What with the recent Emotional Granularity entries of flygskam and biophilia, I seem to be in a pattern of describing emotions that are ecologically related. I’ll make the pattern a trend, then, and spend the rest of the week taking note of subjective states of mind people feel in reaction to the disastrous condition of Planet Earth.
A few weeks ago, Ralph Talmont introduced me to the emotion of solastalgia, a kind of anguish that is caused as people watch the degradation of the natural environment in the familiar places around where they live, knowing that this degradation is just part of a larger ecological crisis around the globe.
Solastalgia is a new word, invented by philosopher Glenn Albrecht, but it has been widely adopted in cultures around the world by people who have long experienced the emotion but had lacked language to describe it. Solastalgia comes from two Latin words, one the root for the English word solace, and the other, algia, an ancient Roman word for pain.
The idea of solastalgia is that because of climate change and other ecological calamities caused by industrialization, the well-known places around our homes that should bring us comfort now bring us pain. The devastation of our planet’s environment has made our favorite spots unfamiliar, exposing us to the eerie sensation of the world as a place that we know by heart, and yet do not know at all.
