Wording climate feelings

#languagematters

On a jaunt through the Oxford English Dictionary a few months back, the new words for the emotions many of us are feeling around climate grabbed my attention. These terms are part of the expansion of compound words around the word ‘climate’ over recent decades, which show the growing importance of climate as well as its place as a political battleground. There are enough of these feeling words that the Oxford English Dictionary has them listed together in a ‘curated compounds’ section for words ‘designating emotional or psychological states arising from concerns over the impact of climate change and global warming’.

The OED gives 1988 as the first year for the development of these words, starting with the term ‘climate fear’. For those who know the history of the rise of public awareness of global warming, 1988 was a big year. That year witnessed the first high profile revelation of what the science was telling us about how fossil fuel burning was heating our planet. NASA scientist, James Hansen, appeared before the US Senate warning that:

Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming … In my opinion, the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.

Two decades later, he published a book on the calamity that global warming is now starting to unleash, with the forlorn and poignant title Storms of My Grandchildren. The title acknowledges Hansen’s change of role - becoming a grandparent, but also, his move from being a scientist to becoming a policy advocate on climate.

He writes underneath a photo of his first grandchild in the preface to this book:

I sometimes showed a viewgraph of the photo of our first grandchild on this page during my talks on global warming. At first it was partly a joke, as newspapers were referring to me as the ‘grandfather of global warming’, and partly pride in a young lady who had become an angel in our lives. But gradually, my perception of being a ‘witness’ changed, leading to a hard decision: I did not want my grandchildren, someday in the future, to look back and say, ‘Opa understood what was happening, but he did not make it clear.

From ‘climate fear’ of the late 1980s, the OED has watched the rise of other climate emotions: ‘climate grief’ (2002), ‘climate anger’ (2011), and ‘climate anxiety’ (2011). The rise of climate feelings has garnered attention from professionals. America now has a Climate Psychiatry Alliance. The American Psychological Association, together with an organization named ecoAmerica, has been releasing regular reports on the impacts of the climate crisis on the mental health of children and young people, the most recent released last year. It is extremely confronting to read. The impacts are so deep and so wide, from the trauma experienced in extreme weather, to the slow burn of poor air quality and heat which according to the report ‘can increase risk of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, cognitive function impairment, interpersonal aggression and other mental health impacts’. Climate is even reaching the next generation in utero, as the report explains:

Prenatal impacts of climate change can derail the normal development of physiological systems, cognitive abilities, and emotional skills in ways that are sometimes irreversible. Children exposed prenatally to weather disasters, high temperatures, air pollution, and maternal anxiety are at risk for a range of social, cognitive, psychiatric, and behavioral dysfunctions. The impacts on the fetus can include greater risk of developmental regression, anxiety or depressive disorder, ADHD, lower scores on activity and extraversion levels, and lower levels of self-control, as well as risk of psychiatric disorders later in life.

It is hard to encompass - to find the words for - the scale of what is and will be unfolding in our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. We can expect to see this curated entry on climate feelings in the OED expand over coming years, including two new terms which are not yet listed: ‘environmental melancholia’ and ‘solastalgia’.

Environmental melancholia

The term ‘environmental melancholia’ comes out of a Freudian psycholanalytic tradition. It was coined by Renee Lertzman’s in her 2015 academic monograph, based on two decades of work as an environmental communications professional. Over that time, she interviewed numerous environmental activists, consulted across government and the private sector, and designed and taught courses on the psychological aspects of environmental communications education.

The intersection of psychoanalysis and environmental distress goes back at least to the early 90s, and a meeting at the Freud Museum in London, which brought together a group of psychoanalysts and environmental activists to discuss the ‘denial, projection, anxiety and loss’ that people experience in the face of the existential threats to our natural environment. Lertzman acknowledges what may seem a weird disjunction between the intimate ‘cozy, rug-adorned confines’ of a consulting room, and the ‘frantic front line of environmental activism’. But she argues that psychoanalysis and environmental activism have something very deep in common: both are deeply concerned with ‘the concept and practice of reparation - that is, to repair, to heal, to fix’. And she argues convincingly against the ‘rational actor’ model that she says underpins a lot of activist communications - a model that is based on the idea that if only people had ‘the facts’, they would take action.

But this approach leaves human subjectivity out of the equation. For Lertmann, the deep and often unconscious, amorphous nature of our feelings about enviromental loss can stop us acting:

I argue that a form of melancholia, environmental melancholia – an arrested, inchoate form of mourning – is at the heart of much of the inaction in response to ecological degradation.

She also makes the point that the complex emotions many of us feel are still private, and socially regulated:

The grief, mourning, anger, confusion and overwhelm that can accompany awareness of environmental issues remain largely unaddressed, private and professionally and socially taboo

Politicians love to tell us that ‘now is not the time to discuss climate’ when extreme weather events are leaving large scale destruction in their wake. If these emotions are not addressed, they will impact the access we have to collective action on behalf of our planet:

… vast reserves of creative potential for engaging and addressing ecological challenge are available but ‘tied up’ in complex psychic negotiations …

Let’s not ignore the deep misogyny of Freud’s work, and its ongoing echo in our very gendered lives. But Lertzman’s call to rethink climate inertia through a Freudian lens - from seeing it as a lack of caring, to understanding how hard it is for individual nervous systems to confront the scale of the existential crisis we are in the midst of - is very compelling.

Solastalgia

The Oxford English Dictionary does not yet record 'solastalgia': a word coined early in this century to describe the emotional and existential stress caused by environmental degradation. But the Macquarie Dictionary knows this word, because, like 'budgie smuggler' and 'selfie', 'solastalgia' is an Australian coinage. It's roots are in the psychical distress of people living in the Hunter Valley in NSW, side by side with the open aching wounds of coal mines. The word’s author is Australian environmental philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, who lived and worked next to the scarred landscapes of open cut coal mines, now estimated to cover 130 000 hectares.

Glenn's phone would ring with desperate pleas for help from locals. They were up against the mighty patriarchic power of Australian coal interests, ably assisted by our many coal-loving politicians. They wanted Albrecht to do something to assist in their fight to halt the expansion of coal mines, or to control pollution from coal fired power stations. This they were experiencing on top of living through an unrelenting climate-fueled drought. Albrecht heard their pain and distress, palpable even over a phone line: distress that hit at the core of their identity and wellbeing. English didn't have the word to capture this very modern feeling, to describe the relationship between human distress and ecosystem distress. So he coined a new word.

'Solastalgia' is a riff on the word 'nostalgia', a melancholic missing of home, or more familiar  time. But the kind of distress Albrecht was bearing witness to was not nostalgia. These people were still at home. But they had lost or were losing the comfort and solace of 'home'. The no longer felt 'at home' in their homes. To understand this concept, Albrecht looked at the literature on 'place pathologies', including accounts of the profound emotional disorientation of colonized First Nations people like the Navajo. 'Solastalgia' combines a piece of Greek with a piece of Latin. From Greek it borrows 'algia',  which means pain, suffering and sickness. From Latin it takes 'solari' - the feeling of solace and comfort. Albrecht's word captures a 'place-based distress' experienced by people who feel powerless as they witness environmental injustice, an 'imposed place transition'.

Albrecht discusses solastalgia and other ‘earth emotions’ in his 2019 book with this title, subtitled ‘New Words for a New World’. He dedicates this book to some younger humans in this life. The dedication reads: ‘For Lilly, Teddy, Lyra, and Generation Symbiocene’. ‘Symbiocene’ is another word crafted by Albrecht - a hopeful word to describe a future where ‘humans symbiotically reintegrate themselves, emotionally, psychological and technologically, into nature and natural systems’. I’ll be visiting this book in some later posts.

How are you feeling, climatologically speaking?

We need to name our complex feelings around climate. And we have to find a way to bring the scale of these feelings into everyday conversation, to bring them into the light, to learn to live with them. I can see the avoidance of these emotions in my own life, with family and friends. While the weather is such a breezy (pun intended) and ordinary topic in our lives, climate is complex and confronting. And these emotions all intersect with how we talk to our children about climate, because they are intimately connected with how we want them to feel about their futures.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your feelings, and whether any of these terms resonate for you.