Covid-19, Pandemics and Solastalgia.

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 …

Eco- the spray-on solution to almost everything and … nothing.

"In many respects, especially for Indigenous people, the scientifically derived terms “ecology,” “ecological,” and “ecosystem” also fail to capture the emotional and cultural dimensions of the human relationship to land. They are useful terms in systems science but not so relevant to the expression of human emotions. Ecosystems are abstractions, as it is impossible to …

The Effort of Blame: Bushfires and Burnt Koalas.

I have meteoranxiety. The red, orange and yellow colours on the satellite weather screen indicate the intensity of precipitation. Yellow is moderate, red is heavy rain. I am being teased by the rain. Only the top of my head is wet but the most savage drought I have experienced in my lifetime (I am 66) …

Generation Symbiocene, Optimism and Symbiocene Identity

The loss of identity tied to a sense of place was one of the defining characteristics of my concept of solastalgia.[1] The issue of "identity" was even in the sub-title of the first publication devoted to it.  In my first publication on this topic I argued that, while solastalgia is a serious psychic condition, it …

Solastalgia 2003

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, PFAS and the Psyche: Contamination at Williamtown, NSW.

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 …

Ecocide and Solastalgia

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 …

Solastalgia in the Anthropocene and the Ghedeist in the Symbiocene

  Abstract The Anthropocene epoch is based on the evidence of dominance of human affairs over all natural processes at a planetary scale. It is also characterised by countless biocidal catastrophes worldwide with mass bee death by insecticides just one that has received world-wide attention. Those sensitive to the scope and scale of these insults …