The lives of Wynn Bruce and David Buckel were separated by the distance between Boulder, Colo., And New York City, and the professional divide between a photographer working in a grocery store and a pioneering lawyer. What they had in common was the belief that climate change posed a serious threat to society, as well as the admiration for Buddhist principles of full commitment to a cause. Both men died in self-immolation – Mr. Buckel in 2018 and Mr. Bruce last Friday, Earth Day. They did less in death than they could in life, families and psychologists said. “It was a terrible mistake David made,” her husband Terry Kaelber said in an interview this week. But “these are two people who cared a lot about sending a message.” The final acts of the two men came after years of warning by psychologists that a changing climate is subverting not only the physical Earth, but also the mental well-being of its inhabitants. Some call it “climate stress”. Others suggest that desperation for impending disaster — burning forests, waterless reservoirs, flooded sea fronts, and homeless people — equates to a kind of “pre-traumatic stress.” Dark climate thoughts can burden those who are already struggling, said Lise Van Susteren, a psychiatrist who specializes in the effects of climate change on mental health. “Usually we can say to ourselves, ‘Today is a bad day, but it will get better.’ The increasingly obvious reality of a warming planet suggests, instead, that “it is not going to improve. “It will get worse,” he said. When this idea takes root, “then you start entering a treacherous area.” This existential anxiety that some people feel can be exacerbated by the feeling that “the government is not paying attention to them. “So this institutional betrayal is also part of the trauma that causes a sense of despair,” said Dr Van Susteren. A 2020 study published by Yale researchers found feelings of disgust or helplessness about climate issues in more than 40 percent of Americans surveyed. A 2021 survey of 10,000 children and young people in 10 countries, including Brazil, France, Nigeria, India and the United States, found that more than half reported feelings of sadness, anxiety, anger, weakness, weakness and guilt associated with with the climate. Nearly half said that these feelings “negatively affected their daily lives and functioning”. Mr Bruce’s death before the US Supreme Court was not the first time he had attempted to take his own life in the fire. He had made an earlier attempt in 2017 in New York, his father told the Washington Post. Winnie Bruce set himself on fire in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on April 22, 2022, sparking a national debate about his motives and whether he may have been inspired by Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire in the past to protest government atrocities. / The Associated Press Both for 50-year-old Bruce and for 60-year-old Buckel, ecological anguish combined with an interest in Buddhism, whose followers have used self-immolation as a form of protest in various parts of the world. In China, 159 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. The self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963 in Saigon brought worldwide attention to the persecution in South Vietnam. Mr Buckel had spoken to friends about such acts, saying he “really admired that level of commitment”, Mr Kaelber said. “I’m not sure I would agree with that. I would argue that the absolute commitment is to stay in the fight. There is a side of me that thinks that what Mr. Bakel did is “like I give up.” But in a note he sent to several media outlets shortly before his death, Mr. Buckel, a prominent gay and transgender rights activist, had expressed a note of despair. “Most people on the planet now breathe unhealthy fossil fuel air and many die prematurely as a result – my premature death from fossil fuels reflects what we do to ourselves,” he wrote. Mr Bruce also tackled climate change. He has lived since 2000 in Boulder, Colo., Not far from the site of the Marshall Fire, the most catastrophic in the history of the state, destroyed 1,084 residential buildings at the end of December 2021. A few days later, she posted on Facebook an excerpt from Buddhist environmentalist Joanna Macy from her book Despair and personal strength in the nuclear age“The heart that opens can contain the whole universe.” Mr. Bruce grew up in Minnesota, where he developed a love of the countryside through frequent trips to a family home in Luchen, on the north shore of Lake Superior. As a boy, he rowed with his father, Douglas Bruce, in the Wilderness area of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, just south of the Ontario border. “He really liked the countryside,” his father said in an interview. A car accident as a teenager left him with a traumatic brain injury and “it was difficult for him to be able to have a full-time job,” his father said. Mr. Bruce’s great-grandfather worked as a director of photography in Hollywood, and about a decade ago Mr. Bruce enrolled in a graphic design program at Front Range Community College in Longmond. Colo. “He was studying, I think he was a photojournalist, but because of his head and leg injuries he could not drive, so that was limited,” said trainer Pauli Driver-Smith. He opened a photo studio. He also worked at a grocery store, where he befriended Brian Grossman, a local sculptor with multiple sclerosis. Mr Grossman recalled that Mr Bruce had said that it was “horrible” for governments to “ignore global warming and pollution”. It was something he “believed in with all his might,” said Grossman, who last spoke with Mr Bruce about a week before his death. Mr. Bruce praised him for his persistence as an artist working with a degenerative condition. “I think our connection was based on our mutual difficulties, doing what we believed in,” Grossman said. Mr. Bruce found other social connections through Buddhism by attending events at the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center. The center offered “meditation in nature along with dharma teachings on ecological action,” according to Kritee Kanko, a founding board member. After Mr Bruce’s death, Ms Kanko wrote on Twitter that she had been “planning it for at least a year”. “This act is not suicide,” he wrote. “This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to draw attention to the climate crisis.” She and other Buddhist leaders later issued a statement saying none of them “knew about their plans to set themselves on fire on Earth Day.” But “this has been on his mind for a long time, I can say,” said his father. Mr Bruce’s death “reflects his concern for you and for me and for everyone else on the planet,” said his father. “He could not do that if he was desperate or in some kind of spiral.” However, Mr Bruce’s death has refreshed Mr Kaelber’s own sense that the debate over climate change should extend beyond its effects on Earth. While he still hopes there is time for action – and says the only viable solution is to tackle the root causes of global warming rather than the symptoms – he also believes that “taking care of each other emotionally and mentally ”must become part of the climate. “Because it seems that life is getting a lot more complicated everywhere.” And, he added, “the long-range picture is dark.” If you have suicidal thoughts, call the Child Helpline at 1-800-668-6868 or Crisis Service Canada at 1-833-456-4566 or visit
