Episode 2
Solastalgia and Healing: A Personal Tale of Recovery
Read the article at GlobalWarmingisReal.com.
Takeaways:
- Experiencing a health scare can profoundly alter our relationship with nature and ourselves.
- Solastalgia reflects the emotional distress tied to environmental changes affecting our sense of home.
- Healing from personal trauma and environmental loss requires acceptance, restoration, and defense of what remains.
- The connection between individual health crises and environmental degradation highlights our shared vulnerabilities and grief.
- Recognizing solastalgia encourages us to engage with nature and advocate for its preservation.
- Through the journey of healing, we discover that hope lies in our collective efforts to address climate change.
A personal health scare can serve as a catalyst for profound introspection, particularly when it collides with the pressing realities of our changing environment. During a week-long hospital stay, I found myself grappling with both physical vulnerabilities and a disconcerting sense of loss—not just of health, but of the familiar landscapes that have cradled my existence.
In this inaugural episode of the GlobalWarmingisReal podcast, I examine the concept of solastalgia, a term Glenn Albrecht coined to describe the emotional distress caused by environmental degradation.
Reflecting on my healing journey, I realized that our personal narratives are intricately linked with the stories of our surroundings. The emotional upheaval I experienced in the hospital mirrored the grief we feel when witnessing the destruction of our cherished natural spaces. In this poignant exploration, we recognize that healing is not just an individual journey; it’s a collective endeavor to mend our broken relationship with nature, ourselves, and each other.
We’ll explore how acknowledging this connection can empower us to advocate for the environments we once took for granted and find solace in our shared struggles. Through this narrative, I hope to inspire listeners to reflect on their own experiences of loss and healing and consider how they might contribute to restoring personal and environmental well-being.
Links referenced in this episode:
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host Thomas Schuenemann.
I'm a global info worker, climate content creator, audio producer, and founder of globalwarmingisreal.com I have a knack for making the incomprehensible a little digestible, which is a good thing because my mission is to help people understand climate change and to reach as wide an audience as possible as soon as possible. In the podcast, I speak with activists, authors, policy experts, entrepreneurs and NGO heads.
The people doing the work on the ground to slow climate change, teaching others how to adapt, and helping create a climate narrative that works. They shape our living story as we move forward day by day. We'll also review books and tell stories using sound and the imagination.
It's all to help spread awareness and understanding of climate, human development, psychology, sociology, and how we can learn to live in the Anthropocene. It's been said that hope is when we stop fooling ourselves on this show.
We don't doom scroll, but we don't paint a Pollyanna picture of our current situation either. We explore what's doable. Can we bring back what's lost? No. But we sure can defend what remains. In this make or break decade.
We must fix our broken relationship with nature, ourselves, and each other. So let's get started. One Monday last August, I found myself rather unexpectedly in the hospital.
Up to that point in my 65 years on the planet, I'd managed to spend only two nights in the hospital. Once when I was 13, after having my tonsils out. Next decades later, last year in fact, for back surgery.
I really don't like staying in the hospital, of course, who does? Little did I know when I donned my hospital garb that Monday that it would be another week and a day before I could put on my civilian clothes.
Endless hours watching the drip drip of the IV run down the tube into my arm. Infection raged in my veins.
I am happy to report that the infection succumbed to surgery and the antibiotic onslaught, but not without some collateral damage from which, fortunately, I have almost fully recovered. It was bad. It could have been much worse, and for that I am grateful.
While the doctors attended to my physical wound, I was mostly left alone to deal with the psychological and emotional shock to my sense of normality and stability, such as it was beforehand. Eight days with little to do affords time to think beyond the typical daily concerns that consume us. It also elicits a craving to go outside.
The sun shone bright outside my window while I stayed in the hospital. All I wanted was to be out there like before and. And the warm sun. The warm sun that reminds me of home. Recovery requires a commitment to healing.
While in the hospital, I read Madeline Ostrander's the era of climate change has created a new emotion. And that new emotion she speaks of is solastalgia.
It's a term originated by Glenn Albrecht, meaning the emotional distress caused by unwelcome environmental change. Think of it as a subtle nostalgia tinged grief from a disrupted sense of home.
We can be sad and concerned when we read about environmental destruction in other parts of the world, but it remains abstract and far away, yet to viscerally feel it in our bones. The withering of our homeland creates a singular emotional distress.
We feel solastalgia at the loss of our cherished landscapes as they once were, witnessing unwelcome change, destruction and a lost sense of well being and stability.
Ostrander's article fits the times not only for the royal we, you and me, but for me lying there in my hospital bed wondering how the actual F did I get here? We use the same language for individual suffering and solastalgia, our internal and external worlds.
This common language reveals the intersection between personal trauma and our natural surroundings, our individual and environmental well being. It's circular and connected, and we suffer for its brokenness.
On the one hand, a medical crisis shatters assumptions about health and our tenacious belief in eternal youth. On the other, we are profoundly saddened when a beloved landscape is lost and raised by development and pollution.
Each evokes grief, a feeling of loss. Working through grief, we learn to cope. And what of healing? I am healing, nearly healed physically, but something is nonetheless lost.
As it is with my physical wound. So it is when I or anyone experiences solastalgia. We accept what is gone, restore what is possible, and defend what is left.
This is how we heal, and this is where our hope rests. Such, my friends, are the idle reflections of a simple man. There's always more we can do to stop climate change.
No amount of engagement is too little. And now more than ever, your involvement matters. To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.
I'm your host, Tom Schueneman. We'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.
