Solastalgia

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A cross posting from my GCSE Natural History Blog.

Solastalgia was mentioned in the Guardian last year in a piece by Damien Gayle.

It's a word I've been familiar with for a while now, as it's a feeling I have had often in the last decade in particular as extreme weather has become more common, and local environments have shown signs of changing, and not always in a good way.

It was used in a piece back in 2016 by Robert MacFarlane who described its origins in the writing of Glenn Albrecht.

The context was the impact of coal mining on the surrounding area.

Solastalgia can be defined as: the “distress produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment”.

On the VeryWell website, there is also a suggestion that:

"When the places that matter most to us—our homes, our lands, and our communities—are disrupted, changed, or threatened, we may also sustain a less visible but no less damaging impact that is carried with us emotionally"

Here's a TED talk with Albrecht talking about the term:



It also points out quite rightly that other cultures have similar words or expressions, and that they probably predate ours given the various despoilation of the world by colonisation...

Solastalgia is not just a first-world concept. Sri Warsini, a researcher at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia is looking into instances of solastalgia that occur in developing countries such as Indonesia, following natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, finding that the loss of housing, livestock and farmland, and the ongoing danger of living in a disaster-prone area, challenge a person’s sense of place and identity and can lead to depression.

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