We are living in the
Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound – and
terrifying – it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists
have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis?’
In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined
the term solastalgia to mean a “form of psychic or existential distress caused
by environmental change”.
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| Manila Bay in the Philippines covered with plastic bags and rubbish - a marker of the Anthropocene. |
Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and
large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales, when he realised
that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes
were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed
his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness.
Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the
pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be
mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible.
Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John
Clare as a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside
disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has flourished recently. “A
worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,” wrote Albrecht, is
“matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes”. Solastalgia
speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered
unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home become suddenly
unhomely around its inhabitants.
Read The Guardian
story by Robert McFarlane - “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever.”
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