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,
History of a Love
(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 used the word) has become strange and
unfamiliar).
