It has become a common request in the course of a discussion to say, “Please, let’s not go there.” It’s a way of indicating that we would rather not visit an uncomfortable topic of conversation.
In his new book Earth Emotions, philosopher Glenn Albrecht provides a name for this sort of feeling in the context of ecological destruction that forever ruins a place. He writes, “Topoaversion is a feeling that you do not wish to return to a place that you once loved and enjoyed when you know that it has been irrevocably changed for the worse.”
Topoaversion might be the emotion experienced by an old school mountain climber, upon seeing long lines near the summit of Mount Everest, with trash strewn all about. It could be the feeling your grandfather has when he plans to visit Acadia National Park to revisit the beautiful remote coastlines of his youth, only to hear that he can expect to spend most of his time there stuck in traffic. It is the emotion of experienced divers who prefer to avoid the Great Barrier Reef upon hearing of the massive bleaching afflicting its corals.
There will be those who argue that topoaversion is not really an emotion unto itself. They’ll claim that topoaversion is really just one specific example of the basic emotion “sad”. The word “sad” doesn’t begin to describe, however, the tragically painful combination of longing and disgust that come along with the specific experience of learning that a beloved place has been destroyed.
Topoaversion is in the same class of ecologically-focused emotions that I’ve described this week: Biophilia, flygskam, solastalgia, and climate grief. Yet, it is distinct from all of these.
The emotional impact of a phenomenon so immense as anthropogenic climate change cannot possibly described by just one or two basic emotions. The childish simplicity of Emotion AI’s crude framework of feelings falls flat before the linguistic requirements for describing the many manifestations of our broken hearts on this devastated planet.
Glenn Albrecht’s Earth Emotions only begin to explore the territories of suffering that are resulting from generations of thoughtless neglect of the natural world we depend upon for survival. In the years to come, as the atmosphere grows even hotter and the sea levels rise, we can expect to see the articulation of yet more words that describe our emotional reactions to the death of the world as we have known it.
