Solastalgia

Solastalgia (pronounced sol-las-jee-uh)

The pain or distress caused by the loss or lack or solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory

2003: A coining by Professor Glenn Albrecht (b 1953), the construct built from the Latin sōlācium (solace, comfort) +‎ -algia (pain).  Sōlācium was from sōlor (to comfort, console, solace) + –ac- (a variant of –āx- (used to form adjectives expressing a tendency or inclination to the action of the root verb)) +‎ -ium, from the Latin -um (in this context used to indicate the setting where a given activity is carried out).  The –algia suffix was from the New Latin -algia, from the Ancient Greek -αλγία (-algía), from compounds ending in Ancient Greek ἄλγος (álgos) (pain) +‎ the Ancient Greek -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā).  The most well-known was probably kephalalgíā (headache).  Solastalgia is a noun, Solastalgic is a noun and adjective and solastalgically is an adverb; the noun plural is solastalgias.

Elements what became the modern environmentalism can be found in writings from Antiquity and there are passages in Biblical Scripture which are quoted to support the notion Christ and God Himself were greenies.  However, as a political movement, it was very much a creation of the late twentieth century although Theodore Roosevelt (TR, 1858–1919; US president 1901-1909), despite his reputation as a big game hunter, made some notable contributions.  In what proved an active retirement, Roosevelt would often remark that more than the landmark anti-trust laws or his Nobel Peace Prize, the most enduring legacy of his presidency would be the federal legislation relating to the conservation and protection of the natural environment, both land and wildlife.  While he was in the White House, new national parks and forests were created, the total areas an impressive 360,000 square miles (930,000 km²), a reasonable achievement given the pressure vested interests exerted upon the Congress to prevent anything which would impinge upon “development”.

Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (1903) by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

Roosevelt though was not typical and in most places the profits from industrialization & development proved more compelling than abstractions about the environment; even when the effects of climate change became obvious, it was clear only a crisis would rapidly create the conditions for change.  Events such as the London’s “Great Smog” of 1952 were so dramatic changes were made (culminating in the Clean Air Act (1956)) and the state of the air quality in San Francisco & Los Angeles was by the late 1950s so obviously deteriorating that California enacted anti-pollution laws even before there was much federal legislation, the state remaining in the vanguard to this day.  Those political phenomenon for a while encouraged the thought that even though decisive action to reduce carbon emissions was improbable while climate change (once referred to as “the greenhouse effect” and later “global warming”) seemed both remote and conceptual, once the “crisis events” began to affect those living in the rich countries of the global north (ie “the white folks”), the term would morph into “climate crisis” and resource allocation would shift to address the problem.  That theory remains sound but what was under-estimated was the threshold point for the word “crisis”.  Despite the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires, soaring temperatures, polar vortexes and floods, thus far the political system is still being adjusted on the basis of gradual change: the imperative remains managing rather than rectifying the problem.  Once, television-friendly events such as (1) melting glaciers creating landslides destroying entire villages which have for centuries sate in the Swiss Alps, (2) suburbs of mansions in the hills of Los Angeles being razed to the ground by wildfires, (3) previously unprecedented floods in Europe and Asia killing hundreds and (4) heat waves routinely becoming a feature of once temperate regions would have been thought “crisis triggers” but the political system has thus far absorbed them.

Silent Spring (First edition, 1962) by Rachel Carson.

The origins of the environment movement in its modem form are often traced to the publication in 1962 of Silent Spring by marine biologist Rachel Carson (1907–1964) although it took years for the controversy that book generated to coalesce into an embryonic “green” movement.  Silent Spring was a best-seller which (in an accessible form) introduced to the general public notions of the threat chemical pollution posed to ecology, the power of her argument being to identify the issue not as something restricted to a narrow section of agricultural concerns but as part of a systemic threat to the balance of nature and the very survival of human civilization.  There were many other influences (demographic, cultural, economic, educational etc) at this time and by the late 1960s, it was apparent concerns about pollution, over-population, pesticide use and such had created an identifiable shared language and public visibility although it was something too fragmented to be called a movement, the goals and advocated courses of action remaining disparate.  Structurally however, organizations were being formed and a convenient turning point suggesting critical mass had been achieved came in the US in April, 1970 when some 20 million participants received wide coverage in the media for Earth Day, a warning to the politicians that “the environment” might affect voting patterns.  It was in this era that the framework of US environmental legislation was built including the Clean Air Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972) and Endangered Species Act (1973) was formed, all passed during the administration of Richard Nixon (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) and under Nixon, in 1970, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) was created, an institution of which Theodore Roosevelt would have approved.

Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019) by Professor Glenn Albrecht.

When working as a academic, Glenn Albrecht was granted conventional academic titles (such as Professor of Sustainability) but his work puts him in the category of “ecophilosopher”, a concept which would have been understood by the natural scientists of Antiquity; it’s now an increasingly populated field with a niche in popular publishing.  The eco- prefix was from the French éco-, from the Latin oeco-, from Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) (house, household) and was for generations familiar in “economy” and its derivatives but is now most associated with ecology or the environment (in the ecological sense).  For better or worse, it has come to be applied to novel constructs including ecotourism (forms of “sustainable” tourism claimed to cause less environmental damage), ecofascism (literally “fascist politics with support for ecological concerns” but used usually (as a derogatory) to refer to uncompromising, aggressive or violent environmental activism, the most extreme form of which is ecoterrorism (a label used rather loosely, even of vegans who stage protests outside restaurants serving the products of the slaughter industry)) and ecofeminism (a socio-political movement combining feminism and environmentalism).

The ecophilosophers have produced many publications but Professor Albrecht has been unusual in that he has been prolific also in the coining of words, especially those which relate to or are consequent upon what he calls the “sumbiocentric” (taking into account the centrality of the process of symbiosis in all of our deliberations on human affairs”).  Such creations in emerging or expanding fields of study are of course not unusual.  In environmentalism, new terms and words have in recent decades appeared but there’s been a element of technological determinism to some.  Although the notion humanity lives on a “ship travelling through space” had been in use since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the metaphor had been nautical and it wasn’t until “spaceships” started to be launched the 1960s the term was updated to the now familiar “spaceship earth”.  Neologisms, even if used in context can be baffling but helpfully, Professor Albrecht published also a “glossary of psycho erratic terms” with pocket definitions explaining his lexicon of the “Earth’s emotions”.

Endemophilia: A “love of place”, specifically the “particular love of the locally and regionally distinctive in the people of a place.”  The mechanism for this is: “Once a person realizes that the landscape they have before them is not replicated in even a general way elsewhere in the country or on their continent or even in the world, there is ample room for a positive Earth emotion based on rarity and uniqueness.”  This is classified as a spectrum condition in that the more “a uniqueness is understood… the more it can be appreciated”.  Professor Albrecht was speaking of geology, florna & fauna but figuratively the concept can be applied to the built environment in urban areas and it doesn’t demand an interest in architecture to take pleasure from the form of (some) buildings.

Eutierria: A “feeling of total harmony with our place, and the naïve loss of ego (merging subject and ego) we often felt as children”.  Professor Albrecht cites the author Richard Louv (b 1949) who used the phrase “nature deficit disorder” in suggesting a word was needed to describe the state of harmony one could achieve if “connected to the Earth”.  Eutierria is a “positive feeling of oneness with the Earth and its life forces, where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated, and a deep sense of peace and contentedness pervades consciousness”.

The HUCE (Harvard University Center for the Environment) in 2017 noted the phenomenon of mermosity, recording that some six months earlier New York Magazine had “published its most-read article ever, surpassing a photo spread of Lindsay Lohan.”  The topic the HUCE summarized as “Doom”, the apocalyptic visions of a world ravaged by climate change, the young especially afflicted by a crushing sense of dread.

Mermosity: “An anticipatory state of being worried about the possible passing of the familiar, and its replacement by that which does not sit comfortably in one’s sense of place.”  This is a word now with great currency because researchers have noted one aspect of the prominence in the media of (1) human-induced climate change and (2) the apparent inevitability of its adverse consequences has resulted in a pervading sense of doom among some, especially the young.  According to some psychologists, their young patients are exhibiting “mourning-like” behaviour, thinking the planet already in the throes of destruction and they exist merely as mourners at its protracted funeral.

Meteoranxiety: The “anxiety felt in the face of the threat of the frequency and severity of extreme weather events”.  This is an example of a feedback loop in that weather events (rain, storms, heatwaves etc) now tending by many to be attributed exclusively to human-induced climate change, thus exacerbating one’s mermosity.  In the literature of psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, philosophy, sociology & political science there are explanations (often replete with house jargon) explaining how “perception bias” & “cognitive bias” operate and interact but such things rarely are discussed on the TikTok news feeds which these days are so influential in shaping world views.

Solastalgia: “The pain or distress caused by the loss or lack or solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory”.  This is the “lived experience of negative environmental change” and reflects the sense of loss of what once was (or one’s imagined construct of what once was), a phenomenon Professor Albrecht describes as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”.  Although coined to be used in the context of climate change, it can be applied more widely and the feeling will be familiar to those who notice the lack of familiar landmarks in cities as urban redevelopment changes the architecture.  In those cases, the distress can be made more troubling still because even a building one may for years frequently have seen rapidly can fade from memory to the point where it can be hard to remember its appearance, even if it stood for decades.

Google ngram: Because of the way Google harvests data for their ngrams, they’re not literally a tracking of the use of a word in society but can be usefully indicative of certain trends, (although one is never quite sure which trend(s)), especially over decades.  As a record of actual aggregate use, ngrams are not wholly reliable because: (1) the sub-set of texts Google uses is slanted towards the scientific & academic and (2) the technical limitations imposed by the use of OCR (optical character recognition) when handling older texts of sometime dubious legibility (a process AI should improve).  Where numbers bounce around, this may reflect either: (1) peaks and troughs in use for some reason or (2) some quirk in the data harvested.  Being recent, the ngram for solastagia should be an untypically accurate indication of trends in use but it’s a quantitative and not qualitative measure: Although a word very much of the climate change era, it has been used in other contexts as, as a neologism, it appears also in many dictionaries and other on-line lists.

Sumbiocentric: “Taking into account the centrality of the process of symbiosis in all of our deliberations on human affairs”.  The special place environmentalism has assumed in the public consciousness means the sumbiocentric is positioned as something beyond just another construction of ethics and should be thought a kind of secular, moral theology.  Ominously, one apparent implication in this would appear to be the desirability (according to some the necessity) for some sort of internationally “co-ordinated” government, a concept with a wide vista and in various forms at times advocated by figures as diverse as the polemicist playwright George Bernard Shaw (GBS; 1856-1950) and Edward Teller (1908–2003), the so-called “father of the hydrogen bomb”.

Sumbiophilia: “The love of living together”.  This would apparently be the state of things in the symbiocene, a speculative era which would succeed the Anthropocene and be characterized by a harmonious and cooperative coexistence between humans and the rest of nature which presumably would be something of a new Jerusalem although shepherds, child care workers and others would be advised not to take literally the Biblical Scripture: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6, King James Version (KJV, 1611)).  However, other than sensible precautions when around carnivorous predators, all would exist in a symbiosis (living together for mutual benefit) without the destructive practices of the anthropocene.  In the world of Green Party wine & cheese evenings, sumbiophilia probably seems the most natural thing in the world although the party leadership would be sufficiently realistic to understand not all would agree so, when it was made compulsory, “re-education camps” would be needed to “persuade” the recalcitrant.  As used by Professor Albrecht, sumbiophilia is an ideal but one obviously counter-historical because the development of the nation state (which took millennia and was (more or less) perfected in the nationalisms which have been the dominant political paradigm since the nineteenth century) suggests what people love is not us all “living together” but groups of us “keeping the others out”.  Not for nothing are idealists thought the most dangerous creatures on Earth.

Terrafuric: “The extreme anger unleashed within those who can clearly see the self-destructive tendencies in the current forms of industrial-technological society and feel they must protest and act to change its direction”.  This is another spectrum condition ranging from writing truculent letters to the New York Times, to members of Extinction Rebellion super-gluing themselves to the road to assassinating the “guilty parties”, a la Luigi Mangione (b 1998).

Terranascia (“Earth creating forces”) and terraphthora (“Earth destroying forces”) are companion terms which could be used by geologists, cosmologists and others but the significance in this context is that humans are now (and have long been) among the most ecologically destructive forces known.

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger (2017) by Antonia Grunenberg (b 1944).  Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) relationship with Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) began when she was a 19 year old student of philosophy and he her professor, married and aged 36.  Both, for different reasons, would more than once have experienced solastalgia.

Solastalgia began life in the milieu of the climate change wars but poets and others beyond the battleground have been drawn to the word, re-purposing it in abstract or figurative ways, comparing the process of literal environmental degradation with losses elsewhere.  The adaptations have included (1) Social & cultural change (loss of familiar traditions or communities), (2) Linguistic erosion (mourning the disappearance of words, dialects or the quirks in language with which one grew up, replaced often by new (and baffling) forms of slang), (3) One’s personal emotional framework (the loss of friends, partner or family members), (4) Aging (the realization of mounting decrepitude), (5) Digital displacement (a more recent phenomenon which covers a range including an inability to master new technology, grief when once enjoyed digital spaces become toxic, commercialized or abandoned and having to “upgrade” from familiar, functional software to newer versions which offer no advantages), (6) Artistic loss (one’s favourite forms of music, art or literature become unfashionable and neglected) and (7) Existential disconnection (not a new idea but now one an increasing number claim to suffer; a kind of philosophical estrangement in which one feels “the world” (in the sense the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) used the word) has become strange and unfamiliar).