Solastalgia

My usual joy at discovering a new word was recently bittersweet. Solastalgia is a formidable and necessary neologism, though it grants a name to an emotion with which I'd rather not be familiar.

The word was defined in 2003 (see the links below), "Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change", lead-authored by Glenn Albrecht, as "a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress... As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home."

That my weekly bouts of melancholy have now been pathologised and labelled highlights the definition as a common experience, worthy of diagnosis, which isn't comforting. Before now, I simply described this feeling as "Oh, no: even more of the view from Glastonbury Tor has disappeared beneath industrial space since yesterday". But it seems that a sufficiently high percentage of the global population is so familiar with this feeling that it deserves its own word, comprised of the Latin for comfort (solacium) and the Greek root for pain (-algia).

The priority concern of the study by Albrecht et al is the distress experienced by people witnessing the kind of environmental changes that recently prompted the announcement of the Anthropocene: the geological age in which humans define the greatest changes to the land surfaces, waters, skies and climate system of the Earth. Mortified as I am by this global crossing of the Rubicon, it occurs to me that most people with cause to be wistful about changes to their local environment are less likely to have been affected by the kinds of heavy industry observed by Albrecht. The "Solastalgia" study particularly details the sense of loss experienced by people living within a (quarried) stone's throw of large-scale open-cut mining, which is a rapacious mauling of the landscape I can barely imagine, never mind consider occurring within the green borders of my home city. But I feel compelled to speak for all the folk in the world who, like me – though mercifully not traumatised to the same extent as tribespeople of the Amazon rainforest, who've seen their homes transformed by industrial logging into a nuclear winter of endless devastation – still know the heartbreak of disappearing green space, even if it is due to development considered useful or beneficial to society and infrastructure.

Due to the exponential expansion demanded by the economic system in which we toil, and of course the UK's constant need for affordable housing, a fact of most people's lives has become the loss of their natural local environment. The wild meadow that hosted most of your childhood play is now the site of a factory that produces novelty plastic dog poo; the stream where you saw your first kingfisher now flows through a concrete subterranean channel beneath a housing development And, as though this weren't enough, the cruel aftermath for those distraught by the change is discovering that the new roads in the estate are named after the flora and fauna that used to flourish there. You had your first kiss where 37 Squashed Badger Road now stands, and the hazel thicket from which you watched the sun set after your hide-and-seeking friends gave up is now Uprooted Greenery Drive.

I wouldn't be any more or less upset about these irreversible changes if the pristine meadow and its tangled fringes had been dynamited for lead-ore extraction. When the place you think of as home is gone, regardless of the manner of its removal, it is gone.

Had it been coined earlier, solastalgia would have been a useful word to introduce to Jimmy Copper in 1951 during his recorded interview with the BBC, in which he discussed his grief regarding changes to the downs of his Sussex home. He talks of his younger days spent working as a shepherd, recalling the "grace and beauty" of the chalk hills in those days, and then his voice cracks with emotion when he observes that, since then, those downs have become a sea of "'ouses, 'ouses, 'ouses."

There can't be many people left in the world who aren't able to tell a similar story.

The Anthropocene may mark the age in which Wordsworth's heartfelt stanza loses its truth.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, he declared in 1798. But she may well betray us soon, paved over and toxic, simply unable to support the species that broke its own heart by killing her.

© Mark Crutchfield, 2017

http://panjournal.net/issues
/3
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10398560701701288