Sweeping Solastalgia

Bee on a small white clover flower on a lawn

Bee in clover

Although the emotions I felt last week on the allotment were mainly caused by a negative outlook brought on by recent personal events, the growing sense of unease about the negative changes I and many others are witnessing in the natural world around us also played a part. This feeling was termed ‘solastalgia’ by Glenn A. Albrecht, and it is a concept that seems to be spreading, so I decided to make it the focus of this blog post – which explains it in very simple terms.

Albrecht defined solastalgia (derived from the words solace, desolation, nostalgia and algia or pain/sorrow) as “the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and ‘lived experience’ of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place. It is characteristically a chronic condition, tied to the gradual erosion of identity created by the sense of belonging to a particular loved place, and a feeling of distress, or psychological desolation, about its unwanted transformation.” (https://glennaalbrecht.wordpress.com/2018/12/17/solastalgia-the-definition-and-origins/).

In other words, you are homesick whilst still at home or in another familiar and loved place. I know I’ve felt like that a lot recently, whether sitting on the allotment or visiting local wild spaces, and am seeing tweets from others noting the lack of previously reliable annual wildlife encounters: house martins not returning to eaves where they and their kin have nested for generations; fewer swifts and swallows; bee and other insect numbers well down on previous years; less frog spawn in the garden pond; ponds small and large drying up totally in the drought-like conditions of early June; orchids not surviving the council mower’s devastating cut; the list goes on and on.

Emergence

There are positives, though; for example, some councils participated in #NoMowMay this year; the hawthorn blossom has been spectacular countrywide; this week on the allotment I saw a ladybird emerging from its pupa; some butterflies and moths are on the wing at Speke Hall meadows; and there are house martins swirling around my waterside home collecting insects for their young and filling the air with the sound of scratchy chirrups (or ‘blowing raspberries’) as I type this. So it’s not all doom and gloom – but the feeling of solastalgia persists. And its double effect is that the place where we want to find – or have previously found – comfort or solace is the place that is causing these negative feelings: our favourite natural space is not only not providing the same comfort and joy as before, it is actually provoking feelings of pain and desolation.

A burnet moth and a meadow brown butterfly on a pink ragged robin flower

Move over

Funnily enough – or perhaps it was serendipity – as I was pondering the first draft of this post, naturalist Stephen Barlow (@SteB777) shared a tweet (https://twitter.com/SteB777/status/1669072385079746560?t=tWkyS_KPHC5KgxC_ougH-A&s) that perfectly encapsulated this feeling. He quoted a passage from Aldo Leopold’s 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, which included the following: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” In a linked tweet, Barlow added: “There is so little awareness of our current situation, and almost total political denial of the reality.”

And so another layer is added to the sense of solastalgia: not only are we brought low by feeling sorrow in our favourite wild places, we also feel increasingly isolated from the rest of the human population, who do not know or do not care about the damage being inflicted on the natural world.

Yet again I try to bring some balance to the despair, wondering whether, if we consider solastalgia’s near-relation, nostalgia, the sense of thinking wistfully about home when we are not there, that feeling can be coloured by a mis-remembering: maybe things weren’t really that great there, in the past. And so possibly that is the same with this new feeling of solastalgia: perhaps things aren’t really that bad now; maybe they weren’t really that great before. Perhaps shifting baseline syndrome is working the other way round: we are remembering skies full of swifts and fields full of butterflies when they were never *quite* that full. I doubt this, but I do know that many people are still reporting enjoyable and frequent wildlife encounters – so maybe there is hope.

Whatever the reality, we as individuals need to keep plodding away and trying to make things better in our own wild spaces – indeed, I think we have a duty to do so, not just for the many species that depend on us in our gardens, allotments, parks, nature reserves, road verges, hedgerows, field margins, urban tree pits and pavement cracks, etc., but also for ourselves: to turn solastalgia back into solace by making our green spaces whole again.