There’s a Name for the Grief You’re Feeling About Climate Change
‘Solastalgia’ is the pain of watching the world change under your feet
Back in the early 2000s, Australia was going through a brutal heat wave and a persistent drought. The fierce temperatures were changing the landscape and the fabric of daily life: crops and flowers wouldn’t grow, coral reefs were dying off, and the government was rationing water.
The philosopher Glenn Albrecht noticed something happening to the people who were living in the drought region:
They were getting depressed.
Specifically, they were distraught at watching the environment around them, which had been pretty stable their whole lives, begin to fall apart. They knew that weather could be unpredictable, of course. They were used to that. But these new climate changes seemed more long-term, more ominous, and more permanent. The home they knew was vanishing. It left them deeply unsettled.
This was, Albrecht realized, a new type of emotion. The people in Australia were feeling something that resembled homesickness — except they hadn’t gone anywhere. Instead, their world was leaving them.
So in 2003, Albrecht coined a term for this new feeling: “Solastalgia.”
