A drought and a coal mine demanded a new word

The homesickness of never having left

Solastalgia names a specific kind of distress: a home place turning for the worse while the people who live there are still living in it, not the ache of being away from a home that stayed the same.¹ Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, built the word in May 2003 and first spoke it in public at the Ecohealth conference in Montreal.² He had one place in mind: the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where open-cut coal mines and a multi-year drought were remaking the land under people who had nowhere else to call home.²

A coal valley in drought needed a name

Albrecht put the case into print two years later, in a 2005 philosophy journal essay, and formalized it with co-authors in a fuller clinical paper in Australasian Psychiatry in 2007, drawn from interviews and fieldwork in the Upper Hunter.³ Residents there were living through "negative reactions brought about by a sense of powerlessness" as mining and drought altered a landscape none of them had chosen to leave.³

Nostalgia is pain felt at a distance, for a home left behind. Albrecht's word keeps the ache and relocates it: it is "the homesickness you have when you are still located within your home environment."¹ Unlike nostalgia's passing pang, it is "characteristically a chronic condition, tied to the gradual erosion of identity created by the sense of belonging to a particular loved place."¹

The word kept growing in Albrecht's own hands

Albrecht's 2019 book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World extended solastalgia into a wider vocabulary of environmental feeling; a review in Inside Higher Ed called him "an Australian environmental philosopher."⁴

Three years later, on his own blog, Albrecht cast the Symbiocene, a proposed future epoch of symbiotic human-nature relationships, as solastalgia's antidote rather than its sequel: "The path to avoiding yet more solastalgia, and other negative psychoterratic Earth emotions that damage the psyche, must take us into the Symbiocene."⁵

What Albrecht heard from the people living it

Profiled in 2019 about that same book, Albrecht recounted a Hunter Valley rancher's account of living beside the expanding mines: "I lost a lot of weight. I'd wake up in the middle of the night with my stomach like [a clenched fist]." An Aboriginal man in the same valley told him he drove hundreds of miles out of his way rather than pass "all the holes, all the dirt."⁶

Albrecht built the word, he said, because the feeling already existed and had no name for it. Once he had solastalgia, it went "off my tongue, as if it had always been there." Naming it, he said, did more than describe: it "enables people to share what would otherwise be an isolated, atomistic, individualistic feeling and work together."⁶

Measured in one study, questioned in another

It has reached general dictionaries, defined plainly as "sadness or melancholy due to environmental changes and related loss especially as it affects one's home place."⁷ A 2022 study went further and built the Scale of Solastalgia, a ten-item instrument scoring the concept along two dimensions its authors trace straight back to Albrecht. One is a "solace" dimension, "the loss of comfort or consolation provided by an inhabited environment and the nostalgia that its degradation causes." The other is an "algia" dimension of emotional distress.⁸

Applied outside the setting Albrecht built it in, the fit strains. Researchers studying Pacific island communities facing climate-driven land loss found his framework, in their words, "may be narrow in its ability to fully capture and convey the complex realities experienced by Pacific peoples."⁹ For them, the loss of land "is ultimately a loss of culture, identity, wellbeing, and kinship" beyond what a model of place attachment reaches.⁹ A later review of the wider solastalgia literature found the same strain again: many authors who invoke the term never say what they mean by "place" at all.¹⁰

That gap marks where the word should stop working. Solastalgia names distress at a change already underway in a place someone has not left. It is not the ordinary homesickness of a traveler, which fades once the traveler goes home, because there is no leaving and no returning here. It is not eco-anxiety either: eco-anxiety is dread about change still to come, and solastalgia is grief for a change already in progress under a person's feet. Confuse the two and the word stops doing its one job: naming the specific ache of staying put while the ground itself gives way.