness was helpful to me, especially the way she maps it onto language. She talks in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, about learning Potawatomi and realizing that all of these things that in English, we refer to as “it”, we use object pronouns. In Potawatomi [natural beings] are referred to with personal pronouns like “who, she, he”. So just reframing what is alive and deserving of personhood through learning another language. 

In the very sense that the English language creates categories for grammar, there's almost a loneliness within our language. I think seeing a way outside of that (because I also have a background as a translator) and understanding that this is something particular to English and that it's something that we could do better. We could try to make English less lonely.

The whole idea of species loneliness also goes back to very hierarchical ideas in natural history, placing humans at the top with consciousness and then every other kind of life form below.

These hierarchies are very racist and problematic tropes that have been widely disproven. But just realizing in subtle ways how some of that is still in the grammar of our language and thinking about how to unmake it was really important for me.

Kamea Chayne: I think it's really interesting for me to learn different languages because it helps you to see how certain worldviews are embedded in those languages. And so therefore, with English, for example, is all that a person knows it might be hard for people to even conceptualize what it means to take on another sort of logic of understanding the world because that's the only lens that they have been taught to see the world through.

I'm curious to hear you expand more on this idea, especially with you as a translator too. I'm sure you've thought through this a lot, but this idea of English as being a language that facilitates loneliness or worldviews of loneliness. What more can you share about that?

Laura Marris: As a translator, I translate French to English. And one of the first poets and writers that I translated was a Breton poet and playwright, Paol Keineg. He lived in Brittany, which is a region that has at times tried to gain its independence from universalizing French ideas of what language should be.

And so when I was translating him, I was trying to translate his poems into English, but wondering how to do that in such a way that it would be, not just translating one totalizing majority language into another totalizing majority language. It was more about how to translate his poems that have Breton idioms and syntax embedded in them, into English in a way that might be more multilingual and more suspicious of linguistic authority. ended up finding a way to do it by using video and having different versions of lines substitute into the poem.

That experience taught me a lot about the nature of languages that try to be universal in any way and how damaging that can be. And so, sometimes in translation, we talk about English as a monoculture. It's almost like the grass that grows at the expense of everything else. 

I think translation is a discipline that pushes against the idea of linguistic monoculture. There are so many interesting ecological threads that work their way into translation metaphors.

Kamea Chayne: We also definitely know that biodiversity loss is occurring alongside language loss and cultural diversity loss, so, these are very important connections to think through. To pivot a little bit here in terms of looking towards possibilities for our future based on the trajectory of where we are today you share, “As the climate changes and becomes more extreme the species that do survive may become increasingly lonely. And the more a creature can tolerate, the more likely she is to end up alone in an increasingly hostile world." I'm curious to hear more about this.

You also talk about how extremophiles (species that thrive in extremes), make up a much smaller percentage of life on Earth, occupying places whose conditions would kill most other organisms. I wonder if the gauge of extremes is relative, as in, species that live along the deep ocean boiling vents, wouldn't be able to survive in a human's comfortable room temperature range because that to them is considered very extreme.

Is this more so pointing to the increasing loneliness that the species of the world would experience from changes happening in ranges and at rates that many of our bodies have not been adapted nor accustomed to?

Laura Marris: Thank you for the thoughtfulness of that question! Extremophiles have these very specific small niches. The range of what they can tolerate is very extreme from our perspective. But you're right, they're still vulnerable to vast changes in their environments. And one of the categories that I write about in the book is the category of extremotolerance, which is adjacent to extremophile, but a little bit different. For example, tardigrades are not extremophiles, they're extremotolerant. Different species can go into dormancy or stasis to survive extreme cold or extreme heat. But that's not what they would prefer. 

The concept of extremotolerance was interesting to me because in many ways it had analogues to what I was seeing in the neighborhood where I grew up, which is near Long Island Sound. I've seen people increasingly add bunker-like features to their houses as the water rises, such as storm shutters that can close so that waves won't do as much damage if they hit the house. Or they're raising the road and elevating it so that sunny day flooding doesn't isolate the end of the street.

All these things that are happening and trying to keep pace with the rate of change. There's something quite tricky about that because there's a relationship between investment and privilege there (in terms of which places we spend money on and which we don't). But also there's an almost hubristic quality of thinking that we can stay ten steps ahead of the change.

I'm not sure I have the solution for this, it’s a very complex problem. But I do think that environmental justice and equitability play a huge role in these conversations, and probably haven't played enough of a role thus far in the changes that we're making to our environments to try to be more resilient.

Kamea Chayne: I think it's interesting to think about tolerance and comfort ranges as well. I feel like part of what has driven the systemic changes led by particular human cultures and societies that have disproportionately contributed to our ecological crises has been this underlying desire to control our environments. And that shows up in many different forms. 

This reminds me of our interview with Hi'ilei Hobart about her book Cooling the Tropics. We discussed how cooling and refrigeration have become indispensable in places that once thrived without these energy-intensive technologies. And this shift has had a profound impact, particularly on food sovereignty in more remote Pacific Islands.

But with that, I think about how we’ve increasingly sought to control our environmental temperatures through different technologies to a more narrow range - which becomes an even greater need when we consider things like borders and land access that prevent people to migrate and adapt.

And I'm not saying that people shouldn't use heaters and AC to regulate our environmental temperatures for comfort and health — although there are also different ways to do that and there is nuance there as well. But I do think the amount that we use today in many scenarios is excessive and comes at an unnecessary cost energy-wise and also making a lot of our bodies develop more narrow ranges of comfort and adaptability.

And I don’t have a clear solution, but it feels like it’s become a vicious cycle: as we increasingly control our environments, our sense of what is comfortable shifts, which in turn affects our health expectations and responses to different conditions.

And then what used to be a luxury becomes a necessity. And then as our climatic conditions fluctuate with greater extremes, people double down on this urge to control even more, which feeds back into this cycle of disconnection and the energy intensiveness in our ways of existence.

I know there is a lot here but I welcome you to pick up wherever calls you right now, and anything you'd like to share in terms of our sense of loneliness and our desires to control.

Laura Marris: For me, a lot of it comes back to this idea that within a capitalist system, there always has to be growth and that things have to be privatized and made profitable. I think in many ways that limits our ability to move and have common spaces where shelter and communally held resources for resilience and survival are shared. But I agree with you. 

When control [of our environment] becomes a luxury, it’s a particularly dangerous trend. It creates a disparity in who has access to resources to ameliorate their environment. 

It becomes this question of displacing the cost of using those extra resources for the survival of a few or the resilience of a few, as opposed to figuring out cheaper and more sustainable ways. For example, lowering the heat across the city, instead of simply letting people (who can afford it) have as much AC as they want.

Kamea Chayne: And part of the message, from noticing how many cultures of people have turned to control and also isolation to achieve some sense of comfort or safety: is that it does make people less in tune with the language and the symptoms of the land and the more-than-human world.

And also just the fact that as our “modern societal forces”, force a lot of people to live increasingly busy and fast-paced lives just to be able to get by, a lot of our capacities to slow down and listen more deeply also decrease as well.

And so the question then becomes, if we're not paying attention, and if our bodies aren't in tune with our broader earth body, then how can we sense what's missing? And how can we then allow our longings to lead us? What have you thought through in terms of this relationship between our attunement and our responsiveness to the world as they relate to this era of loneliness?

Laura Marris: That's a really beautiful question. I think that many people do have a longing to be more connected to seasonal rhythms and even stories that are not so happy. People are invested in what's happening to endangered species near them, or all of these ways in which other species are vital in their own right, but also indicators for wider ecosystem health in ways that affect people too. 

And there's a great example of that here in the Great Lakes. For example, to go back to the idea of toxicity in the 1960s and 70s, pretty much all of the lake trout in the Niagara border region in Lake Ontario were killed off by the amount of toxicity that was being released. And so they have become kind of an indicator species of how we're doing. I think just being tuned in to examples like that and learning stories like that in a hyper-local way can be a powerful this and can reorient what you take for granted and what you appreciate in the landscape around you.

We know that there's no longer this question of the pristine. Everywhere we are, there's some kind of human fingerprint; whether that's climate change based, a flake of glitter at the top of Mount Everest, or a plastic bag at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

All of these things are part of our world. And I think if we stop chasing the kind of faraway pristine and turn toward really these fascinating local histories, it's a good way to orient toward and appreciate and begin to care for the places that we live and the places that we spend time in. I think if we can start to do that, then it's a huge step toward having a better relationship with our environment.

Kamea Chayne: And we can certainly leave imprints that are regenerative as well, wherever we go. 

Laura Marris: If you ameliorate the soil of your garden, for example, and if you learn the history of all the weeds and plants that are growing there, that will tell you so much more about all of the people who have brought seeds, and all the animals that have come through your backyard. It becomes a much bigger story than if you just look back at it and you think, “Look at all those weeds I have to pull.”

Kamea Chayne: Yea, that’s very true — all the stories that are woven into the world that we see around us today.

And to go a little bit deeper into this thread, I also think about how people generally feel the strongest in terms of our senses of protectiveness of things and beings that we have direct relationships with and that we love. 

So I ponder about this bigger time scale, of how each younger generation will have less of a personal relationship with what is already considered endangered today. Whether that's particular languages, cultures, habitats, ecosystems, or species. Not to say that revival isn't possible, because many communities have proven and led the way and shown that it is, especially with the guidance of elders. But I do wonder how you thought through this generational shift and how personally and directly we can relate to or notice what's increasingly not present. 

What are the possibilities of some intergenerational remembrance and longing that we can sense in our bodies and hearts, even though we might no longer have personal relationships with those things ourselves?

Laura Marris: Sometimes people call it ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, this idea that every generation has a new normal of what they're used to seeing around them. And what you're used to seeing becomes your expectation of what is normal for your street, for example, the birds that you see. But this was a huge part of the book for me because one of the inspirations for it was finding a folder of my father's bird lists from the 1980s. 

After he died, I found a folder full of bird lists in the back of a drawer. I lived with it and had it on my wall for a few years before knowing what to do with it. As I started to look at it, I realized that some of the birds that he was seeing were birds that I don't see anymore in the places where I grew up. And I started to notice that other species have slightly changed their migration patterns due to climate change. And so for me, seeing how much that list had changed in the course of my lifetime was a really big wake-up call. 

Community science can keep a long archive going. It's almost like an archive of ecological memory. 

If I had my father's bird lists then hopefully I'd save mine and give them to someone. They're recorded in these databases that collect data from the Christmas bird count, for example. And so you keep going with what people have been seeing and it shows you a longer history of bird counts and the prevalence of a species in a certain place.

Over time, I think these archives become more and more important as we try to navigate ecological change intergenerationally. And for me, they're more than just data points. It's telling you, once you look at different species in an area, the whole intertwined collection of them and how many keystone species are there in a place.

It can tell you over time how an ecosystem has evolved and what is thriving there. And that information becomes more and more important to me over time. It became a huge part of my desire to finish this book. To write it was to have a place to put my father’s bird lists; they ended up becoming the partitions between sections of the book.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this. As we near the end of our conversation, I'm curious to return to what this all means, I feel like especially in fields that prioritize, “objectivity”, and not feelings, what is possible when we try to understand our very crises of today through listening more deeply to our hearts and longings and the lens of relationships? And also, what does it mean to consider this question of how we can add to our archives of ecological memory?

Laura Marris: Thank you for that question. The idea of how we can continue with all of this is very much letting go of (or at least grappling with) eco-grief, and maybe trying to reframe it a little bit. Because I often have people talk to me about eco-grief and eco-anxiety, and I think that these feelings are very valid.

And yet grief can be a response to finality, but if we can try to push the grief a little bit toward longing, there becomes a different kind of negotiation where we start to act.

For me, this means getting out there counting different species, doing community science work and having a different kind of relationship with the species that I was seeing and appreciating them more. All of this is kind of tied together with knowing what's around us and knowing the fascinating histories of all the things that we see every day.

I just realized there's a weed growing in my yard and it was brought as part of ballast that was in ships coming from England. And many things like that are stories that are kind of crossing my desk as I walk or crossing my vision as I walk around the neighborhood. And so for me, that kind of gives me hope.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are coming to the end of our main discussion, but I would love to welcome you to share anything else on your mind that I didn't get to ask you about, as well as any other calls to action or deeper inquiries you have for our listeners.

Laura Marris: One call to action is to get to know the local community science projects that are happening. And even if it's just doing e-Bird in your neighbourhood when you walk around your block, that can be a huge help. There are a lot of places where there is an environmental justice issue and there are fewer birds there. It can be a marker of ways that cities have been inequitably distributed green space. And I think that community science is a really powerful tool. It's not just something that you might do on the weekend. Every little bit helps. So I think if you can get out there and do e-Bird for 15 minutes, once a month or something, that's huge.

Kamea Chayne: Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com.

We also share our deepest gratitudes for any and all of the ways you’re able to support our independent media work — whether through sharing your favorite episodes on social media or with loved ones, contributing a one-time donation, or joining our Patreon at Patreon.com/greendreamer.

For now, here are some closing words of wisdom from our guest to take away with you.

Laura Marris: I think the final words would just be to learn the hyper-local history of the place where you live and you know, ecologically, socially, and economically. Figure out your relationship to the place from there.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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