In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to mean a “form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change”. 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.

Albrecht’s coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are increasingly calling the “Anthropocene”: the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record. And what a signature it will be. We have bored 50m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.

Drought in Australia
Droughts are becoming an increasingly frequent reality in Australia thanks to climate change shifting rain patterns. The Climate Council reported last year that since the mid-1990s, southeast Australia has experienced a 15 percent decrease in rainfall during early winter and late autumn.
The photo below is a closeup of Wellshot Creek in Queensland, Australia's second-largest state - in March 2014, it suffered from its most widespread drought to date, with 80 percent of the region affected.

That looks like a snapshot in time. What period does it cover?

Since when did the Great Artesian Basin cover South-East Australia?

lee wrote on May 17^th, 2016 at 2:04pm:


If you take a North South centreline and an East West centreline, it appears that the Great Artesian Basin is mostly in South East Australia unless you are going to redraw the WA border to include it.

Your Solastalgia bus is waiting to whisk you to the Anthropocene.

That worked for you?

Laugh till you cry wrote on May 17^th, 2016 at 5:33pm:


I wear big boy pants not diapers. I don't have a problem.