Solastalgia and other Earth Emotions
Naming the emotions of a world in transition
Solastalgia is “the mental distress specifically caused by environmental change, where one’s home environment and sense of place is being violated”
Ecopsychologist Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia in 2005, based on the emotional impacts of large-scale coal mining on Aboriginal individuals’ wellbeing in New South Wales, Australia.
In Albrecht's critical book "Earth Emotions", solastalgia is identified as one of six conditions he defines as land-based sicknesses, or psychoterratic diseases, emerging from our what I see as the imperialist/ capitalist worldview which has impacted everyone's relationship to our natural world. "Solastalgia" describes the loss that land-dependent communities feel when their place is violated.
Right now we are witnessing solastalgic loss at magnitudes never felt or seen before on our Earth. In addition to the great loss of life from wars and climate catastrophes, both natural and human cultivated landscapes are irrevocably harmed, which delivers a reverberating blow to people's sense of place and identity which leads to severe mental and emotional health issues that are rarely linked to these systemic issues.
People with depression and addiction are often told to go to therapy and engage in individual healing for what are collective and systemic problems, and their embodied despair is seen as some isolated instance instead of overlapping phenomena with the destruction of the Earth that we are seeing at the hands of an economy of extraction and warfare capitalism.
Our well-being is inextricably intertwined with the well-being of our Earth and the intact tapestry of memory that's held in our natural and built landscapes.
In order to tend to cultures of transition we must understand the role of historical and contemporary violences faced by communities all around the world plays in our lived experience of Solastalgia.
Glenn Albrecht states: " We can read history to see how this has happened to humans before, as indigenous people were put on this path by colonial powers in places all over the globe. Their experience of emotional loss, then extinction (in some cases), presents a glimpse of our own future. Indigenous literature now contains dystopian plots that tell of solastalgia and other powerful negative displacement emotions for land and places. In Australia, Indigenous writers, such as Alexis Wright in her terraphthoric novel, The Swan Book, transmit the very idea of solastalgic loss to the reader. In non-indigenous literature, the resonance of the eco-apocalyptic in The Road by Cormac McCarthy conveys a similar experience for those already thinking about the emotions of displacement and separation due to anthropogenic climate change. What is this period of human history doing to our mental landscapes as it obliterates and blights biophysical ones? In addition to the concepts of nostalgia and solastalgia, negative psychoterratic states in the existing literature, such as biophobia, ecoparalysis, ecoanxiety, ecocide, and ecophobia will be introduced, as will the emergent role of my new terms such as terrafurie, tierracide, tierratrauma, and meteoranxiety."
I keep thinking about the numbing influence of the type of traumatizing dominant culture we live under. And we are seeing it on our feeds in real time with landscapes being obliterated by war. We are seeing people in shock and enduring great traumatic injuries, both physical and mental/emotional, and we ourselves are in shock and trauma just bearing witness. This can lead us to feelings of despair which in turn leads us to dissociation, because that is a protective mechanism of our nervous systems response to trauma. Freeze. Shut down.
Emotional death is a type of dissassociation which breeds lack of empathy because if we were feeling the emotions of the grief of the earth's pain we would be immoblized. Glenn Albrecht speaks of this biophilic emotional death here, "The emotional death.. occurs when some humans no longer even have a reaction to the end, death, or loss of nature. There is no emotional presence to bear witness, as all remaining biota are ignored as irrelevant to the life projects of individual humans."
That's why it's not only more important than ever that we continue to lean in and feel the full spectrum of emotions in this current moment, however uncomfortable they may be. That's why it's also helpful to have new vocabulary to speak to these very specific emotions felt in the shadow of empire. Otherwise we risk apathy that leads to moral injury.
Albrecht's book Earth Emotions opens a doorway to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a lexicon of positive and negative emotions, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia love of life for our home planet. He proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science and Indigenous wisdom. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene.
"The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory. In order to get out of the Anthropocene, humans will need generational change. I will make the case that Generation Symbiocene (Gen S) will arise from within the ranks of all of the post-boomer generations (Gens) as the need for a new human identity, built on common Symbiocene principles, politics, and ethics, becomes clear."
I'm thinking of engaging with this book as a book club discussion this winter. Anyone interested? Comment below.
