“An affected eucalypt forest in the Helena National Park is visible in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image acquired on 20 April 2024.” See: https://www.copernicus.eu/en/media/image-day-gallery/australian-eucalypt-forests-impacted-drought In April 2011, I wrote about this form of “ethical dieback” when living in Jarrahdale, right in the middle of a huge dieback event in the Darling Ranges of SW Western Australia. … Continue reading Solastalgia for the Jarrah Forest
Solastalgia and the Psyche As a philosopher, I tread with trepidation into the realm of psychiatry. While both disciplines have overlapping domains in the mind/brain nexus, they also diverge into many areas where there seems very little mutual contact. That only psychiatry has a clinical context is also a major point of departure. One area … Continue reading Solastalgia, the Symbiotic Emotion and the Symbiocene
Glenn Albrecht, Australia’s ‘Person General’. We are all being fucked by the fickle finger of failure. The land that we love is being fried and a bunch of fuckwits in charge are doing nothing about it. It is frying because the joint is getting fucking hotter. Our trees and gardens are fucking dying and frying … Continue reading Solastalgia and Fire: Written for the Australian Black Summer of 2019-2020. Re-written for the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2022.
Albrecht, G.A. (2010) Solastalgia and the Creation of New Ways of Living, Chapter 13 in Pretty, J. and Pilgrim S., (eds), Nature and Culture: Rebuilding Lost Connections, London, Earthscan, pp.217-234. Introduction: The global transformation of place and psychoterratic dis-ease Cultures all over the world have concepts in their language that relate psychological states to states … Continue reading Solastalgia and the Creation of New Ways of Living (2010)
Solastalgia and Soundscapes I have solastalgia at the fading of natural sounds in the environment … our soundscape is changing. We are in fact experiencing an aural invasion … the sounds of the natural world are slowly being silenced by the noise pollution of industrial society. If it is not the cacophony of air conditioners, road and … Continue reading Solastalgia and Soundscapes (2007)
Glenn A Albrecht, ‘Solastalgia: Environmental damage has made it possible to be homesick without leaving home’. From Alternatives Journal 32:4/5 2006. Covid-19, Pandemics and Solastalgia. “Any context in which pervasive change to the existing order challenges place identity has potential to deliver solastalgia. Transformative technologies and emergent disease (for human and non-human life) have enabled … Continue reading Covid-19, Pandemics and Solastalgia.
The PDF: Open Cuts Solastalgia 2003 Written by my colleagues Nick Higginbotham and Sonia Freeman for the Joint Medical and Health Sciences Newsletter 118 December 2003. I provided the notes on Solastalgia for the article which was edited by Kathy Byrne of the Faculty of Health, The University of Newcastle.
Solastalgia is the lived experience of negative environmental change. As a psychoterratic (psyche-earth) experience and emotion, solastalgia is now well established in the global literature on place and its transformation. Solastalgia has its origins in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, while an academic at The … Continue reading Solastalgia, PFAS and the Psyche: Contamination at Williamtown, NSW.
The sudden illness, then death of Polly Higgins (1968 – 2019) is a sad and monumental loss to all humanity. As a champion of the concept of ‘ecocide’, she was taking on the whole world. I believe she would have won. The affinity between her work and mine was captured in Earth Emotions in this … Continue reading Ecocide and Solastalgia
Solastalgia I define solastalgia as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and ‘lived experience’ of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place. It is characteristically a … Continue reading Solastalgia: The Definition and Origins
Psychoterratica 