As winters warm, Minnesotans grapple with climate grief
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
On the first bitter-cold day last December, about a half-dozen volunteers gathered at St. Paul’s Groveland Rec Center for their annual tradition: building a giant ice rink.
They spent the day fire hosing almost 2 million gallons of water onto the frosty baseball fields. It was still below zero at noon. Hose spray froze to volunteers’ parkas. One builder snapped icicles out of his beard.
John Hoeschen has been volunteering to build the rink for about 20 years. In his book, frigid temperatures make for a perfect day.
“That’s exactly what we need,” Hoeschen said. “It’s my goal to have ice for the kids when they go on break.”
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
He said the rink is a neighborhood staple. It’s free to skate, with free gear to borrow. A sunny January day can draw a thousand visitors: high school hockey players, toddlers learning to skate, kids who spend entire days on the ice. It’s a quintessential Minnesota winter scene.
“I think at the end of the day, the community is better for it,” Hoeschen said.
But every year, it’s a battle with warm weather. In the mild winter of 2023-24, volunteers couldn’t build the rink at all — there was never enough frost in the ground. In several recent years, they couldn’t open the rink until mid-January.
This year, it was Jan. 3 — still a week or two later than Hoeschen hoped. A warm spell in December slowed things down.
When Hoeschen compares the past few years’ opening dates to those of 20 years ago, he gets worried.
“It just seems to be getting later and later and later,” Hoeschen said. “What used to be a 10- to 12-week season is now five, six.”
It’s a familiar dilemma for many people in Minnesota, where winter is warming faster than any other season. Average winter temperatures have increased 5.4 degrees in the last century. Average lows are warming even quicker, which means milder nights.
In some ways, Minnesota is lucky when it comes to climate change. It lands on several lists of “climate havens” — places that are more adaptable to warming temperatures.
But the state can still expect changes — including altered winter traditions. Mental health experts say losing those traditions takes a toll.
‘Missing out on the joy’
AJ Johnson-Suresh is a dogsled musher and the owner of Jack and the Pack, a dog sports gear store in Roseville. She loves winter — but now, she says, it comes with a lot of anxiety.
This winter, she was only able to get her dogs out training on the snow a handful of times. Big snowfalls this year melted too fast to make for a consistent dogsledding season, Johnson-Suresh said.
When the snow melts, she rigs her dogs up to her truck and drives while they pull, so they can train on dry land.
“It’s not fun for me at all. I don’t even consider that mushing,” Johnson-Suresh said. “I’m just, like, hanging out in a car.”
Warm temperatures or a lack of snow — or both — have posed a problem for dogsledding around the country in recent years. Organizers of the Klondike Dog Derby in Minnetonka canceled the race this winter due to warm weather for the third year in a row.
The John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon on Minnesota’s North Shore was canceled in 2024, and had to be postponed until later in the season in 2025. Even as far north as Alaska, the famed Iditarod changed its course in 2025 due to low snow in parts of the state.
Johnson-Suresh knows some mushers who have moved up north, or drive farther to get to good snow. But that’s expensive, and Johnson-Suresh said she doesn’t want to uproot her life like that.
It’s not just the lackluster training season that gets her down; for Johnson-Suresh, it’s the closest-to-home reminder of climate change.
“Myself and other mushers have been very depressed,” Johnson-Suresh said. “You’re missing out on the joy of the training. I’ve thought about it multiple times where I was like, ‘Should we keep doing this?’ I don’t know.”
Climate grief
Shawna Weaver has heard similar accounts from many people in the Upper Midwest. She’s a counselor and climate grief researcher, and author of the book “Climate Grief.”
She first started thinking about climate grief while working as a school counselor about 15 years ago.
“More and more students were reporting having some sort of grief or anxiety around climate change,” Weaver said.
Kids brought up fears about what they saw close to home, like melting snow too early in winter. Weaver said she feels that grief herself when she visits the northern Wisconsin lake she used to cross on a snowmobile to get to school. These days, the ice is often too thin to hold the weight.
Weaver said the fear of losing a traditional “up north” winter is, for many people, the fear of losing a beloved lifestyle.
“Those are some of the deepest-held themes and throughlines of our lives and of our identities, and they’re often intertwined with some of our most transformative memories, with family and with who we say we are,” Weaver said.
Climate grief is a developing area of mental health practice. It’s not used as an official diagnostic term, but it is gaining more attention and research. The American Psychological Association conducts research and offers trainings on climate and mental health for therapists. Weaver said there’s more research in the field than there used to be and more therapists trained to help people who struggle with climate grief.
Weaver said grief is a helpful way to think about the loss of a familiar environment, even though it’s different than grieving a person.
“Unlike other grief, we don’t get to first move through a trauma or a crisis and then have a phase of grieving. And that’s the way, usually, people tend to move through a big change,” Weaver said.
So, coping with this kind of change is different, too.
Weaver said talk therapy can help, especially with therapists who’ve studied climate-related anxiety. But she said that’s not the whole solution. Researchers and mental health practitioners often suggest actually getting involved in climate work.
Christie Manning is an environmental studies professor at Macalester College in St. Paul and one of the authors of reports on climate and mental health from the American Psychological Association. She said getting involved in climate work helps her students.
“They channel their worry and their anger into doing something,” Manning said. “Working with the St. Paul City Council or the district council, working with the college administration, trying to do the pieces that they can tackle and that do have an impact.”
She said one of the reasons climate change is so stressful is because it’s vast. People know they can’t fix the problem on their own. But just putting a dent in the problem is helpful — on both the mental health side and the climate side.
Manning calls this “meaning-focused coping,” another term mental health professionals have developed in the past decade.
“It’s a resilience practice where you recognize that, ‘Maybe what I am doing is not going to protect me or protect anyone else from this problem that I’m worried about, but it still matters,’” Manning said.
And it may be helpful for the Minnesotans who are grieving changes in winter traditions.
Making the most of winter
Ryan Rogers has been cross-country skiing since he was a kid. His parents passed on the tradition. He said he gets a lot of joy from it — but often, it’s coupled with constantly refreshing his weather app to see if his training sessions and races will still be doable.
He’s currently working toward a master’s degree in environmental policy.
“I think it was skiing that sort of got me into it,” Rogers said. “Of course, climate change … is vastly more serious than one winter sport. It’s a great personal motivator, but I think there’s so much more at stake.”
It helps, he says, to know he’s able to work on climate solutions.
Skiing, conveniently, also offers something else that researchers recommend for coping with grief: community.
“We can all kind of pool our sorrows together,” Rogers said. “We’re going to ski when we can, and we’re going to enjoy every inch of snow that we get.”
Back at St Paul’s Groveland ice rinks, John Hoeschen is sticking to a similar philosophy: make the most of the winter you get.
The rink closed this year in mid-February, when St. Paul hit record highs in the mid-50s. That’s longer than the past few seasons. Cold weekend days brought out the crowds he loves to see at the rinks: sometimes a thousand people, and kids who spend a whole day skating around.
Hoeschen said he’ll keep up this beloved ice rink for as long as he can. But he has a limit.
“If we go two years without ice, I’m done,” Hoeschen said.
This story is part of Call to Mind, American Public Media and MPR's initiative to foster new conversations about mental health.
