What do we call this unprecedented moment of home-instability, widespread displacement, unease with our surroundings, the feeling that we can no longer trust what is familiar?
In such a moment of collective distress, the act of naming can carry a lot of power—to acknowledge and legitimize disquieting and traumatic experiences and to create a sense of shared struggle and aspiration. In various moments in human history—especially in moments of unrest—people have tried to name the pain that comes from the disruption of home: a complex set of feelings, muddled together like paint colors on a palette, that includes longing, love, grief, existential angst, and even a lurking sense of dread. Loss of home can also evoke the pain of dispossession, profound cultural and personal disorientation, and righteous anger, all of which can haunt a society for generations.
After the English invaded Wales in the thirteenth century, the word hiraeth (pronounced like here-eyeth) became a fixture in the Welsh language, to express the societal disruption of living under colonial rule. The feeling remains a defining part of Welsh identity. “Hiraeth is a protest,” writes essayist Pamela Petro. “It’s a sickness [that comes on] because home isn’t the place it should have been.”
In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, assembled a set of case studies to document the pain of home-disruption. Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that turned the region into “a smoldering land, amputated of half its population,” writes historian Thomas Dodman. The war’s long aftermath left this part of Europe in a state of economic stagnation and political instability. Later, his hometown, the independent city-state of Mulhouse (which wasn’t part of France proper until 1798), became a sanctuary to refugees fleeing religious persecution in France. At the time, it was also common practice in Western Europe to hire Swiss mercenaries to provide muscle, firepower, and military expertise to local militias. And these young soldiers reportedly suffered a common, chronic heartbreak, la maladie du pays, literally “the disease of the country” in French, or Heimweh, “home-woe” in Swiss German. In the thesis Hofer produced as part of his studies, he gave a scientific name to the pain of home loss that he had witnessed throughout his life. He called it nostalgia, derived from Greek, “composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nosos, return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifies suffering or grief,” he wrote. In English, a century later, this emotion would also receive the name homesickness. But to Hofer, nostalgia was also a medical condition whose symptoms included fever, nausea, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and respiratory problems, along with “palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.” Untreated, it could be fatal, and there were documented deaths among Swiss soldiers attributed to this malady. By the nineteenth century, the symptoms of nostalgia included “tachycardia, skin rashes, hyperhidrosis [excessive sweating], hearing difficulties, convulsions, heartburn, vomiting, diarrhea, and any rales or wheezing that a stethoscope might pick up in the chest,” according to Dodman. We would probably now attribute many of these symptoms to other psychological ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the twentieth century, the meaning of nostalgia became more detached from home and homesickness. Instead, it was about time, the longing for the real or imagined comforts of the past. Modern nostalgia can be pleasant or cloying but also dangerous—a desire for a moment that has never truly existed, a longing for a home or homeland that shelters some and exposes others to violence and displacement. The German word Heimat, which translates roughly as “homeland,” can conjure a “beautiful and terribly violent past,” writes cultural theorist Julia Metzger-Traber. For some Germans, the word simply evokes belonging or safety or connection with nature, but Heimat was also used in the 1930s and 1940s to romanticize Nazi ideology. That meaning still haunts Germany, and in 2018, when the German Ministry of the Interior formally renamed itself to include the word Heimat, a group of journalists of color published an anthology called Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (“Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare”). To them the word still evoked a “white majority society which is being threatened by people who are not allegedly part of it,” reflected Fatma Aydemir, and not the “radical diversity that is the reality in Germany.”
But in discarding the original notion of nostalgia, we may have underestimated the impact that place and home—our connectedness to community and ecosystem and planet—have on the human body and our ability to navigate our lives. Having a home is part of human well-being; when home is disrupted, it can make us literally sick. It is a kind of trauma. Social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove has described the pain felt by displaced communities—especially Black communities uprooted because of gentrification, discrimination, and urban development—as “root shock,” or “the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of some or all of one’s emotional ecosystem.”
In an era of climate crisis, we will have to reckon with new complexities in our relationships to home, and even more people will experience the shock of being uprooted. In the long run, if we fail to address the crisis that is disrupting our planetary home, there will be hardly any safe refuge left.
Australian scholar Glenn Albrecht has devoted decades of his career to searching for language that might define the home-woe of the twenty-first century, the grief of climate change.
For Albrecht, home has always, in some way, involved birds. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, he kept a secret aviary in his backyard in Western Australia. As a university student, he considered becoming an ornithologist. But Albrecht was also a dreamer—a self-described “tree-hugging hippie”—and he was eventually drawn to the humanities, to pondering meanings and societies, language and human relationships to the natural world, and to a decades-long career studying what might happen to our collective sense of home in an era of climate disruption.
In the early 1980s, as a Ph.D. student, Albrecht and his wife made a home near Newcastle, the most urbanized part of a bushy and idyllic section of southeast Australia called the Hunter Region, a place of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. For birds, the Hunter River Valley offers a stopover along the vast migratory route called the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, which runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand. Albrecht’s enthusiasm for the avian world led him into a set of leadership roles with groups involved in protecting wetlands, and then he began to learn what was truly threatening the well-being of both the feathered and the human residents of the Hunter—coal mining.
Coal mining in the Hunter dates to the late eighteenth century, but its visible impacts on the landscape were relatively modest until the mid-twentieth century, when changes in mining technology and a booming export market made it viable for the industry to expand radically. Between 1981 and 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter increased almost twentyfold. There are global implications, of course: coal produces the highest carbon emissions* per unit of energy of any fossil fuel. From the perspective of the atmosphere, it is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Physically, at the scale of a local and regional landscape, open-cut or open-cast is a kind of strip-mining, akin to the mountaintop removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge high levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, and nickel into nearby water supplies. They fill the air with toxic dust, and people of the Hunter have learned to shut their doors and windows during strong winds. Children living in the region have high rates of asthma and chronic respiratory diseases.
From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert or a recent volcanic eruption. Albrecht was confronted with such a scene one day while driving along a highway through the Hunter. “I stopped and got out of my car and looked west up the valley at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book Earth Emotions. “In front of me lay hundreds of square kilometers of open-cast black coal mines feeding two large power stations.… The air was thick with dust and there was the acrid smell of burning coal from the spontaneous combustion that was erupting in various actively mined locations.… A dull roar went up in the far distance as a mine detonated a panel of overburden, and a cloud of orange smoke drifted over that end of the valley.” To Albrecht, just to behold these mines felt like an “acute traumatic event.”
Meanwhile, he began fielding calls from friends, neighbors, and other conservationists in the Hunter. “In their attempts to halt the expansion of open-cut coal mining and to control the impact of power station pollution, individuals would ring me at work pleading for help with their cause. Their distress about the threats to their identity and well-being, even over the phone, was palpable,” he wrote later in an academic article. To Albrecht, these conversations were both personal and a subject of scholarly inquiry, because there seemed to be so few satisfactory efforts, at least in Western society, to characterize the agony and angst people experience when their surroundings become marred.
In the 1990s, a group of psychologists, including Alan Kanner, Theodore Roszak, and Mary Gomes, established the field of ecopsychology to recognize the connection between people’s emotional health and the natural world. But even now, the field remains marginalized, says Kanner. “Many clinicians treat their client’s grief, anger, and fear about the environmental crisis as somehow peripheral to what truly matters, as either symbolic of human-centered concerns or even a kind of avoidance of their core personal issues,” he explains. Of course, volumes of research demonstrate that health—mental health, especially—is not just an individual pursuit but heavily influenced by what is happening in society, in our communities, and in the environment. But Western medicine is not really designed to treat the collective causes of medical troubles, and we are only just beginning to talk about the ways that the climate crisis is also a mounting health catastrophe. (In September 2021, more than two hundred medical journals released a joint statement that climate change is now the greatest threat to public health worldwide, in part because of its impact on mental health.)
Like Hofer, Albrecht thought it would be useful to name the experience of watching one’s home environment unravel. (He wasn’t the first to name such a feeling. There are words in Indigenous languages that could have filled the gap, but none had yet migrated into the English language.) Around the turn of the millennium, he decided to coin his own word. “With my wife Jill, I sat at the dining table at home and explored numerous possibilities. One word, ‘nostalgia,’ came to our attention as it was once a concept linked to … homesickness,” he wrote. Hunter Valley residents were homesick, but they hadn’t gone anywhere—the place they lived in just no longer offered the kind of comfort, solace, or safety one would expect from home. Albrecht came up with the word solastalgia, using the suffix -algia, meaning “pain,” and the same Latin root as the words solace, console, and also desolation. (In Latin, solacium means “comfort” and desolare, “to leave alone,” so the word solastalgia suggested the loss of comfort, the loneliness of being estranged from home.) He published the first academic paper on the idea in 2005.
Some neologisms never make it out of the realm of private conversation, and some molder in the corners of academic journals as useless jargon. But occasionally a word like this catches a bit of zeitgeist, like wind, and gets borne aloft into the culture at large.
Over the next several years, it seemed Albrecht’s mellifluous word had tapped into a kind of angst about life on a warming planet. Artists and creatives picked up on the idea. A British trip-hop band produced an instrumental track called “Solastalgia,” and a Slovenian artist recorded an album, also called Solastalgia. At the beginning of 2010, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Albrecht and commissioned sculptor Kate MacDowell to create a porcelain representation of solastalgia—a brain full of delicate trees and Australian wildlife.
The neologism also offered a useful means of describing and studying how the impacts of climate change reach beyond tangible, physical, and economic damages. A team of social scientists identified feelings of solastalgia among people from rural northern Ghana, a region devastated by climate change–related drought and crop failure. A collaboration of environmental scientists and public health researchers observed solastalgia in communities affected by hurricanes and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. A Los Angeles physician named David Eisenman stumbled across the idea of solastalgia when interviewing survivors of the 2011 Wallow Fire, the largest wildfire on record in Arizona. “All around them was this blackened, charred landscape,” he remembered. Over and over, he heard them express “the sense that they were grieving [its loss] like for a loved one.” He and his team designed a special set of survey questions to gauge the problem and asked fire survivors to rate their responses to statements such as “I feel like I have been grieving for the loss of the forest affected by the Wallow Fire” (71 percent agreed or strongly agreed) and “seeing the forest affected by the Wallow Fire has been stressful” (93 percent concurred). The more uneasy they felt about the landscape itself, the more at risk they were for other kinds of psychological distress.
It’s now becoming more common for writers, artists, and scholars to talk about the emotions of the climate crisis. We have even more ways to name the experiences of people living through megadisasters and the slow attrition of beloved places—including “climate grief,” “ecological grief,” and “environmental melancholia.” In a 2020 survey by the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of American adults said they’d experienced “eco-anxiety.”
We are moving into an era defined by homesickness.
Does it matter if we name or even notice this kind of angst?
In recent years, it’s become abundantly clear how much our actual, physical homes and lives are at risk, all over the world. In 2019 alone, 24.9 million people around the globe were effectively evicted from their homes by natural disasters and climate change impacts, including 1.5 million in the Americas. A record-breaking monsoon season in India displaced one million people that year and killed 1,600. Communities that survive disasters, both large and small, face damage that is hard to even tally. Various economists have tried to estimate the harm of climate change to our societies in monetary terms—up to sixty-five billion euros per year (or around seventy-three billion dollars at the time of this writing) in one estimate.
Others have made calculations of potential economic losses based on factors such as wage-earning potentials and gross domestic product (methods that could easily devalue the impacts on vulnerable people and on less tangible aspects of human well-being). Still, the world could lose up to 18 percent of GDP by 2050 if nothing is done about climate change. But such calculations strike me as profound underestimates of a phenomenon that could easily tear apart the basic fabric of our societies, economically and physically.†
Former vice president Al Gore has called climate change a “challenge to our consciousness and our moral courage.” The journalist David Wallace-Wells—in his sobering book on the climate crisis titled The Uninhabitable Earth—lambasted our society for “an incredible failure of imagination.”
Imagination and empathy, feelings and morality are closely intertwined. And I have long wondered if we have failed in some more personal realm. Have we cultivated a tendency to shut off our feelings and distract ourselves from what is, in truth, horrifying? Have we persuaded ourselves for too long that climate change is the problem of others and that the storms will never rattle our own roofs? And if we all faced our grief, would we find the collective will to take the kind of drastic action required to stanch the destruction?
In 2013, I met Glenn Albrecht while I was on a writing fellowship in Perth, a Western Australian city of Spanish-style architecture, white-sand beaches, brightly colored wild cockatoos, and some of the most profuse biodiversity of any city in the world. He had moved back to the country’s west coast in 2009 to take a post as a professor of sustainability at Murdoch University and was living with and caring for his elderly mother in a house about thirty miles outside Perth that they had nicknamed Birdland. He had also broadened his work beyond solastalgia and was creating an entire lexicon of polysyllabic words related to climate change. At a seminar at a local university, I watched him—a gangly, energetic man—urge the few dozen people in the room to pronounce several other neologisms, in the manner of a children’s television program. Albrecht waved his arms like a drum major in a marching band, as we sounded out in unison “SUM-BI-OS-IT-Y,” sumbiosity, which refers to a utopian-sounding state in which people live in balance with the Earth. (I had doubts about whether this word would catch on, though I could appreciate the sentiment.)
The environs of Perth were most definitely not in such a state. Because of climate change, the amount of regional rainfall has dropped by about 20 percent since the 1970s, and since 2000, the populace has been slurping most of its water from shrinking aquifers. I had twice been to Perth years before—once as a student and once shortly after graduating—and at the time, it had felt like a second home to me, a colorful place where I came of age and immersed myself in its wild and urban beauty. And even on my return, more than a decade later, I could see something strange had happened. Many of my favorite lakes and wetlands—from a small duck pond near a university to marshes and big expanses of open water full of black swans—had shrunk. Some had reportedly even caught on fire in recent years—the peat beneath them smoldering for weeks. In the exurbs, entire forests of jarrah trees, a species of eucalypt with lustrous red heartwood and lacy white flowers, were dying from a combination of stress and a fungal disease. “I’m witnessing the disruption of my own home biophysical environment, the things that I grew up loving,” Albrecht told me.
Meanwhile, the idea of solastalgia had taken on a life of its own, and in the Hunter, the concept had been used in a 2013 court ruling to stop the expansion of a coal mine by the company Rio Tinto: the solastalgic pain of local residents was named as one of several reasons to halt the project. Albrecht had testified on the negative impacts on citizens and how the project would likely make one village unlivable. “Hence, approval for this project would set a precedent for all future cases where the intrinsic values of human culture (including agriculture), good human health (physical and mental) in nonpolluted environments, aesthetic and scenic beauty, amenity, a strong sense of place, and community cohesion will all be trumped by the dollar value of resources irrespective of the negative impacts imposed in obtaining them,” he wrote in a supplementary report for the hearing. It was maybe the first time that something as intangible as love of home had nearly as much legal standing as pure economics. The decision was overturned again in 2015, but the community group there has continued to try to fight the mine.
After Albrecht’s mother passed away, he returned to southeastern Australia full-time in 2014—to a place at the edge of the Hunter Valley that he and his wife named Wallaby Farm, where they could live nearly off the grid, with solar power and a farm full of fruits, herbs, and vegetables. But in 2019, wildfires raged around his property—part of the massive outbreak of flames called the Black Summer that would devastate much of Australia and draw international attention. One fire ignited about a mile from Albrecht’s house. Albrecht wore a face mask much of that season to cope with the searing smoke. He kept watch for any embers that might drift through the air and alight on his property.
When I spoke to him not long thereafter, he said, “We’re actually in the process of trying to sell it and move. We’re being driven out by climate change.” (Though I later heard he and his wife had actually stayed put.)
In our interview—just after the explosion of the Covid outbreak worldwide—he took the same slightly detached, professorial tone that I had always heard from him. I couldn’t hear his emotion in his voice. “The bushfires were a massive psychoterratic experience,” he observed, drawing on another Latinate word he had coined.
I asked him about a post he had placed on Facebook during the height of the fires. It was full of expletives and occupied some space between humor and rage. “The land that we love is being fried and a bunch of fuckwits in charge are doing nothing about it,” he had proclaimed. “It is frying because the joint is getting fucking hotter. Our trees and gardens are fucking dying and frying because of fucking climate warming. People are being fried because of fucking fires.”
This post was, he said, an expression of his anger in the Australian vernacular.
When I read it, it was like hearing a battle cry in the distance—a roar about everything we love, everything we are losing, everything we must try to defend.