This is a selected article from our newsletter. Sign up for the latest!
What can unexpected trauma teach us about the heartbreak of a lost landscape?
Shock, Loss, Recovery
A recent, wholly unexpected, 8-day stay in the hospital this past month left me little to do but watch the rhythmic drip, drip of the IV run down the tub hanging above my right shoulder into my arm. The battle between infection and antibiotics raged in my veins.
I am happy to report that the infection succumbed to surgery and the antibiotic onslaught, but not without some collateral damage, from which I now recover. It was bad, but it could have been much worse, for that I am grateful.
While the doctors attended to my physical wound, I was left alone to deal with the psychological and emotional shock to my sense of normality and stability (such as it was beforehand). Eight days with little to do affords time to think beyond the typical daily concerns that consume us.
It also elicits a craving to go outside. The sun shines bright outside my window. All I want is to be out there in the warm sun that reminds me of home. Recovery requires a commitment to healing.
Solastalgia
While in the hospital, I read Madeline Ostrander’s The Era of Climate Change Has Created a New Emotion.
Solastalgia is the new emotion Ostrander refers to in her article. A term originated by Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia is the emotional distress caused by unwelcome environmental change—a subtle, nostalgia-tinged grief from a disrupted sense of home.
We can be sad and concerned when we read about environmental destruction in other parts of the world, but it remains abstract and far away. Yet, to viscerally feel, in our bones, the withering of our homeland creates a singular emotional distress.
We feel solastalgia at the loss of our cherished landscapes as they once were, witnessing unwelcome change, destruction, and a lost sense of well-being and stability.
Grief, Acceptance, Perseverance
We use the same language for internal suffering and solastalgia–our internal and external worlds. This common language reveals the intersection between personal trauma and solastalgia, individual and environmental well-being.
A medical crisis shatters assumptions about health and a tenacious belief in eternal youth. We feel profoundly sad when a beloved landscape is lost and razed by development and pollution. Each evokes grief—a sense of loss.
Working through grief allows us to accept what is, giving way to acceptance. We must learn to cope.
Acceptance maintains itself through perseverance and resilience, doing the hard work demanded of a new and challenging situation. “Being willing is not enough—we must do.” Positive action is a salve against resignation.
And what of healing?
Healing
I am healing physically, but how do I recover from Solastagia? If we can’t bring back what is forever lost, we can still act. Restore what is possible and defend what is left.
Hope is when we stop fooling ourselves. By accepting our feelings of solastalgia and what is lost, we can rehabilitate our splintered relationship with the natural environment, ourselves, and life on this planet.
It is now my job to heal physically. One I take seriously. Maybe there’s a lesson in the experience.
We all have the job to accept where we are, what we’ve lost, and what we might do about it. Then, we can truly heal. This is where our hope rests.
Such are the idle reflections of a simple man.
—
“The Symbiocene is a meme that invites all humans to create a future where positive Earth emotions will prevail over the negative. To create the Symbiocene, we must destroy the Anthropocene and its parasitic and cancerous forms of growth.”
—Glenn Albrecht Earth Emotions
