something akin to homesickness,” he says, “but
none of them had left home.”
What was happening, he reasoned, was that
the physical degradation of the valley was under-
mining the solace that people had felt there. And
so, as the mines churned more green fields to
gray, Albrecht named the feeling the residents
were describing “solastalgia,” which he defined
as the pain of losing the solace of home.
More than a decade later, I heard this unusual
word while watching a film about drought. I
made a note, unsure of how to spell it. Thanks
to Google’s did-you-mean feature, I discovered
tens of thousands of related hits. There were aca-
demic articles, conferences, and news stories.
The concept also had seeped into the art world.
I found a sculpture exhibition in New Jersey, a
pop album in Australia, a classical concerto in
Estonia, all inspired by Albrecht’s word.
While I was scanning the pages of Google hits,
it occurred to me that the concept of solastalgia
seemed to mark a new frontier in our relationship
with the environment, an acknowledgment of a
strange brew of emotions that more people were
feeling as familiar landscapes became unrecog-
nizable. We all know that humans are changing
the planet, but here, in this new word, was a trace
of how those changes are changing us.
“If the language is not rich enough to enable
us to describe and understand these things
properly, well, we bloody well have to create
it,” Albrecht told me when I visited his home in
the Hunter Valley. “Why don’t we have a single
word,” he asked, “that corresponds to a human
feeling?” Especially a feeling “that is profound,
obvious, felt worldwide in various contexts, andA WORLD LOST 39