Solastalgia

A new word for a semi-new feeling.... Just this morning J & I were driving to the "Y" and she asked me ( completely out of the blue!) " What will happen to Lake Michigan when all the polar ice melts?" She was wondering if the water will fill up and go beyond its present borders. I said I wasn't sure but that I "thought" it would affect the low-lying oceanshore more than our lakes. Really not sure.

But then I just read this article from Clive Thompson at Wired about how this is now a documented mental health feeling/fear of losing your home even though you're not leaving!

People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"

It's also a fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone's worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species — polar bears, whales, wading birds — that'll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey, we're nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns.

This is a neat mythos, but in truth it's a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one's sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where the globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can't handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? "We like to think that we're cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big," Albrecht says. "We haven't evolved that much"

I think this is why last summer I was having this really intense extended daydream to chuck everything and buy a little solar powered farm in Wisconsin or Michigan, get some chickens for my own organic eggs, etc.... And why I decided to do the CSA thing and have local produce delivered even though it was insanely expensive. The cicadas were even freaky for me this summer because I wasn't in Illinois the last two times they came out ( 17 and 34 years ago). I don't know what is going to happen. I am going to plant a much bigger garden this year. I feel like I should really KNOW how to grow some of my own food. Read the whole article. (I had never really thought long about Australia becoming a bell-weather country for landscape changes but it makes sense since they are much closer to the Antarctic and the ozone hole, etc. I know they have higher skin cancer rates etc. )

C and I love to take a lot of long walks with my dog Lucky.... Prairie Path, Forest Preserves etc. We are close to finishing the list of all of the DuPage County Preserves.

Solastalgia- I like the sound of the word, like nostalgia, only sadder I think. I don't think that future generations will look very kindly on us at all. All the more reason to take some action sooner than later.

Also, this was in the Trib today about Lake Michigan water levels... I find serendipity often in what draws my attention in a given day.

(photo credit: Tribune photo by Abel Uribe / January 2, 2008)

h/t re Wired story- Andrew Sullivan)