healthearth ... healthearthealthearthealthearth

Symbionment

2011-11-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

We do not only live in the environment ... the environment also lives in us.

If the 'environment' is defined as that which surrounds us, then we do not live within it.

'Symbionment': [Greek sumbiosis, companionship, from sumbioun, to live together, from sumbios, living together : sun-, syn- + bios, life; http://www.thefreedictionary.com/symbiosis] [Ment - a process or condition.]

Therefore, we are all in the symbionment, not the environment.

Symbionment: that condition where we all live together and where companionship between ourselves and other beings is the norm and the basis of the normative.

Our language has evolved on the assumption that we are not in the environment but separate from it. Its time to redirect our language to reflect the reality of our total immersion in nature and natural processes.

Marx and Engels and their relevance to the 'Occupy' movement.

2011-11-05T17:21:00.000-07:00

Marx and Engels on the Sustainable Society

Glenn Albrecht. July 1991, revised May 1992, revised for Blog November 2011.

[This essay is over 20 years old now. Never published, but maybe more relevant than ever?]

The now almost orthodox view of Marx and Engels concerning the relationship humans have to the natural environment is that they endorsed a strongly anthropocentric or human centered philosophy which gave humans a position of dominance over the rest of nature. Moreover, it is frequently argued that their anthropocentrism is supported by their 'materialism' and its association with a view of perpetual progress. The net result of these broad philosophical beliefs was to produce human beings and social orders that have a crude instrumental view of nature, a belief in the unlimited satisfaction of 'genuine' human needs and wants and the infinite growth of an attendant economic system that produces material goods in response to those needs and wants.

It would appear that the society which is the outcome of these beliefs, is the opposite of what is currently understood as a 'sustainable' society. A sustainable society would at a bare minimum accept that there are environmentally imposed limitations on human material progress and that humans must learn to live in harmony with natural structures and processes. For human life and societies to have continuity, human needs and wants must find their expression most fundamentally within ecologically defined constraints.

With respect to the human-nature relationship, the value system associated with Marx and Marxism is thought to be no different to the value system associated with industrial capitalism. Exactly the same outcome arises where the destruction of the environment is seen as the unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the 'development' of 'raw' nature to suit human needs and interests. The common factor in both Marxian inspired 'Socialist' economies and free-market 'Capitalist' economies is the belief that human progress is dependent on a commitment to the ongoing growth of industrial society.

The major differences in the political and economic structures that animate these quite different social orders are of no great consequence when it comes to assessing their respective records on destruction of the environment. The central command economy and the free-market economy have equally bad track records on protection of environmental quality because they share a value system that elevates human material progress and economic growth above all else.

That Marx and Engels were 'true believers' in the prevailing anti-nature value system is based on a reading of their major works where there appears to be ample evidence of their adherence to this paradigm. Major support for this reading comes from the view that Marx in particular viewed humanity as "possessing" nature as its "inorganic body", that nature must be "transformed" or "mastered" to satisfy human needs and that automated production and associated technology will be universally used to exploit nature while liberating humans in the process.

That Marx understood nature to be the "inorganic body" of humanity is not at all contentious. However, in the Early Writings Marx makes it clear that the message of this claim is not that humans 'own' or 'possess' nature as one might possess an automobile or a watch, but that humans interact in a vital way with the whole of nature in order to survive. Marx argues:

The life of the species in man as in animals is physical in that man, (like the animal) lives by inorganic nature... Man lives physically by these [plants, animals, minerals, air, light, etc.,] products of nature; they may appear in the form of food, heat, clothing, housing, etc. The universality of man appears in practice in the universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body: (1) as a direct means of life, and (2) as the matter, object and instrument of his life activity. Nature is the inorganic body of man, that is, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives by nature. This means that nature is his body with which he must remain in perpetual process in order not to die. That the physical and spiritual life of man is tied up with nature is another way of saying that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

(Marx, in Easton L. and Guddat K., eds [E&G] 1967:293)

Humans are, according to Marx, uniquely self-conscious animals and they creatively apply consciousness to their interactions with nature. Other animals, by contrast, interact with nature on the basis of the instinctive satisfaction of basic needs, however, their own transformations of inorganic nature (beehives, termite mounds, beaver dams etc.) are not the products of active design. Furthermore, most animals are limited in their interactions with nature to specific ecological settings, while humans can transcend such limits to use the entire earth as a 'home'. Humans are qualitatively different from other animals in that they can lead a universal life in conceptual and material terms. Marx comments:

The animal builds only according to the standard and need of the species to which it belongs while man knows how to produce according to the standard of any species and at all times knows how to apply an intrinsic standard to the object. Thus man creates according to the laws of beauty.

(Marx, E&G 1967:295)

Humans are productive in ways that go beyond the satisfaction of basic physical needs and through their productive work what is 'natural' for humans is the creative transformation of nature to suit their needs and interests. When humans exploit one another, particularly when the products of human labour are appropriated from its producer, the human becomes alienated from its own species potential. It is then, according to Marx, that the human becomes "inferior" to the animal since the human is alienated from "...his spiritual nature, his human essence, from his body and likewise from nature outside him." (Marx, E&G 1967:295).

It is clear from these remarks that Marx did not see nature as the creation of human consciousness, as would an Idealist or Constructionist, rather he sees nature as external and independent of 'mind'. Humans have through their naturally acquired intelligence the unique capacity to understand the 'laws of nature' as they affect all life forms. As a consequence of the workings of an intelligent and creative mind, humans recreate external nature as it appears to them, in a 'humanised' form. A Realist interpretation of Marx's ideas would be that there is an external nature and that humans, through the media of sensory experience and rational thought, attempt to know that externality. Although a part of nature themselves, humans will have a uniquely human perspective on the totality of nature. In that no other animal has the capacity to "reproduce the whole of nature" as a consequence of its productive capacities, humans in some significant sense, have ‘superior’ capabilities than other life forms.

Marx would certainly not have agreed with those contemporary environmental philosophers who see, as a result of our interconnectedness with nature, all living species on this planet as having equal standing. Yet, despite this major difference, Marx does share with many modern environmentalists, the idea that nature is an extension of the body of humans. Inspired more by spiritual than material extension of the self into nature, writers such as Alan Watts in the 1960s created mottos for modern thinkers such as "the world is your body" (in Nash 1990:151). Deep Ecologists such as Fox, Seed and Naess all agree that there is "...no firm ontological divide in the field of existence" (Fox, in Devall and Sessions 1985:66). Marx, in seeing material existence as involving continuity of the organic and the inorganic actually anticipated one of the foundational planks of a distinctively environmental philosophy.

Marx's organicism runs deeper than his recognition of the reciprocal relationships that exist between humans and the natural realm that sustains them. His Hegelian ancestry meant that the whole philosophical approach that is linked to the term "dialectic", is an expression of a more systematic organicist perspective. The background to understanding Marx's use of organic imagery is to know something of Hegel's Organic or Dialectical philosophy. Hegel, in what he termed the "Dialectic", tried to create a new type of philosophical reflection suitable for the explication of reality, which he saw as an organically unfolding process or development.

The model or metaphor most widely used by Hegel to convey to the reader just what this means is that of a natural organism, a plant, for example, and the way it grows or develops. In simple terms, a natural organism like a plant undergoes constant development from genesis to death. Such an organism displays both great unity, in that its 'parts' possess a common life, and great diversity, in that the 'parts', the bud, the blossom and the fruit, for example, display great structural variation.

In addition to this 'unity in diversity', an organism develops by a constant process of negation; the blossom replaces the fruit, the fruit replaces the blossom and the seed the fruit. All this change by 'contradictions' happens within the context of what amounts to an internal blueprint for all development from the outset. The seed, for example, contains internally all the 'instructions' it needs to grow into a tree, given a suitable environment. Hegel's dialectical or organic philosophy was designed to counter a mechanistic and atomistic view of reality which had become popular under the influence of the founding fathers of modern reductionist science.

Marx incorporated this Hegelian way of thinking into his own theory. His and Engels' views on organic life were also supplemented by Darwin's theory of evolution. Marx, utilising a review of Capital written in 1872, quotes from the review in a way that brings the Hegelian and Darwinian elements of his thinking together. The reviewer states of Marx's method:

In a word, economic life goes through an evolutionary history resembling that with which we are familiar in other domains of biology...the earlier economists misunderstood the nature of economic laws when they compared them with the laws of physics and chemistry... A profounder analysis of the phenomena has shown that social organisms differ from one another as fundamentally as do vegetable and animal organisms... the scientific value of such an investigation lies in the origin, existence, development, and death of a given social organism, and its replacement by another and higher one. Such, in fact, is the value of Marx's book.

(Marx, 1974[1867]:lviii-lix)

Marx makes the following comment immediately after the passage just quoted:

When the writer describes so aptly and (so far as my personal application of it goes) so generously, the method I have actually used, what else is he describing but the dialectic method?

Marx, 1974[1867]:lix)

Marx's analysis of the material basis of social organisation was to be a scientific application of the dialectical method to the history and contemporary reality of the way that humans interact with nature to produce their own means of subsistence. This required of Marx and Engels that they apply an organicist or dialectical way of thinking to all human action. As Marx himself put this idea in relation to his era, "... even the ruling classes are beginning to realise that contemporary society is not a solid crystal, but an organism capable of change and continually undergoing change" (Marx, 1974:li). Therefore, the epistemological stance of Marx was in support of organic or holistic ways of analysing parts, wholes and relationships. This too indicates that Marx and Engels thought in ways that anticipated the strong links that have been forged between the environmental movement and neo-organicist thought. In writers as divergent as Capra (1982), and Bookchin (1982), we can see the resurgence of philosophical organicism and its application to environmental matters.

The overwhelming emphasis in Marx's writings was to explicate and evaluate the structural implications of the Capitalist mode of production from the perspective of a dialectically inspired materialism. His major concerns centered on how capitalist economies develop over time and the exploitation that characterised relationships between classes in society. However, as we shall now see, Marx and Engels displayed a surprisingly 'modern' grasp of the impact of the Capitalist mode of production on both social and natural ecologies.

Capitalism, according to both Marx and Engels, is based fundamentally on the unsustainable exploitation of both the productive capacities of human labour and the natural capital provided by the environment. It is symptomatic of relationships based on increasing levels of exploitation that those who are being exploited can, after a certain point, no longer sustain themselves. Although credited mainly with the elaboration of the exploitation of human labour, Marx, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, saw clearly the implications of both types of exploitation. In an important passage in Capital, Marx suggests the need for a law of social production that maintains human activity in balance with its support environment. He prophetically argues:

With the constantly increasing preponderance of urban population aggregated in the great centres, capitalist production increases, on the one hand, the mobility of society, while destroying, on the other, the interchange of material between man and the soil, that is to say the return to the soil of its constituents that are used by human beings in the form of food and clothing - a return which is the permanent natural essential for the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. Thus it simultaneously destroys the health of the urban labourer and the mental welfare of the rural worker. But, while thus destroying the natural and spontaneously developed system for the circulation of matter from the soil to human beings, and from human beings back to the soil, it necessitates the systematic restoration of such a circulation as a regulative law of social production, and its restoration in a form adequate to the full development of mankind.

(Marx, 1974:546-547, my emphasis)

The specific awareness of the systematic, reciprocal relationships that exist between human communities and their surrounding natural environments indicates that Marx had a very sophisticated ecological understanding of the human-nature relationship. His reference to a regulative law of social production that would maintain human activity in dynamic balance with nature is an idea that strongly anticipates the current demands for what is called "sustainable development". What is unsustainable about much current production is that it is predicated on a perpetual, one-way flow of raw materials and energy from nature to society. Such unidirectional, 'infinite growth' in a finite system based on cycles and flows is clearly not sustainable in the medium to long term.

For Marx, capitalist production is based upon a set of values that enables the "foundations of all wealth - the land and the workers" to be exploited and destroyed by productive processes and technology. This view is supported by Engels who saw the ecological implications of the selfishness, egocentricity and short-sightedness of capitalist values. In the Dialectics of Nature, Engels observes:

When an individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual profit he is satisfied, and does not care what becomes afterwards of the commodity and its purchases. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What did it matter to the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, what did it matter to them that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of soil, leaving only bare rock.

(Engels, in Parsons, 1977:182)

In his mature writings Marx was primarily concerned to show the connections between environmental degradation and a decline in human vitality and health. In Capital, Marx makes an observation linking environmental and human health, which as we shall see below, is being repeated with tragic consequences in the late twentieth century. He warns:

Quite apart from the menace of a steadily growing labour movement, a restriction of the hours of factory labour was dictated by a necessity akin to that which has bought guano to manure English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder which had, in one case, exhausted the soil, had in the other, exhausted the vital energies of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak as loudly here as does the reduction of the standard of fitness for military service in Germany and France.

(Marx, 1974:239-40)

In the Grundrisse, (1977[1857-8]:604-608), Marx presents a systematic attack on Malthus for over-emphasising the role of natural scarcity in setting limitations on human population size. What Malthus failed to acknowledge was that to a very large extent, human population levels are tied to the 'specific conditions of production' that operate at a particular point and place in human history. Modern environmentalists, particularly some Deep Ecologists, have rather simplistically tended to see human overpopulation as a major cause of environmental problems and a substantial decrease in human numbers as the 'solution' to those problems.

As humans change the ways they produce their means of material existence they transcend previous limits to what could be produced. Marx would have reminded us that over history, the perceptions of what appeared to be natural limits to productive capacity have in fact been limits imposed only by the specific mode of production operating at that time. Thus, a hunting and gathering people would have limitations on the productive capacity of their home 'territory' set by the technologies they used and their ability to find food in a natural setting. Agricultural and industrial societies could use the same size 'territory' but have it be productive to a far greater extent and have it 'carry' a far more numerous population. The concept of over-population is certainly tied to the concept of the carrying capacity of the support environment, however, the carrying capacity is defined by both naturally imposed, absolute limits and socially imposed relative limits to productive capacity.

For Marx, it is a particular feature of Capitalist production that it converts food into a commodity, luxuries into 'necessities' and the labour of humans into surplus value or profit. It is these and other features of Capitalist society such as the need for perpetual unemployment that are the major causes of overpopulation. If overpopulation subsequently is implicated as a major contributing cause in environmental destruction, then its social genesis must be understood. Marx at least provided a theoretical framework for understanding how overpopulation emerges under capitalist values. Contemporary strands in environmental philosophy such as Deep Ecology show great concern about overpopulation and carrying capacity, but they do not examine the social aspects of carrying capacity nor the specific features of Capitalism that contribute to overpopulation.

The thesis on carrying capacity and population forwarded by Marx is supported to a large extent by some contemporary writers on environmental issues. The Eco-anarchist, George Bradford, for example, has pointed out that Western Capitalist nations currently waste and deliberately dump enormous amounts of high quality food. He also argues that "...the present human population could be carried today if we did not put so much agricultural land into the production of such luxuries as coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar and beef cattle that mostly go to rich nations." (in Watson, 1990:20-27). Put simply, it is largely the system of food distribution that is a problem in the present context of global population numbers, not a problem of productive capacity in relation to population size.

It is well known that Marx and Engels said little about the possible social structure of a post-capitalist society. Readers of their works are given the impression that a Communist society will be one where the abolition of private property will see the end to the alienation of human beings from their potential as creative, productive animals. Capitalist society will self-destruct since humans begin to see their full potential as individuals and as a species but have it denied to them by a numerically small but powerful elite. This happens under Capitalism, as distinct from all previous modes of production, because there is a drive toward the universal development of the forces of production. Marx argues on this point:

Hence the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation of capital, degradation of the labourer, and the most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises... and finally to violent overthrow.

(Marx 1977:749)

Capitalism, is for Marx, a necessary stage in human productive history because it is the last major step in progress toward the universal development of human beings. One possible interpretation of this 'grand theory' is that in the communist utopia, the productive machinery of Capitalism continues as before a revolution, changing only in that technology and machinery is owned by the workers or the people, not the capitalists. Thus, critics of Marx suggest that the technological 'paradise' of communism will be, with respect to environmental destruction, not in any way different from the technocentric destructiveness of industrial Capitalism. This view finds stark verification when current evidence suggests that environmental degradation in what was the Eastern Bloc may be worse than anything to be found in the Capitalist West.

However, this thesis ignores much of what Marx actually had to say about labour and technology under the Capitalist mode of production. It is true that Marx saw technology as a kind of liberating force. In Capital when discussing the development of manufacturing industry, Marx, barely containing his moral outrage, states:

The cheapening of labour power by the sheer misuse of labour power of women and children, the sheer theft of all the normal conditions of life and labour, and the sheer brutality of overwork and nightwork, encounters, at long last, certain limits imposed by nature, limits which cannot be overstepped... When this point is finally reached (and it is not reached for a long time), the hour has struck for the introduction of machinery...

(Marx, 1974:506, my emphasis)

Modern eco-anarchist writers such as Bookchin see machinery, particularly high-tech automated production, as having an important place in their own visions of an ecological society. Bookchin has no time for those who, for supposedly 'environmental' reasons, wish to encourage the use of labour-intensive work. Like Marx, he sees that labour-saving technologies "...would free human beings from needless toil and give them unstructured time for their self-cultivation" (Bookchin 1989:196).

With the introduction of industrial technology in the form of machines, Marx still insists that not only is alienation occurring via the extraction of surplus value, alienation happens because the machines have been built and designed by humans working within the exploitative parameters of the capitalist mode of production. This is a primary reason why workers are mutilated in such horrific numbers in industrial 'accidents' and why workers are poisoned by the very substances that they use in production. In the chapter in Capital on 'The Working Day' the reader gets the indelible impression that the whole system of production under capitalist values is an abhorrent thing for Marx. He argues, in a passage typical of his mature writings:

Whereas simple cooperation leaves the individual's methods of work substantially unaltered; manufacture revolutionises these methods, and cuts at the root of individual labour power. It transforms the worker into a cripple, a monster, by forcing him to develop some highly specialised dexterity at the cost of a productive world of productive impulses and faculties - much as in Argentina they slaughter a whole beast simply in order to get its hide or its tallow (Marx,1974:381).

Under capitalist relations of production, according to Marx, "... machines can only arise in antithesis to living labour", under different relations of production, Marx argued that there would be "... a changed foundation of production, a new foundation first created by the process of history" (Marx, 1977:833). Clearly, Marx has in mind the idea that in his vision of the new society, new relations of production entail a new mode of production. Given what has been argued in the context of human and environmental health above, and in particular the idea of a regulative law of social production that embraces the idea of ecologically sustainable development, it is inconceivable that Marx's vision of the future society simply be the productive system of Capitalism minus the capitalists. What Marx might have had in mind with the idea of a changed foundation of production could easily be consistent with the ideas of 'tools for conviviality' proposed by Illich or the technology implied by Schumacher's 'technology with a human face' or the collection of environmentally sound technologies that are now labelled under the word "appropriate".

To condemn Marx and Engels for what happened in the Soviet Union is to ignore the fact that the changed relations of production under "communism" have not seen the introduction of a new mode of production. If anything, the East has simply appropriated the worst of the technologies of the West, often in outdated or secondhand forms. In this context, the opposition of living labour to the machine and technology reaches its global zenith.

It is little wonder then that the scenario documented by Marx in the first half of the C19 is now being repeated in the second half of the C20. In a recent report on eco-catastrophe in the Soviet Union, Hedlund shows how the relationship between environmental and human health is being made manifest:

Some of the toxic wastes concentrated in air, water and soils have inevitably found their way into human bodies. The consequences are easy to find. In the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, in the southern Urals, half of all the young men are reported to be unfit for any form of military service, while the remainder are assigned to light duties. Equally disturbing accounts may be heard from many other parts of the country (Hedlund,S. 1991:25).

No doubt Marx and Engels would not have approved of any government, be it central command or democratic, "socialist" or capitalist, that ignored lessons learnt more than 150 years ago about the vital relationship between environmental and human health. When Marx speculated about the future society he seemed content with a vision that made it "... possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I like, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman or a critic." (Marx, 1967:425). Marx was able to conceptualise such things because he, like Engels, believed activities like fishing, hunting, farming and criticism are predicated on protecting and conserving the totality of nature that sustains body and spirit. The ideas of workers being more creative, autonomous and multi-skilled in the workplace and industry being acutely aware of its environmental responsibilities toward the total life cycle of materials and products are being touted as the contemporary trademarks of a 'clever' society. Such ideas are not all that new.

Bibliography

Capra, F. (1982) The Turning Point, Fontana, London.

Devall, B. and Sessions, G. (1985) Deep Ecology, Gibbs Smith, Salt Lake City.

Bookchin, M. (1989) Remaking Society, Black Rose Books, Montreal.

Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom, Cheshire Books, Palo Alto.

Dobson, A. (1990) Green Political Thought, Unwin Hyman, London.

Eckersley, R. "The Road to Ectopia? Socialism Vs Environmentalism", in The Ecologist, 1988, Vol. 18, Nos 4/5, pp. 142-147.

Easton, L, and Guddat, L. eds, (1967) Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Anchor Books, New York.

Engels, F. (1934) Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science, trans Burns, E., Co-operative Pub. Soc., Moscow.

Gorz, A. (1980) Ecology as Politics, South End Press, Boston.

Hedlund, S. "Red Dust" in The Weekend Australian, July 13-14 1991, pp. 25,27.

Marx, K. (1977[1857-8]) Grundrisse, trans M Nicolaus, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Marx, K. (1974[1867]) Capital, Vol. 1, trans E & C Paul, Everymans, London.

Nash, R. The Rights of Nature, The Primervera Press, Leichhardt NSW.

Parsons, H. (1977) ed, Marx and Engels on Ecology, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut.

Pepper, D. (1989) The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Routledge, London.

Routley, V. "On Karl Marx as an Environmental Hero" in Environmental Ethics, Fall 1981, Vol. 3, pp. 237-244.

Tolman, C. "Karl Marx, Alienation, and the Mastery of Nature" in Environmental Ethics, Spring 1981, Vol. 3, No 1, pp. 63-74.

Watson, R. "George Bradford: How Deep is Deep Ecology? and Return of the Son of Deep Ecology", Review, in Environmental Ethics, Winter 1990, Vol. 12, No 4. pp 371-374.

My Take on Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-05T03:31:00.000-07:00

I agree with many others who see the outpouring of 'Occupy' dissent as an expression of ethical or moral outrage. It is outrage at the now globalised loss of human and non-human potential in life. While poverty is relative to context, even in so-called rich countries, people are having their life potential severely restricted by gross exploitation, unemployment and under-employment. Elsewhere, some humans simply have their lives cut short by starvation, disease and circumstances beyond their control such as natural disasters and climate change.

People are now increasingly united in the view that the gross inequality of power, privilege and wealth in the world is primarily caused by monopoly ownership of natural and human resources that are ruthlessly exploited for exclusive private profit. The exploitation pushes natural and humans systems beyond their limits with resultant loss of planetary, ecosystem and human health.

I have tried to capture the new politics of solidarity needed to address this situation with the concept of ‘soliphilia’. I have defined soliphilia as: the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it. The soli is from solidarity with meanings connected to a union of interests, purposes, or sympathies among members of a group; fellowship of responsibilities and interests. The word has its origins in the French terms for ‘interdependent’, ‘in common’ and from the Latin solidus, with meanings connected to ‘solid’ and whole.

I believe that soliphilia encompasses much of the politico-emotional feeling that ‘Occupy’ represents. We want our communities back from the brink, we want the social in society to be meaningful and we want a shared experience of decision-making and common-wealth creation. We experience soliphilia when fully engaged with the politics of people and places that we love. ‘Occupy’ gives expression to a symbiotic politics of place and our motivation to defeat the forces that cause sickness, death, extinction and unwelcome change. Soliphilia goes beyond left-right politics and provides a universal language to help achieve genuine sustainability.

However, I have realised that we do not have a word in English to cover the sense of profound sadness and distress that many of us have for the chronic devaluing and diminution of solidarity, social symbiosis and community. The social fabric of our loved communities is disappearing as a lived experience similar to that of the gradual loss our loved biophysical environments. I have created the concept of ‘solastalgia’ to explain this lived experience of distress and loss of solace about negative change to loved home environments and it has now gained considerable acceptance in our understanding of ‘psychoterratic’ or earth related emotional and psychological responses.

I now propose ‘solialgia’ as the opposite of soliphilia and it has the same etymological origins except that the algia or pain replaces the philia or love. Solialgia is defined as the distress people feel when their loved home community begins to disappear with loss of community, neighbourhood, neighbours, solidarity and common interests. When there is distress about a lived experience of; social unity falling apart, community in retreat, eviction, homelessness, social pathology, the privatisation of common wealth, the retreat of democracy ... there is solialgia.

Be warned, however, as there will be those who wish to use solialgia to justify their racism, sexism and other prejudices. We have to ‘occupy’ soliphilia and solialgia and prevent their abuse by those who actually represent their antithesis. As I have seen with the concept of solastalgia, this can be a difficult task.

The politics of place has an emotional and psychological landscape similar to that of the biophysical and I believe that soliphilia and solialgia cover two ends of an important spectrum but one that we have rarely ever spoken about ... now we can.

Let me know what you think.

My response to the Chevron ad.

2011-10-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

healthearth ... healthearthealthearthealthearth: Creating a language for our psychoterratic emotions and feelings

2011-09-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

healthearth ... healthearthealthearthealthearth: Creating a language for our psychoterratic emotions and feelings

Creating a language for our psychoterratic emotions and feelings

2011-09-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

I am developing a conceptual framework for understanding psychoterratic, or earth related (terra) mental health (psyche) states or conditions. I want to contribute to an expanded understanding of the changing relationship between the states of biophysical and built environments and human mental and physical health.

Despite the importance of connections between environmental or ecosystem health and human health (physical and mental) in many cultures, we have very few concepts in English that address environmentally-induced mental distress, or conversely, environmentally enhanced positive mental health. What I am attempting to do now is develop a rich psychoterratic typology that provides a language and conceptual landscape to match the rich range of emotions and feelings people have about nature and place.

The negative and positive concepts that are relevant to a fuller understanding of the human-environment relationship have been incorporated by me into a psychoterratic typology (below).

Table 1. A Typology of Psychoterratic States.

Negative States	Origin	Positive States	Origin
Nostalgia	Hofer 1688	Endemophilia	Albrecht 2010
Necrophilia	Fromm 1965	Biophilia	Fromm 1965
Biophobia	Kellert & Wilson 1995	Biophilia	Wilson 1984
Ecophobia	Sobel 1995	Ecophilia	Sobel 1995
Solastalgia	Albrecht 2005	Topophilia	Auden 1947, Tuan 1974
Global Dread	Albrecht 2003	Soliphilia	Albrecht 2009
Nature Deficit Disorder	Louv 2005	Ecophilia and Eutierria	Albrecht 2010
Ecoparalysis	Rees 2007, Albrecht 2008	Soliphilia	Albrecht 2009
Ecoanxiety	Leff 1990	Eutierria	Albrecht 2010

The typology of psychoterratic states is a transdisciplinary contribution to the complete reworking of our “eco-mental” landscapes (Bateson 1972). As work in development, this typology contains concepts developed over time in the international literature and new terms created by myself. In brief overview, the key elements of the typology include:

Nostalgia and Endemophilia

Nostalgia, as defined by Hofer (1688) was regarded as a medically diagnosable disease. In past centuries, because people were more strongly and permanently tied to place, the condition of nostalgia was more likely to be felt as a severe form of psychoterratic and somaterratic disorder (Lowenthal 1985). I have created the new term, endemophilia, to counter traditionally defined nostalgia. The English word, ‘endemic’, is based on the French word, endémique and has the Greek roots, endēmia (a dwelling in) and endēmos (native in the people) and philia (love of). Endemophilia describes the particular love of the locally and regionally distinctive in the people of that place. It is similar to what Relph (2008 (1976) ) called “existential insideness” or the deep, satisfying feeling of being truly at home with one’s place and culture.

Necrophilia, Biophobia and Biophilia

The Neo-Freudian, Erich Fromm, contributed to the psychoterratic typology by creating the binary opposites of necrophilia and biophilia. Necrophilia, or the love of death, is to be countered by the love of life (Fromm 1965). Fromm’s (1965, 1994) pioneering concept of biophilia links love of humanity with love of life and nature, in a nexus that anticipates many themes within environmental ethics. For E.O. Wilson (1984), biophobia describes an anathema to the natural world, and Wilson (1984) saw biophilia, or biological affiliation with all other organisms, as a counter to biophobia and destructive and exploitative relationships with nature.

Ecophobia and Ecophilia

Sobel (1995) and others use the term ecophobia to describe the fear or hatred of ecology or the environment, involving a denial of the value of biodiversity, the physicality of the earth and the processes that make life possible. To counter what Kahn has called “environmental generational amnesia” (Kahn 1999) we need to draw on every element of bio- and ecophilia left in humans to find educative solutions to environmental and climatic problems. As David Sobel argues: “We can cure the malaise of ecophobia with ecophilia” (Sobel 1995).

Solastalgia and Topophilia

I have created the concept of solastalgia (Albrecht 2005, 2006, 2010), defined as emplaced or existential melancholia at the negatively perceived transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment. Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of ‘solace’ and ‘desolation’. Solace is derived from solari and solacium, with meanings connected to the alleviation of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events. Desolation has its origins in solus and desolare with meanings connected to abandonment and loneliness. Algia means pain, suffering or sickness.It is a form of ‘homesickness’ like that experienced with traditionally defined nostalgia, except that the victim has not left their home or home environment.

The concept of solastalgia has had considerable international impact since its creation and has helped revive interest in the relationships between humans and place at all scales.In addition to application in new academic research, the concept of solastalgia, has, since its creation in 2003, steadily grown in its public use. An internet search on the term will produce many thousands of results in many languages and a brief scan of those results reveals that, apart from new applications in academic contexts, artists, composers and musicians, poets, playwrights and hundreds of ordinary people in blogs and websites have already started to use the term and apply it in meaningful ways.

The concept of topophilia was first used by the poet W.H. Auden in 1947 to describe the attention given to the love of particular and peculiar places as manifest in the poetry of John Betjeman (Hauser 2007). The neologism combines topos (place) with philia or love, hence love of place. By contrast, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) explicitly used the term to describe a love of landscape that included the non-built or natural environment as well as the built environment. If we accept that love of landscape and place can be a powerful emotion, especially for Indigenous people and people who live closely to the land/soil, then a lived experience of the chronic desolation of that landscape/place would be an equally powerful emotion and psychic state. It is this precise experience that solastalgia describes.

Global Dread, Soliphilia and Nature Deficit Disorder

Global dread is a psychoterratic condition centred on the anticipation of a future state of the world that produces a mixture of terror and sadness in the sufferer for those who will exist within such a state. I created the concept of soliphilia’ to provide a cultural and political concept that will help negate dread and solastalgia. The concept has its origins in the French solidaire (interdependent) and the Latin solidus (solid or whole) and the love of one’s fellow citizens and neighbours implied by the Greek (philia). Soliphilia is manifest in the interdependent solidarity and the wholeness or unity needed between people to overcome the alienation and disempowerment present in contemporary political decision-making. Soliphilia introduces the notion of political commitment to the saving of loved home environments at all scales, from the local to the global. While only in existence since 2009, this concept has already been discussed in a feature article that has global reach (Smith 2010). The concept of soliphilia also has affinities with ideas such as ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (Heise 2008) where rather than place pathology and dread being the inevitable consequence of modernity, a global sense of place can also be compatible with an endemic sense of place in an environment of high quality.

Richard Louv (2008) has created the term ‘nature deficit disorder’ and has warned about the negative impacts of withdrawal of our children and their socialisation from nature and natural processes. Louv and many others point out that the epidemics of physical (obesity) and mental health (ADD) in our children are closely related to the disconnection now well established between children and eco-socialisation. Without close physical contact with wild places and wild things, as Sobel also pointed out, the socialisation and education of children are incomplete. At this point, as Fromm argued, the development of the healthy personality is compromised.

Ecoparalysis, Ecoanxiety and Eutierria

Ecoparalysis appears as apathy, complacency or disengagement with reality as it unfolds, but the detachment people feel may well be psychoterratic rather than an active decision to do nothing. Lertzman, building on the work of the psychoanalyst, Searles, suggests that “[f]ar from being an absence of pathos, or feeling, inner feelings of anxiety, fear or powerlessness manifest as a lack of action or a paralysis” (Lertzman 2008). Rees highlights the structural aspects of the current human dilemma when he argues that while individuals “hold to the expansionist myth” of consuming and growing our way to sustainability, “society remains in eco-paralysis” (Rees 2008). Ecoanxiety, or non-specific worry about our relationship to support environments in the twenty-first century (Leff 1990, Dickinson 2008) is generated, on a daily basis, by the delivery of information and images about negative trends concerning the environment and the climate. I define eutierria as a good and positive feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces. This feeling is one where the boundaries between self and the rest of nature are obliterated and a deep sense of peace and connectedness pervades consciousness. When the human-nature relationship is spontaneous and mutually enriching (symbiotic) we experience an emotional state of ‘eutierria’ in contrast, to ecoanxiety, ecoparalysis and global dread. Eutierria now exists as an alternative to what has previously been described within religious and spiritual writings as “that oceanic feeling.”

The Emotions of Climate Change.

2011-06-23T07:04:00.000-07:00

Forget the economics and the science ... it’s all about emotion. The science is absolutely clear ... we are responsible for global warming and climate change and the longer term consequences of failure to mitigate are too ghastly to think about. The economics are also in the realm of the bleeding obvious ... the cost of mitigation is nowhere near the cost of the damage that will be caused by destructive climate change that will smash agriculture worldwide and wreak more storm and tempest damage to our vital technology and infrastructure.

So, what about the emotions? How can emotions explain the types of responses we see today? Given that the emotions are primary factors generating action or inaction in humans, (‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin ēmovēre to disturb, and movēre to move), it is most likely that they will be implicated in issues that invite action (or inaction) such as climate change.

Modern humans evolved within bioregional contexts only 200,000 years ago. In the last ten thousand years, the Earth’s climate has been relatively stable and cultures have sustained themselves around the predictability of the seasons and other solar system regularities such as the tides. Our perceptual and emotional development was tied to survival in often difficult environments where scarcity usually prevailed over abundance.

Survival in a time of scarcity was contingent on aggressively defending home territories from human rivals. Men, especially, in the context of a hunting and gathering economy, also required the emotional attributes required to hunt and kill animals that, in many instances, could kill or injure them. In addition, detailed knowledge of the home environment was vital and relationships to places and things of sustenance and the human cooperation needed to sustain family and clan must have been foundational to the emotions.

With internal place-based emotions mainly tied to cooperation within home territories and families and external place-based relationships mainly based on defence and aggression, at least two clearly opposed sets of emotions have become part of our biological and cultural evolution. Many authors (see, for example, Parrot 2001) have built complex typologies of the emotions, however, in this short essay I wish only to highlight the contrast between emotions affiliated with cooperation (love, care, joy) and conflict (anger, hostility, fear).

In the last two hundred years (especially) humans in Capitalist, industrialised and technologically complex societies have created a social and cultural environment based not on scarcity but abundance. In such circumstances, the emotional typology produced in the previous 200,000 years becomes confused. The ‘external’ emotions connected to competition are harnessed to maximise corporate growth and dominance in a global market place while the ‘internal’ more cooperative emotions are increasingly tied to making the corporate body more efficient and productive.

Particular place-based emotions have been transcended by more global connections and increased alienation from the natural systems that once sustained us. In addition to artificial habitats supported by technologies that deliver virtual experiences (of people and place) we have built a globally connected economy that has removed the threat posed by outsiders and ‘others’ to only a few (but occasionally effective) terrorists and cultures that refuse to be part of the global ‘corporate family’. Now, it is mainly those who pose a threat from the inside to the institutions that deliver the abundance that all enjoy,who are perceived to be ‘outsiders’ and a threat to the integrity of the whole system.

In the C20, it was ‘the Left’ that held the place of 'outsider' and opponent of market-based modern societies where the ‘Cold War’ for right libertarians was (and still is) all about victory of free markets, individual freedom and Western institutions (democracy) over communist/socialist forms of social organisation based on collectivism and authoritarianism.

In the C21, in the new ‘Green War’, the enemy has now become those who suggest that there are limits to material growth in any aspect of human life. Given that the ultimate basis of Capitalism is infinite growth, such advocacy of limits is seen as threatening the very basis of the material abundance that has come to characterise a modern society.

The emotional choreography of hunting and gathering societies is revealed when those who argue for unlimited freedom and unlimited growth use ‘outsider’ emotions to defend their position. Their emotional landscape is based on hostility to the ‘other’, and aggression towards opposing views and people that espouse them. These people are fighting a ‘Green War’ because ‘greens’ represent that which is most anathema to them ... the restriction of individual freedom in the interests of any collective good. Even rationality and science, if used to support forms of limitation, including limits to greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, become enemies of the so-called free and open society.

It is then quite explicable to see the expression of emotions in the hostility and ad hominen attacks on climate scientists and environmentalists made by climate change denialists, anti- limits-to-growthers and green sceptics. Their total world view is being challenged by climate and environmental science and in order to preserve their own coherence, they must oppose every piece of evidence that suggests the need to change and respect limits. If this now means opposing the very scientific traditions on which their own abundant world was erected, then so be it.

By contrast, the climate scientists and environmentalists who see the need for restraint and self limitation are able to use the insider emotional choreography of the hunters and gatherers to establish and reinforce their own position. They can clearly see that humans have re-entered a world of scarcity and that there is a need to give expression to relictual communal emotions of care, responsibility and collective good that enable sustainability within the imposed limits. That they have to confront those who oppose them and who do so via the opposing emotions of hostility and aggression only makes for the drama of the emotions to be played out in the most difficult of circumstances.

What is strange is that we have not paid sufficient attention to the emotions of climate change and environmentalism. As with the emotions of denial of the harm of cigarette smoking, centred on personal freedom, addiction and lifestyle, the similar emotions of climate change denial are powerful enough for people to oppose science, be blind to evidence and be thoughtless about how others now (intragenerational ethics) and others in the future (intergenerational ethics) can sustain themselves.

It must also be noted that the drama of the emotions is also substantially being played out within the context of a privately owned media that has a vested interest in profit-making by selling the trappings of an infinite growth model of an economy. Be it in the service of new motor vehicle images or big glossy advertisements for new mining employees, the commercial media must employ journalists who are able to give expression to the emotions of infinite growth insiders and oppose them to the emotions of limits to growth outsiders. That they do so to protect the interests of those who profit from infinite growth models of economic activity should come as no surprise to anyone. In doing their job they also ensure that they themselves continue to have one.

If, after receipt of information about the real threats to life, we oppose untrammelled human development and are concerned about the fate of future generations, then our emotions are primed to urgently mitigate the causes of climate change. If we want to accept climate change but continue with business as usual, then we are emotionally disposed to support adaption to any change. If we are emotionally tied to a world view (ideology) that cannot co-exist with limitations to individual and corporate freedom, then we will oppose any action that will constrain economic growth including 'costly' adaptation to climate change.

Symbiocene

2011-05-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

Many are now suggesting that we should rename this period on earth as the Anthropocene.

This era could be called the Obscene, not the Anthropocene.

I for one, a human, do not wished to be associated with a period in Earth's history where the dominant people in one species, wipe out the foundations of life for all other humans and non-humans.

I wish to part of the 'Symbiocene' where humans live in harmony with all other beings.

We can do this via eco- and biomimicry and ecoindustrial economies.

Its going to be hard, but it is at least thermodynamically possible. It may even be ethical and beautiful.

Black Swan Event and Deadly Brain Virus

2011-05-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Perth newspaper, The West Australian today. Two articles next each other.

One on Black Swans falling sick because of the drought and hotter weather and the other about a deadly virus, Murray Valley encephalitis, which is carried by mosquitoes, now found close to Perth (http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/newshome/9453199/mosquito-virus-spreads-across-wa/).

In the Black Swan story, the language is all about a "dry spell" with no mention of climate change or global warming and its impacts on SW WA. The swans are sick from botulism and other water borne diseases. Another possible cause is exhaustion as they come to the coast to escape the drought further inland.

The "deadly brain virus" story says that the virus warning now extends to anywhere north and east of Perth". However, there is no mention of the changing climate and how it favours the spread of the mosquito and hence, the virus.

Like the dying trees, sick swans are an indicator of ecosystems in distress, while the spread of infectious diseases, particularly by mosquitoes, as climates get warmer has been predicted by the IPCC and other research on global warming.

Climate change is not only real, it is here in Perth and is having major impacts right now. Its a pity our one daily newpaper cannot see and make the connections.

Ethical Dieback

2011-04-29T19:58:00.000-07:00

Ethical Dieback.

While gamers and sports fans might like slow motion action scenes where you can watch every move in minute detail, I doubt if anybody would like to watch the slow motion disaster that is unfolding before our very eyes in the Perth region.

I live in the hills at Jarrahdale and well into April I am watching whole sections of the forest slowly die. It is not just Jarrah and Marri that are turning yellow and dying, the whole ecosystem is in deep distress, so much so that, tragically, it looks like a Northern Hemisphere autumn is taking place right here, right now.

If we could watch what is going on in fast forward we would see vast tracts of bushland dying of thirst in the grip of this permanent drought. If you take the time to look, you will notice that the native ecosystems on the coastal plain are also in the deep distress of various forms of ‘dieback’. What is happening is a 'tipping point' in the process of 'tipping' ... a rare but hugely important event.

The Perth Region, including the Hills, has had a 20% decline in rainfall over the last 30 years and a much larger, 60% decline in runoff into the streams and our dams. Gooralong Brook, once a year-round running stream, has disappeared and most of its deeper pools are now bone dry. The climate of the SW of WA has already changed for the worse and if it gets even warmer and dryer, the Perth region will be in perpetual ecosystem distress.

This distress is not only about trees, frogs, jilgies and thirsty kangaroos; it is also a crisis of the human spirit and the mind. Our identity as people of the Perth region is at stake. All that is endemic to this special part of the world is at risk of slow death by desiccation. Our iconic trees such as Banksia and Jarrah are already dying and the wildflowers, the exquisite ground orchids and kangaroo paws, will not reappear in a dry, colourless Spring.

Even the bikies that roar their Harleys up the Jarrahdale Road, heading for the hills, are part of endemic Perth, for although they might find it hard to admit, they love the beautiful bush vistas and the stress release that green, open spaces invite. That you can enjoy the roos, the jarrah forest and a thirst-quenching beer at the Jarrahdale Tavern is a quintessentially West Australian freedom. But it is a freedom, like the water in Serpentine Dam, which is in danger of disappearing.

We are a people in denial about the huge, negative changes to our climate and landscape that have taken place during my lifetime (I am a baby boomer). Since 1975, in SW WA, we have experienced most of the driest years on record. Last year (2010) was the driest year for the SW since 1900 and we are now breaking records for night and day time heat. The summer of 2010 -11 had the highest average minimum and maximum temperatures on record. Our dams are right now at less than a quarter of their total capacity and the chance of record rains that would return them to the spectacular overflows I witnessed as a child seems a very remote possibility.

We, in Perth, are in the front line of human induced global warming and its negative impacts and unless we confront that reality, our environment will either wither or simply pack up and move away from us. Sure, at huge expense, we can produce potable water from the sea and pump more ground water to keep Perth ‘green’, but these ‘solutions’ are a sign that we have got our relationship to the earth completely wrong. Go and have a good look at the (former) Lake Gnangara and think about the trade-off between ecosystem health and green lawns.

We are now living in a time of solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home. We have a lived experience of an environment that is changing all around us in ways that are distressing. Some people still think there is not a problem, that the problem is not serious, that we are not responsible for the problem, that we should do nothing ... but these responses are a sign of deep denial and ethical dieback.

Gooralong Creek with riparian vegetation dead and dying April 2011

Obesity and the Ecological Footprint

2010-07-02T18:06:00.000-07:00

Glenn Albrecht EFA and Obesity article 2007

TEDxSydney Talk on Solastalgia and Soliphilia via YouTube

2010-06-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

TEDxSydney Talk

Solastalgia, Soliphilia, Eutierria and Art.

2010-06-02T01:40:00.000-07:00

Many traditional cultures and their indigenous languages have words for home-heart-environment relationships, however, it is interesting to note that modern English has very few. I created the concept of ‘solastalgia’ to fill this void and to give expression in the English language to a fundamentally important relationship between people, communities and their home environment. I also feel that we need many more new concepts that recapture the closeness that human animals have with their support environment or habitat. The realm of the ‘psychoterratic’ or positive and negative relationships between human mental health (psyche) and the earth (terra) has to be re-created in the twenty first century.

The solace and comfort gained from a positive and creative relationship to home is conducive to physical and mental health. When the human-nature relationship is spontaneous and mutually enriching (symbiotic) we experience a state of ‘eutierria’ which I define as a positive feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces (eu=good, tierra= earth, ia= suffix for member of a group of {positive psychoterratic} conditions). By contrast, when the home environment is changed in ways that take solace away and create feelings of distress, the result can be a breakdown in physical and mental health. Solastalgia is the melancholia or homesickness you have when you remain locked in your home environment while all around you, your home environment is being desolated in ways that you cannot control. The existential and emplaced feelings of desolation and loss of solace are reinforced by powerlessness.

Transformation at small scales of human habitation can be liberating for some but a source of melancholia for others. Place-based repair of damaged landscapes, relocation and/or travel were options for negating solastalgia at a time when the scale and pace of life was small and slow. However, when transformative forces begin to undermine the foundations of sustainability for the Whole Earth, there is potential for solastalgia to become a globally significant source of melancholia and distress. We are now living within these global transformative times as we face up to the universal loss of ecosystem health in the form of toxic pollution and a warming climate with attendant climate chaos. Our home, the Earth, is now under siege from one species and its power and we are beginning to suffer self-imposed solastalgia.

Creative writers and artists have always intuited ‘solastalgia’ in varying degrees. Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ was painted in response to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The blood red sky was a product of volcanic dust ejected into the global atmosphere, but Munch produced an archetypal, ecoapocalyptic response in the famous painting. A lesser degree of existential distress at environmental disturbance can also be found in the work of surrealists such as Salvador Dali and his response to the desolation of mind and landscape as a consequence of transformative powers such as war. Romantic and Nature poets such as Wordsworth have also contributed to the theme of the gradual loss of a loved home environment. Contemporary environmental art portrays the loss of species and ecosystems as something more than loss of biodiversity ... it also depicts the loss of something vital within us ... the negation of the very possibility of eutierria.

The challenge of recognising and responding to solastalgia is now more important than ever. Yes, small scale, local damage is still happening to loved home environments as globalisation homogenises all before its bulldozers, cookie-cutter buildings and neon signifiers of McLandscape. Good people lament the loss of their endemic landscapes as a universally branded global culture obliterates the distinctive and the unique. Urban solastalgia is the distress caused by unwelcome changes to the physical appearance of local and city landscapes, including sensescapes and streetscapes (it is no wonder the graffiti artists want to tag every surface with a reasserted local identity). Rural and regional solastalgia is produced under the impact of mining and agribusiness as they bring unwelcome homogeneity on a huge scale. Humans now possess the power to rapidly change home environments with powerful transformative technologies.

As bad as local and regional neg-transformation is, it is the big picture, the Earth, which is now a home under assault. That Munch feeling is reasserting itself as the planet warms to a Krakatoa-like conclusion. In a greenhouse that is getting hotter, the cryosphere weeps into the ocean and we all get that sinking feeling. As the climate gets hotter, more hostile and unpredictable ... we seek solace wherever it is offered. Even virtual worlds depicted in films like Avatar seem better than the one we are creating for ourselves here on earth. We have virtual solastalgia within a film for a world that delivers moments of eutierria but is under assault from the earth miners. We feel elation when the Na'vi win back their planet with the help of human eco-warriors. It would be good if such eutierria could prevail here on the real earth as bad climate change is reversed and genuine moves are made to be sustainable with clean, safe renewable energy and resources. For this to happen, a new social movement based on what I call ‘soliphilia’ will be needed. Soliphilia is the political affiliation or solidarity needed between us all to be responsible for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it. Solastalgia will be overcome only when sufficient of us act in solidarity to defeat the forces of desolation. A cultural and political movement based on soliphilia is now needed to protect the possibility of that wonderful psychological state I call 'eutierria' being experienced by future generations.

Artists already know this.

Soliphilia on RSA

2010-03-12T16:59:00.000-08:00

Soliphilia and Citizen Power

Ecoparalysis

2010-01-31T00:42:00.000-08:00

The inability to meaningfully respond to the climatic and ecological challenges that face us is not always an expression of apathy. The intractable nature of the problems, the fact that they are tied to the very foundations of our present economy generates dilemmas not seen before in human history. People appear apathetic and disengaged with reality as it unfolds, but their detachment might be ecoparalysis rather than apathy or avoidance.

As we learn more about our carbon footprint it seems that every option to retain life as usual ends in contradiction. Even the idea that we save energy and hence carbon emissions by doing business and personal communication electronically runs into the uncomfortable truth that the annual amount of energy required to run the world-wide-web is roughly the equivalent to the annual energy use and carbon emissions of global air traffic. Not many people in rich, technologically sophisticated parts of the world are prepared to embrace the full implications of a severely carbon constrained world. While many now clearly see the extent and nature of the problem, future negative events, even those that will impact on their own children, are insufficient to change behaviour as usual. I suggest that such gaps between knowledge, values and behaviour are now sources of ecoanxiety and causes of ecoparalysis worldwide.

[concept first presented at the Cultures of Sustainability Conference RMIT 2008]

Avatar and Virtual Solastalgia

2010-01-14T16:15:00.000-08:00

As the real world is being desolated (climate change, ecosystem distress etc etc), real people experience solastalgia. When, in Avatar, they can 'see' an alternative world, which is beautiful, diverse and complex, one that meets their aesthetic, spiritual and ethical needs, they want to live within it. During the movie, they experience a virtual solastalgia as they become virtual participants in the attempted destruction and desolation of the Na'vi and other life forms in this pristine environment ... all for the sake of a meaningless materialism. The movie becomes, for such people, an existential experience of negative environmental change (defined as solastalgia). At the conclusion of the movie when they must accept that such a world is virtual only, they experience a virtual nostalgia for it and become depressed.

The irony of humans finally seeing the value of life, different ways of being 'human', non-human beings and living systems via a movie about a virtual world and its destruction is not lost on me. That a brilliant movie with all of its digital special effects can be more powerful as a change agent than the environmental writers and commentators of the world says something important about environmental education in critically important domains such as global warming, environmental and animal ethics, and habitat destruction.

Innocide and Earthlings

2009-12-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

The Ongoing Apology to Young and Future Earthlings

From Glenn Albrecht, Earth Citizen, 17 Wanliss Street, Jarrahdale, Western Australia.

My fellow Earthlings,

We have reached a point where we must acknowledge the severe injustice that is being perpetrated on the lives of current and future beings. We must say to the recently conceived, newborns, infants, young children, youth, young adults and all future generations on Earth, that we are sorry your future is being put at risk by dangerous climate change. In addition, to those in low-lying countries and especially the poor who cannot possibly adapt to consequences of a warming world ... we say sorry.

The callous abuse and mistreatment of the Earth and its climate is a source of deep shame. In particular we need to offer you, the innocent and non-consenting parties to this desolation, a profound and deep-felt apology for failing to implement binding targets for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions that would deliver stabilisation of the earth’s climate.

We must apologise in advance for the massive hardship that will occur to every facet of life as the climate gets hotter; disease, heat stress, drought and fire frequency increase, ecosystems and agriculture collapse, sea level rises and powerful storms wipe out our communities.

To all human beings who will be disadvantaged and who will have their life potential cut short by climate chaos … we say sorry. To all non-human beings who will face extinction from enormous impacts to their habitats, we say sorry.

To avoid a warming and unpredictable climate you, the occupants of the future, need right now to be represented by well informed people with wisdom and ethical courage. Instead you have political and other leaders, who, in their denial or inaction on the reality of a warming world are putting you all at risk. To continue to abuse the earth and knowingly bring suffering to its future inhabitants is an ethical failure of the highest magnitude.

In a slow motion tragedy, the majority of global leaders are risking the future of the Earth for dubious benefits in the here and now. The so-called representatives of the developed countries of Earth must now be seen and judged for what they are … intellectually and ethically bankrupt. For their gross lack of integrity, for putting the poor, children and families last and for not listening to the advice from scientists about the serious risks of a warming world … we say sorry.

The time has come for elders and those in privileged positions to stand up to such selfishness and egocentricity. Fellow inhabitants of the Earth, we must care about the future. We must make a rapid transition to an ecologically sustainable economy, one that is in harmony with our environment and climate. With courage and action we can right a future wrong in the here and now.

Soliphilia

2009-02-19T15:41:00.000-08:00

Soliphilia: The Antidote to Solastalgia

I have a neologism for you (yes, another one). I have developed the concept of solastalgia to describe the pain or sickness caused by the inability to derive solace from the present state of one’s home environment. It is the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change to one’s ‘sense of place’ and existential well-being. It is closely linked to feelings of powerlessness and a loss of hope about the future. In summary, it is the melancholia or homesickness experienced while you are still at home and your home environment is being gradually desolated. I have written about solastalgia in relation to large-scale mining, drought and changing climates. There are many posts on this Blog (Healthearth) that give more detail on solastalgia.

I am now working on the positive concept of soliphilia. I define soliphilia as:

the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.

The soli is from solidarity with meanings connected to:

A union of interests, purposes, or sympathies among members of a group; fellowship of responsibilities and interests.

[French solidarité, from solidaire, interdependent, from Old French, in common, from Latin solidus, solid, whole.] (http://www.answers.com/topic/solidarity )

I offer this concept as a cultural and political addition to the other ‘philias’ that have been created. E.O Wilson’s biophilia or the love of life is critically important in the context of empathy and engagement with all life. Tuan’s concept of topophilia is a vital part of love of landscape and place and our sense of place. Soliphilia is now added to love of life and place to give us the love of the whole (life + place at all scales) and the solidarity between us that is needed to keep what we all hold in common healthy and strong. Now we have a love of the politics of place where our motivation to defeat solastalgia and other forces that cause sickness and extinction is captured in a new concept. Soliphilia goes beyond left-right politics and provides a universal motivation to achieve sustainability.

I would like your thoughts on this neologism and my reason for creating it.

Yours, in soliphilia, Glenn.

Solastalgia

Soliphilia

See RSA website for more

Fire and the Psyche (written in 2002 in response to massive bushfires in the Sydney and Hunter areas)

2009-02-13T22:17:00.000-08:00

Life for both human and non-humans can be put at risk in an instant by wildfire. Wildfire has the potential to kill and maim many hundreds of humans and destroy their property (Ash Wednesday, Black Friday). The destruction of the natural environment and its animals is also devastating, despite claims that the Australian bush is “fire tolerant”. With the fire season already upon us, it crucial that we re-assess our views and values about the relationship between humans and the land in Australia. I shall describe four positions that try to cover the spectrum of possible views.

Alienation and Arson

The first position is full alienation from our own country. As a colonising culture we come to this continent and bring with us our European conceptual baggage which includes a belief in the inferiority of all things indigenous (including the indigenous people) and the inherent superiority of all things European. Symptoms of alienation gone crazy include “mad palm”, “mad lawn” and “mad paver” diseases. We have created a culture determined to supplant the endemic with the exotic irrespective of the environmental costs. Where the endemic situation threatens the colonist, the response is always extermination of the native. The coloniser mentality is inclined to remove the threat and replace it with certainty and safety. Along with the forests go the Thylacines and Koalas, while exotic palms, pools, pussy cats, pooches and Porsches move in. Unfortunately, so too do the psychopath pyromaniacs who like nothing better than to light fires and watch the carnage. We see our native vegetation as a threat and perceive it as ‘fuel’ for fire. The full alienation results in perpetual burning, concrete and asphalt with no ‘natural’ threats or danger and nothing distinctively Australian left in the landscape.

Design Against Nature

A second option is to design urban structures so as to make them immune from the unwanted features of the bush such as poisonous snakes, quolls, ticks, leeches, spiders and fire. We live close to the bush, but protect ourselves from those aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem processes that are inconsistent with our lifestyle choices and personal safety.
We can work harder to make our dwellings fire resistant or even fire proof. We design to live with fire and keep the bushland as well. However, despite saving human property and lives, the ‘fire bunker’ with its passive (materials) and active (sprinklers) systems does not address the fundamental issue of alienation from the bush. The more we think that we can defeat fire, the more bushland will be infiltrated by urbanisation. Along with the fire-proof urban front comes the armada of insults to the bush outlined above and out go the endemic ‘undesirables’. In defeating fire we defeat the bush.

Phased Transition to ‘the Bush’

A third position is to think about overcoming the alienation with a phased transition from city to bush. In this option, we concede that humans in urban systems have needs that are inconsistent with the presence of unmanaged ecosystems and wild creatures. At the core of city/suburbia is a ‘humans only’ zone where all undesirables (including fruit bats) are excluded. The only animals permitted to dwell within are those that are quasi-human such as dogs and cats that are companion animals for humans. The landscape around such a core is also artificial and celebrates its triumph over the endemic in the form of concrete, pavers, asphalt, manicured lawns, resort style palms and exotic trees.

On the fringes of such an artefact there are highly managed corridors of multiple use park-like reserves where conventional houses sit safely in mowed and maintained transition zones before the real bush. Some undesirables will occasionally slither down the corridor but a four-by-two or a professional pest exterminator easily deals with them. Property damage from fire is virtually non-existent as there is no dense bushland next to housing. The corridors lead to tracts of ‘wilderness’ where no human property or life is at direct risk from fire or pests. Bush fire control is then the responsibility of organisations such as NPWS and its goal is to stop the destruction of our national parks and their biodiversity. The majority of the people at the core of this system remain deeply alienated from endemic Australia, however, those at the periphery get glimpses of the real thing. Those in power sit in the very centre of the core and turn up the air conditioning when the heat is on.

Living Within Nature

A fourth option suggests that a non-alienated way of life might be possible for Australians if the city/urban environment is re-constructed so as to maximise the possibility of an endemic sense of place. Such reconstruction entails the systematic removal of exotics and their replacement with native vegetation and native fauna. From gardens to streetscapes to urban parks, the idea is to always promote the native and to expunge the exotic. Implications here include the complete banning of free-range companion animals. Rather than fence in the natives (the failed Earth Sanctuary idea) we fence in the pooches and pussies so that they constitute no threat to the natives.

For example, we can learn to live with free ranging Koalas, Possums and Bandicoots in our gardens and design our dwellings/gardens to fit with their needs. Such a mentality of ‘inclusion’ also requires a degree of coexistence with the undesirables (spiders, snakes and carnivores) as they too are integral parts of endemic ecosystems and their flora and fauna. Fire too is a normal part of the system and can be used, much as it was by Aboriginal people, to actively manage the environment. Creative use of fire to maintain habitat for native plants and animals and reduce the threat of wildfire for all living things could be considered to be an art as well as a science. However, the reality of fire in a dry landscape means that wildfire will still occur and that sometimes it will kill and maim living things.

Fire and the Psyche

We accept with resignation the death of about 2,000 and the serious injury of 30,000 people a year on our national road system. Yet the death of even one person by bush fire seems to strike at the heart of the Australian psyche. I wonder why such a contrast in our perception of death and injury should prevail. It is possible that our alienation from the land is so profound that we cannot accept that it might be opposing our presence at times.

A reassessment of where and how we are living might be a more appropriate response than calling Fat Elvis. Consideration of the ‘phased transition’ and ‘living within nature’ might help us come to appreciate the privilege of living within the beauty and danger of the Australian landscape. With climate change and more warming inevitable now, we are all going to have to live with fire.

Against Marohasy on Climate Change

2008-09-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

We need to take a good hard look at the type of ‘facts’ Jennifer Marohasy (JM) presents before signing on to her view of the world. Also, take a good hard look at the above photo supporting the article. It shows a river with many dead trees (river red gums?) on its edges. The caption says “Catastrophe Averted: Salinity levels in the Murray have halved, but you won’t hear that from global warming zealots”. Is Marohasy and her paymaster (The Australian) actually suggesting that the landscape in the photograph shows a system in recovery? It looks more like a catastrophe to me.

See: http://multifaith-newcastle.googlegroups.com/web/Fuzzy%20but%20Cold.pdf?gda=M4z3uEwAAABOQTftyhqJubHCkUbQuhxW5kuQK5Hu7aflLRwsWWPzpuyPDPBtASCBtxegF3TlLelmqPZxlyfqqX6aflnmKKQG_Vpvmo5s1aABVJRO3P3wLQ

For an updated PDF of the material presented below

Also, see my new ethicsclimate Blog (follow link)

Global Solastalgia

2008-08-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

People in the front line of environmental change are now telling their stories of distress in the face of unwelcome disturbance to their homes. The Inuit of the Arctic Circle now use the word, “uggianaqtuq” to liken the weather to a once reliable and predictable old friend who is now acting very strangely. Solastalgia is a new concept in the English language I have developed to help explain the distress that comes from the lived experience of such unwelcome environmental change to a person’s sense of place.

As case studies the regions of Appalachia and the Hunter Valley of Australia have much in common. Both places were once seen as places of great beauty where humans could live in harmony with their bioregion. The Hunter Valley was once described as “the Tuscany of the South” while Appalachia has been praised in poetry, music and dance:

From The Bridge: The Dance
by Hart Crane

I took the portage climb, then chose
A further valley-shed; I could not stop.
Feet nozzled wat’ry webs of upper flows;
One white veil gusted from the very top.

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!—wisped of azure wands,
Excerpt taken from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172029

Martha Graham named her ballet ‘Appalachian Spring’ after the lines from Crane’s poem and Aaron Copeland’s famous music for the dance is known by this title. In her Blood Memories, Graham said that her choreography
… is essentially a dance of place. You choose a piece of land, part of the house goes up. You dedicate it. The questioning spirit is there and the sense of establishing roots.
(Martha Graham, Blood Memories: See http://www.cmi.univ-mrs.fr/~esouche/dance/Appala.html )

Despite the rich natural and cultural histories, both places are now being transformed by the simultaneous processes of large scale coal mining and climate change. In response to the double pressures of ecosystem distress and a climate that is beginning to act in hostile and unpredictable ways, many people are experiencing solastalgia, a feeling of existential distress about negatively felt change. These people are feeling a kind of homesickness yet they are still at home. As your home is being desolated, that which once gave you solace is now giving you solastalgia.

There is no more graphic illustration of how people respond to a shift or change in the environment than with the case of mining. Mining literally takes your environment away from you; it undermines your sense of place. In Appalachia, mountain tops are removed; in Australia, the land becomes scarred like burnt flesh, new mountains of spoil and waste are formed while massive voids are carved out of the land.

As if this physical desolation was not enough, the climate, under the influence of global warming, is also becoming unpredictable and it is on the move. In coastal eastern Australia, you would now have to live about 150 kilometres further south than your present location in order to experience a climate similar to that of only 50 years ago. Earlier and warmer springs in the USA and Canada have already changed the sense of place and many species are moving their range further north and into higher altitudes. In order to stay in their home, some of the residents of our ecosystems are packing up and moving further north or south … depending on the hemisphere. Yet we humans remain rooted to the spot and wonder what is going on? For those sensitive enough to notice and bear witness to these unwelcome changes to well-being and sense of place, this addition to Healthearth will show that they are not alone and that solastalgia must be defeated in the simultaneous restoration of human and ecosystem health.

Solastalgia: The Origins and Definition

2008-01-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

As an environmental philosopher at The University of Newcastle I had a reputation within my region as an activist and advocate for environmental conservation and I had published a number of academic and media articles on the environmental history and sustainability of the Hunter Region.

From about the year 2000 onwards, residents within the region would often ring me at work and talk to me about their concerns about particular environmental issues and I would advise and help as best I could.

However, I began to notice the increasing number of people who were concerned about the sheer scale of the environmental impacts in the Upper Hunter Region of NSW. In their attempts to halt the expansion of open cut coal mining and to control the impact of power station pollution, individuals would ring me at work pleading for help with their cause. These people were clearly distressed about the relationship to their home environment and the threat to their identity and well-being from changes to their environment. A visit to the Upper Hunter and close examination of the mining affected landscape confirmed the sheer scale and intensity of the negative changes to the environment.

I had been thinking about the relationship between environmental change, ecosystem distress and human distress for some time. Under the influence of Canadian ecosystem health guru David Rapport and his concept of ‘ecosystem distress syndrome’ I had been working through some of the influences on my own thinking about this relationship. The two major influences at this time were Aldo Leopold and his own concept of ‘land health’ and the Australia’s own pioneer environmental thinker, Elyne Mitchell.

I sought a suitable concept to describe the distress the people in the Upper Hunter were suffering. One word, ‘nostalgia’, came to prominence as it was once a concept linked to a diagnosable illness associated with the melancholia of homesickness for people who were distant from their home. It seemed very close to the condition that Upper Hunter people were manifesting yet had an obvious limitation in that I was dealing with people who were not distant from their home.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos - return to home or native land - and the New Latin suffix algia - pain or sickness from the Greek root algos) or literally, the sickness caused by the intense desire to return home was considered to be a medically diagnosable psycho - physiological disease right up to the middle of the C20. Found in the English language from 1757, nostalgia has been defined differently in different epochs. In 1905 nostalgia was defined as “…a feeling of melancholy caused by grief on account of absence from one’s home country, of which the English equivalent is homesickness. Nostalgia represents a combination of psychic disturbances and must be regarded as a disease. It can lead to melancholia and even death. It is more apt to affect persons whose absence from home is forced rather than voluntary" (William Fiennes 2002:122).

Nostalgia was particularly evident in soldiers fighting in foreign countries who experienced homesickness to the point where they became ill and unable to perform their duties. The cure for nostalgia was a prescription for afflicted soldiers to return home to recuperate and restore their well-being and health. According to Feinnes, nostalgia was still being discussed in journals such as War Medicine in the 1940s and “as late as 1946 was termed a possibly fatal ‘psycho-physiological’ complaint by an eminent social scientist”.

However, in general, reference to ‘nostalgia’ as a sickness resulting from a longing or desire to return home while one is away from ‘home’ is no longer in common use. The more frequent modern use of the term loses its connection to the geographical or spatial ‘home’ and suggests a temporal dimension or ‘looking back’, a desire to be connected with a positively perceived period in the past. Typically, there is a longing for a cultural setting in the past in which a person felt more ‘at home’ than the present. For individuals who see the past as better than the present there is the possibility that nostalgia remains a very real experience that can lead to deep distress. For example, for Indigenous people who have been dispossessed of their lands and culture, the nostalgia for a past where former geographical and cultural integration was both highly valued and sustainable is an ongoing painful experience.

In the Upper Hunter, people were suffering from both imposed place transition (place pathology) and powerlessness (environmental injustice). In overview, there seemed to be some justification for the creation of a new concept that captured the conceptual space or territory connected to this particular constellation of the factors that define place and identity. The people I was concerned about were still ‘at home’, but felt a similar melancholia as that caused by nostalgia connected to the breakdown of the normal relationship between their psychic identity and their home. What these people lacked was solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to a ‘home’ that was being desolated. In addition, they felt a profound sense of isolation about their inability to have a meaningful say and impact on the state of affairs that caused their distress. ‘Solastalgia’ was created to describe the specific form of melancholia connected to lack of solace and sense of desolation in the everyday and lived experience of people within their ‘home’. The English language lacked such a concept.

Solastalgia

Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of nostalgia, solace and desolation. Solace is derived from the Latin verb solari (noun solacium or solatium), with meanings connected to the alleviation or relief of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events. Solace has connections to both psychological and physical contexts. One emphasis refers to the comfort one is given in difficult times (consolation) while another refers to that which gives comfort or strength. A person or a landscape might give solace, strength or support to other people. Special environments might provide solace in ways that other places cannot. If a person lacks solace then they are distressed and in need of consolation. If a person seeks solace or solitude in a much loved place that is being desolated, then they will suffer distress.

Desolation has its origins in the Latin solus (noun desolare) with meanings connected to devastation, deprivation of comfort, abandonment and loneliness. It too has meanings that relate to both psychological and physical contexts … a personal feeling of abandonment (isolation) and to a landscape that has been devastated.

In addition, the concept of solastalgia has been constructed such that it has a ghost reference or structural similarity to nostalgia thereby ensuring that a place reference is imbedded.

Hence, solastalgia has its origins in the New Latin word ‘nostalgia’ (and its Greek roots nostos and algos), however, it is based on two Latin roots, ‘solace’ and ‘desolation’, with a New Latin suffix, algia or pain, to complete its meaning.

Solastalgia is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the 'lived experience' of negative environmental change. It is the homesickness you have when you are still at home. It is that feeling you have when your sense of place is under attack. While I claim responsibility for creating the concept of solastalgia and its meaning, I am aware that that the existential experience underlying it is not new ... only that it is newly defined in English (but possibly represented in many other languages). The experience of solastalgia might well be ancient and ubiquitous and under the impact of relentless environmental change, ecosystem distress and climate chaos, it may well become much more common. It is my sincere hope that the negative experience of solastalgia can be overcome by the restoration of ecosystem and human health via every form of creative enterprise at our disposal.

Heads are Burning

2007-10-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

Heads are Burning

Out where the river dried
The farms and the desert fried
Human wrecks and boiling birds
Dying in forty five degrees

The time has come

To clear the air
To stop the gas

To do our share

The time has come

A fact’s a fact

Too much C02

Let’s bring it back

How can we dance when our world is heating

How do we sleep when our earth is burning
How can we dance when our world is heating

How do we sleep when our earth is burning

The time has come to say fair’s fair
To clear the air, now to do our share

Big engines suck the fossil fuel

From New York to Katmandu

The whole world melts and heats

Slow death by degrees

The time has come

To clear the air
To stop the gas

To do our share

The time has come

A fact’s a fact

Too much C02

Let’s bring it back

How can we dance when our world is heating

How do we sleep when our earth is burning
How can we dance when our world is heating

How do we sleep when our earth is burning

The time has come to say fair’s fair
To clear the air, now to do our share

The time has come, a fact’s a fact

Too much C02, let’s bring it back

How can we dance when our world is heating

How do we sleep when our earth is burning

(With apologies to Midnight Oil, and their song, Beds are Burning, but not to Peter Garrett who has sold out on global warming and the role of coal mining in Australia to the problem)

For the climes they are a-changin'

2007-10-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

Come gather 'round people
wherever you roam
And admit that the carbon
Around you has grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your clime to you
is worth savin'
Then you better start thinkin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the climes they are a-changin'.

Come scientists and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And speak right now
For the sceptics still spin
And there's no tellin' what
Lies they're namin'
For the liars now
They will never win
For the climes they are a-changin'.

Come politicians, businessfolk
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For those that get hurt
Will be they who are poor
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon drown your coastlines
And blow away your walls
For the climes they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
Do criticize more
Because you can understand
Your sons and your daughters
Will not have a chance
The old world is
Rapidly warmin'.
Help healthearth
You can lend your hand
For the climes they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The carbon is cast
The slow ice melt now
Will later be fast
As the death drought grows
The dry winds will blast
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first to change now
Will be without carbon sin
For the climes they are a-changin'.

With apologies to Bob Dylan. Perhaps these are the lyrics he would have written if 'the times' was written today?

The Lomborg Move

2007-09-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

A response to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald September 27 2007

It is hard to take Bjorn Lomborg seriously when he writes about organic food, disease, global poverty, polar bears and global warming. His arguments seem superficially convincing and there are statistics to back them up. However, it takes very little to expose the lack of substance behind his so-called arguments. Having accepted that there can be a causal link between (toxic) chemicals and cancer he goes on to make the claim that:

If you reduce your child's intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that's the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off.

The naivity of this argument is breathtaking. People who spend more of their money on organic food are also likely to spend less of it on high fat, low nutrition, high sugar, highly processed (additives, coloring, preservatives) food. Hence, their children are likely to get more ‘good’ food and less ‘bad’ food. Omit buying just one packet of fried potato chips for your kid every day because you have gone organic, and your child will be better off.

On the issue of carcinogens, pathogens and toxins in food, it is clear that organic food is less risky for the consumer than intensively produced food that has been exposed to the standard array of ‘cides’ in production (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides). The rates of increase in breast cancer and prostate cancer incidence is linked to exposure to pesticides as is the rate of premature births in countries where exposure to pesticides is common. While regulation of pesticides might be good in some countries, we now live in a globalised economy where fruit and vegetables can be flown in from distant places where regulation and standards are poor. Eating organically produced food grown in places where standards are regulated and monitored will be safer for young and older bodies than non-organic food. It will also be better for ecosystem health generally. Given the increasing rates of obesity (in children as well as adults) in developed countries, the idea that we might all need to eat less but better quality food, is not such a radical thought.

Next, Lomborg gets into the plight of the polar bear under climate change:

Consider a tale that has made the covers of some of the world's biggest magazines and newspapers: the plight of the polar bear. We are told that global warming will wipe out this majestic creature. We are not told, however, that over the past 40 years - while temperatures have risen - the global polar bear population has increased from 5000 to 25,000.

Now, like Lomborg, I am no expert of the breeding biology of polar bears, but the latest research from those who are experts is cause for legitimate concern. The polar ice flows that constitute Polar bear habitat are shrinking. So much so that it was reported recently that Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record this year and that the Northwest Passage has opened for the first time. Habitat is important for all species and a disappearing habitat spells disaster.

In western Hudson Bay, Canada, where recent studies of polar bear numbers have been undertaken by qualified scientists, they found that the population has reduced by 22% from 1194 to 935 between 1987 and 2004. Another population in Alaska that has been studied also show reduced numbers and lower adult weights and increased cub mortality. Populations that have increased in number (only two have been reported) are in areas where numbers are recovering from hunting pressure and where protection is now being provided. That bastion of extremism, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has recently proposed listing polar bears as a threatened species.

Despite evidence available that does not support his claim, Lomborg, continues the ignorance with the argument that:

Campaigners and the media claim that we should cut our carbon dioxide emissions to save the polar bear. Well, then, let's do the math. Let's imagine that every country - including the United States and Australia - were to sign the Kyoto Protocol and cut its carbon dioxide emissions for the rest of this century. Looking at the best-studied polar bear population of 1000 bears, in the West Hudson Bay, how many polar bears would we save in a year? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Actually, we would save less than one-tenth of a polar bear.

If we were to stop the increase in global warming with cuts in our carbon dioxide emissions such that we would stop global temperature increase at no more than 2 degrees of warming, then actually, we might save polar bears from extinction by loss of habitat. In doing this, we save the habitat of many other species as well. Most scientists are arguing that if you save the habitat of this admittedly iconic species, then you save whole Arctic ecosystems. Lomborg is clearly attacking a straw bear. You do not have to do the math to figure out that preventing further polar bear habitat from melting will have the outcome of whole (not fractions) polar bears being saved.

Lomborg then argues:

If we really do care about saving polar bears, we could do something much simpler and more effective: ban hunting them. Each year, 49 bears are shot in the West Hudson Bay alone. So why don't we stop killing 49 bears a year before we commit trillions of dollars to do hundreds of times less good?

Yes, Bjorn, it would be a good idea to stop hunting and killing a rare and endangered animal. Perhaps we could do that and tackle the problem of greenhouse gas emissions at the same time? Perhaps we could do “hundreds of times more good” by chewing gum and walking at the same time?

Next, in a now classic Lomborg move, the argument is put that we should not worry too much about these known unknowns (global warming, terrorism, pesticides, and the loss of biodiversity) because there are knowns (e.g., the terrible conditions of the world’s poor) and they should concern us more! His text goes:

Much of my work is to make sense of all these global warnings. I try to put them in perspective and figure out which ones really should concern us, and when we should act on them.
Perhaps surprisingly, not everything of concern should be dealt with immediately. If we don't have a good way to fix a problem, it might be better to focus on something else first. After all, when you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to worry about what global temperatures will be 100 years from now.

Well Bjorn, we do have a good way to to fix the problem of global warming … reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, stupid! After all, if you are not sure if there will be a habitable planet for humans in 100 years from now, it must be hard to swallow your next meal. Especially when right now, the numbers of over-nourished people on the planet roughly equals that of those who are undernourished (1.2 billion). Perhaps it would be good to commit to reduce global hunger in addition to reducing greenhouse gases?

Lomborg tells us the good news is that things are getting better for humans and that we can expect such trends to continue into the future. The facts, according to Lomborg are:

By the close of the century, incomes will have increased sixfold in industrialised countries and 12-fold in developing countries, making the average person in the developing world richer in 2100 than the average American or European is today. The number of poor will drop from a billion to less than 5 million.

Perhaps so, but maybe you have to factor in peak oil and climate change as the fossil fuel based economy and the global environment simultaneously crash in a fiscal and bipolar meltdown. In a non-linear world, making linear projections of past trends into the future is nice science fiction, but it is not the provision of facts. There is no ‘math’ here, just reading the entrails of goats and hoping that people won’t notice the difference between sheer speculation and real science.

Finally, we get to the end of the fantasy. Lomborg tells us that:

None of this means we should stop worrying about the future. But it does mean that we can quit panicking and start thinking calmly to ensure that we focus on the right issues. Global alarm bells might cause pangs of guilt for wealthy Westerners, but they don't give us an adequate understanding of what is going on. We all need to hear both sides of the story.

Bjorn Lomborg is confident that the right issue is the elimination of poverty by continuing the process of wealth creation under consumer capitalism. That rapid increases in economic growth are needed to overcome global poverty is not a new thesis: the Brundtland report in 1987 ran the same line under the label of ‘sustainable development’. It is even called the “trickle down theory of wealth”. Cranking up economic growth just at a moment of much needed greenhouse gas emission reductions is just plain stupid!

Well, we have heard your side of the story Bjorn and it is a confused and pathetic defense of the indefensible.

Rethinking the Limits of Ethics

2007-09-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

Cosmocentric Ethics and Climate Chaos

It is the sheer complexity and potential for devastation of present and future impacts of global warming on global climate that drives the necessity for innovative transdisciplinary responses. In ethics, no less than other domains of research, new perspectives that go beyond or transcend previous ethical frameworks are urgently needed. Under the imperative of sustainability, there has been an expansion of the scope of ethics from purely anthropocentric to ecocentric concerns and values.

Global warming pushes the boundaries of ethical consideration even further into the atmoscentric and climacentric, where new approaches to ethics are being driven by changes to the atmosphere and climates of the planet. All human cultures, all sentient creatures and every type of ecosystem are being profoundly affected by cumulative climate change. The movement from self-interest to planetary interest culminates in cosmocentric ethics or ethical concern about the status of the whole earth.

The transdisciplinary nature of cosmocentric ethics is clear when it is observed that changes in scientific understandings have been the major driver of changes in values and ethics. From a theocentric ethic humans have progressively moved to new ethical dimensions. The issues of sentience were highlighted by the sciences of comparative anatomy and physiology, the temporal and spatial interconnections of living and non-living systems were discovered by evolutionary and ecological sciences and now, the understanding of complex relationships between biodiversity, terrestrial ecosystems, oceans, the atmosphere and climate is being delivered by sciences/studies that transcend traditional discipline boundaries.

Added to the knowledge base delivered by these sciences is the emergence of new transdisciplinary fields of knowledge such as complexity theory and sustainability science. Discipline-based scientific knowledge that is seeking interconnections with other related disciplines and the new transdisciplinary domains, provide a new foundation for ethics. Cosmological citizens, informed about ethics via transdisciplinary environmental education, are in the best position to act on the implications of impending climate chaos.

Solastalgia and Soundscapes

2007-09-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Solastalgia and Soundscapes

I have solastalgia at the fading of natural sounds in the environment ... our soundscape is changing. We are in fact experiencing an aural invasion … the sounds of the natural world are slowly being silenced by the noise pollution of industrial society. If it is not the cacophony of air conditioners, road and air traffic, it is the digital roar inside the earphones … cancelling out the symphony of nature.

Bernie Krause (Wild Soundscapes 2002) has created a division of soundscapes into Biophony, Geophony and Anthrophony. The term ‘biophony’ has been used to describe the noises produced by, for example, birds and insects in a natural environment. Perhaps we should add Ecophony (see Peter Russell Crowe) since the interrelationships of the physical (wind) and the biological (trees) in the total ecosystem is a source of sounds in a landscape). Geophony is the noise from natural landscape features such as moving water while Anthrophony is the total soundscape produced by human societies.

In the US people are recording the natural soundscape in parks in order to document it before it is completely lost to the Technophony or that part of Anthrophony that consists of the noises produced by human technology (see: http://ltm.agriculture.purdue.edu/ear/default_files/Page424.htm ).

The now ubiquitous noises of modern technologies such as aircraft wipe out the possibility of listening to the natural world and its ecophony. I recently listened to a resident of Salt Spring Island (West coast of Canada) tell his story of life on Ganges Harbour being forever changed by the constant traffic of float planes into and out of the island. He came to SSI for its beauty, peace and serenity. Now he lives right next to a busy airport that was never planned and approved and he experiences acute solastalgia as the floatplanes roar past his home and cancel the sounds of gulls, loons, turkey vultures and the hum of the hummingbird.

I wonder how many other people lament the deafening of a once loved soundscape?

As an academic, I work on campuses that have become battlegrounds of technophony as each building competes with the one next door to overwhelm the environment with the noise of fans, compressors and pullies. It is a dull roar, but one that makes contemplation in quietude impossible. The irony is that one has to close a window and shut out fresh air and the ‘outside’ in order to have silence in a room! The birds and animals that inhabit the campus must have to yell at each other to be heard. The subtleties of territories and communication are trashed in a cacophony of competition from technosounds. I have read about how the noise of ships propellers, sonar and other technophony in the oceans has made communication for the creatures of the sea difficult, if not impossible (See: http://www.acousticecology.org/oceanreports.html ).

The silence of the whales,

the deafness of the dolphins.

Drowning in an ocean of noise?

I am even beginning to find the hum of the refrigerator annoying … it is denying me access to that interior silence of night thoughts. Our heads are filling up with the subtle, but pervasive tinnitus technophony of hard drives that play digital tricks on our ears. A wall of noise hits us inside and out. Who knows what damage the earphone is causing to our aural sense? Excessive noise damages ecosystem and human health.

The warnings about deafness go unheard.

Sorry, I can’t hear you …

We must defeat negative technophony and overcome the solastalgia produced by fading soundscapes. As well as the loss of loved physical landscapes, we are losing their sounds. It is time to turn the I-Pod off and give voice to this loss.

Something Borrowed

2007-04-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

Something Borrowed …

A connoisseur
of the consumer society
Collector of pegs, plastic
and precious cobalt antiques
Finder of lost marble memories

Indigo eye ego artist
‘stick figure with charcoal wash’
An amorous avenue for
feather dancing to liquid song
the bower of babble on

Cryptic green female critics
searching for …

Something blue.

---------------------------

Copyright Glenn Albrecht 2007

Image from: http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/satin_bowerbird.htm
With thanks to The Australian Museum.

Measuring Our Integrity

2007-04-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

Measuring our Integrity

We all need measurements of our Greenhouse gas pollution. The ClimateCam or greenhouse gas speedometer now being championed in Newcastle is one way to understand the relationship between consumption and pollution. However, while school kids might learn that turning off the classroom lights at lunchtime will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this is not a realistic response to the scale of the problem we face. One new coal mine, a new coal fired power station or a single ship leaving the port of Newcastle fully laden with coal will instantly wipe out the value of all of Newcastle’s light bulb changing and energy conservation measures. The real greenhouse gas index (GGI) that we need must measure is the concentration of greenhouse gases in the global atmosphere and we must be able to see that we are actually lowering the emissions at a global level. It is the GGI that will be far more important than the Dow Jones or the All Ordinaries and we will need to watch it come down every year.

There is no doubt that global warming is serious business and changing the climate should not be trivialised with public relations stunts. The Hunter region in particular will be hit hard by increased heat stress and disease in humans and other animals, worse droughts and water shortages, severe storms and flash flooding and sea level rise that will inundate all the land many metres above the current sea level. The expensive water front property, port infrastructure and our beaches will become water world. All these hugely costly changes will occur within the lifetime of the current and next generation of Novocastrians, that is, 50 – 100 years from right now.

The trouble with these problems is that although we can, in theory and with massive investments, adapt to slow change, climate scientists are suggesting that the nature, speed and intensity of the changes might not be predictable. The systems we are dealing with are immensely complex and have tipping points or thresholds that when met, are capable of delivering sudden and disastrous impacts. There may be no opportunity to adapt to enormous changes and even if we try, further unpredictable change might render futile all our efforts to avoid catastrophe. A bi-polar meltdown of ice and a sudden and large rise in sea level will just flow right over the top of any hugely expensive adaptive barrage or levee system we commit to protect our property in the near future. The Hunter is in an extremely vulnerable position with respect to all of the worst possible impacts of climate chaos. Our coastal lifestyle and real estate values, industry, our city and port, Lake Macquarie and agriculture are all at risk. In the face of growing evidence of real world change in response to global warming, it is not scare mongering to argue that the total environment is at foreseeable risk of dangerous change.

The cause of this really bad future scenario is our increasing greenhouse gas problem. For politicians … ‘It’s the climate, stupid’. We must urgently reduce our greenhouse gas emissions until we bring the planet’s climate back into a reasonably predictable pattern. With global greenhouse gas concentrations already close to dangerous levels for further warming and climate chaos we cannot afford any longer to play Russian roulette with the future. The science and the ethics are telling us to change and change right now!

Having delayed reasonable responses to global warming for over a decade it is now necessary that drastic changes take place. The fossil fuels that drive a combustion economy must be urgently phased out. In Australia, we must leave coal in the ground and show that we are prepared to make a sacrifice of cheap but polluting energy for the benefit of all global citizens and all future generations. Ethical leadership on the global warming issue will demonstrate such generosity towards the future.

The GGI as a measure of total concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the only relevant measure of greenhouse gases and the only way to substantially reduce that concentration is to massively reduce our use of fossil fuels. We just have to stop exploding and burning things to run an economy. Climate chaos and an environment in crisis deliver an economic super-depression. It is not a question of balance. A foundation for society based on genuinely clean, safe and renewable energy is vital to our needs in the post combustion economy. These technologies are available right now and for the current generation of political leaders and captains of industry to be investing billions in the filthy lie of ‘clean coal’ and insanely dangerous nuclear energy is ethically bankrupt. Perhaps worse is a possible outcome of a lifestyle related Greenhouse Gas Speedometer that gives children the impression that the world will be saved if only they change their light bulbs. While the GGS in Newcastle might go down, the GGI continues to rise steeply as the Port is expanded to export more coal.

Our children need to know the truth about what is happening to their world and a vital part of that truth is that we all must understand that the coal-based wealth of the Hunter region and the Port of Newcastle is built upon the very cause of climate chaos. Our children deserve much more and much better.

Glenn Albrecht Tuesday 17th April.

Link to Organic Philosophy by Glenn Albrecht in the journal Concrescence

2007-04-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.concrescence.org/index.php/concrescence/article/view/29

Life Out of Balance

2007-04-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

Life Out of Balance

A thousand years of Aamjiwnaang dreams
spirits touched by pure steam
from sweat lodge rocks
that release a culture’s memory.

One hundred short years of inversion
in the Chemical Valley
fugitive emissions into every space
Is the maple syrup really sweet?

Geese struggle for formation in miasmic air
benzene tears in the artist’s eye
reveal the reasons for
Benjamin Chee Chee’s suicide.

Sweet innocent boys go missing
So too the Snapping Turtle penis
shrinking in the chromosome chaos
the Hopi call Koyaanisqatsi.

A hundred long years of restoration
Geese, turtles and children
once again in perfect formation
life in beautiful balance.

Copyright: Glenn Albrecht

*also A Film by Godfrey Reggio, with Music by Philip Glass.
Ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life disintegrating. 4. Life out of balance. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.

Written on the release of information about the feminisation of the population of Aamjiwnaang First Nation people and snapping turtles. Twice the number of girls are being born than boys and the ‘feminised’ turtles have diminished penis size. Pollution from ‘chemical valley’ (Sarnia, Ontario) is thought to be implicated. Benjamin Chee Chee was a Native American artist, now famous for his portraits of Canada Geese and other birds. His Autumn Flight is depicted. I see his attempt to keep the world in order/balance in geese art as his way of trying to defeat the pathology and tragedy of nostalgia and solastalgia. The Aaamjiwnaang tell of geese trying to land in Chemical Valley in a cloud of benzene and dying before they hit water. Chee Chee's suicide, the problems of Indigenous people and the death of order in Canada Geese seem somehow connected.

Benjamin Chee Chee Image from http://www.whetung.com/chee.html with deep appreciation.

Yi-ran-na-li: A Cliff face at South Newcastle Beach, Newcastle, Australia.

2007-04-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Yi-ran-na-li: A Cliff face at South Newcastle Beach, Newcastle, Australia.

A number of places along the Newcastle coastal environment are important to the Awabakal people and were recorded as such by Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, a 'Missionary to the Lake Macquarie Aborigines' between 1824 and 1859. Reverend Threlkeld was coached in his interpretations by M’Gill, an Awabakal chief, also known as Biraban meaning ‘eaglehawk’.

One of the places described by Reverend Threlkeld is the cliff at South Newcastle Beach, named Yi-ran-na-li.

“There is a sort of sacred place near Newcastle on the sea-beach, beneath a high cliff, named Yi-ran-na-li, where, it is said, that if any person speak, the stones will fall down upon them, from the high arched rocks above, the crumbling state of which is such as to render it extremely probable, that the mere concussion of air from the voice would cause the effect to take place.

I was walking beneath the projecting rock and called loudly to McGill, who with other Aborigines, were with me, he instantly beckoned me to be silent, at which I wondered, a few small stones fell down from the crumbling overshadowing cliff at that moment, and they urged me on.

When we had passed out of the precincts of the fearful place, I asked what they meant by commanding my silence, and pushing on so quickly, without speaking? This elicited the tradition of the place as a fearful one, for if any one speak whilst passing beneath the overhanging rocks, stones would invariably fall as we had just witnessed.” (Threlkeld in Gunson 1974:65)

The very large rock that fell in 2004 perhaps marked Yi-ran-na-li’s final stand. It was a rock so large that we could not ignore it. That rock was a statement about our failure to live within the constraints and sensitivities of place. Despite the removal of the rock and the total reshaping (destruction) of the cliff face to make it ‘safer’ we should not forget the cultural belief of the local Aboriginal people that this place was to be feared and respected.

We can still learn from Yi-ran-na-li’. The cliff speaks to us with a wisdom that is thousands of years old. M’Gill knew this stone wisdom, but we have failed to listen, and today we still have so much to learn about so many other aspects of an endemic sense of place and about the environment that we live in.

It is not too late to show the respect that Yi-ran-na-li deserves. Just as M’Gill instructed Reverend Threlkeld to move on, we should also move quickly and quietly from the vicinity of Yi-ran-na-li, and resume our conversations and activities at a safer distance.

Ethics and Climate Change

2007-03-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

The Ethics of Climate Chaos

Glenn Albrecht PhD

---------------------------------------

The scientific evidence for climate change is now overwhelming. Almost every day we hear news of yet another study that documents the actual changes to our formerly predictable weather patterns and biophysical processes. We all now see and read about the economic, health, psychological and ecological impacts of the increasing frequency and intensity of hurricanes such as Katrina and Larry. There are places on earth where climate change is happening so rapidly that people have new words to describe the shock of change in what was once a reasonably reliable and predictable context. The Inuit of the Arctic have applied a word, uggianaqtuq’ (pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took) which has connotations of a “friend acting strangely” or unpredictable behaviour to the way climate change is impacting on their culture[i]. Our world is indeed beginning to act in strange ways but what is even stranger is that in the face of such change, we are not acting quickly enough to counter the prospect of catastrophic risk to all future activity in our economies and our cultures. We can expect new epidemics of illness, physical and mental, in the face of such devastating change. I have created the concept of solastalgia to capture the 'uggianaqtug' in the English language.

You might have thought that the ethics of actually changing the global climate would have been on the top of the agenda in all of the recent talkfests on long-term energy policy. After all, what is at stake with the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is the future environmental security of all beings on the planet and in particular, the ability of humans to cope with massive but largely unpredictable changes to every aspect of their lives.

In a world operating under complex and unstable conditions, adaptation to the impending changes will be largely impossible because all current forms of planning are based on data and predictions linked to the past. However, in the brave new world, there will be many surprise events in the emergence of complex non-linear complex systems acting under new factors driving their evolution. Such system unpredictability will render useless many of the institutions and methodologies created to manage risk in our economic systems. The institution of insurance, for example, will be one of the first to fail as actuarial analysis fails to cope with evolving non-linear systems in the form of an array hugely damaging unnatural events. In a world characterised by chaos, all that was friendly and familiar will become strange to us and the Inuit will be seen as prescient.

The ethical issues of climate chaos are quite clear and can been understood within the principles of sustainability developed over the last 20 years in the international community. A key ethical issue is equity or the distribution of benefits and burdens of climate change. The intragenerational ethics of climate change is highlighted by the fact that some human communities have already had their lives directly and negatively affected by rising sea levels and melting glaciers. In the Pacific, low lying, inhabited islands are being inundated by the sea, leading to the world’s first climate chaos refugees. As suggested above, in the Arctic, melting permafrost and glacier retreat have already made life difficult for the Inuit people as they can no longer rely on a foundation of solid ice for safe travel, secure buildings and for sources of traditional food such as seals. The people of Himalayan countries such as Bhutan have already experienced catastrophic floods from glacial lakes that form, then burst under the rising flow of glacial melt water. These floods destroy in-stream hydro-electric power generation and the lights go out in Bhutan.

In both the Arctic and the Antarctic, impacts on biodiversity have now been documented with sea ice melt causing Polar Bear habitat to shrink and more snow causing negative impacts on Caribou and Moose. Antarctica is also experiencing major changes with Krill, the foundation of the food chain, in severe decline with flow on effects to populations of fish, seals, penguins, and whales further up the food chain. The world over, there is mounting evidence that as warming occurs, biodiversity or the variety of life, is rapidly disappearing. The extinction of frog species has now been linked to warming and many other species including the Mountain Pygmy Possum of Australia are under similar threat. Biodiversity can be considered under the umbrella of interspecies equity in the here and now, so we already have major lapses in ethical obligations to species other than ourselves.

If we add the increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, wild fires and droughts on humans, domesticated animals and wildlife, then another layer of huge impacts has already been imposed on current generations. In Australia, the extreme hot temperatures will see increasing deaths from heat stress in humans and animals (e.g., cattle) and most recently in January 2006, poultry.

The potential impacts of climate chaos that we are imposing on future generations of humans are so great that one would have thought that leaders of countries such as the USA and Australia who profess ‘civilised’, Christian values would have them at the top of their agendas. But no, the prospect of escalating warming delivering epidemics of infectious diseases, catastrophic failure of agricultural systems, failure of fresh water supplies, massive coastal damage due to storm and tidal inundation and other unpredictable changes as a result of climate chaos has not yet bothered them.

Although the concept of intergenerational equity might seem abstract to some, to deliver into the hands of future children and grandchildren a world that will be in major and prolonged crisis is not a difficult ethical issue to contemplate. It is simply unacceptable to sit on our seats of power, board or conference tables and deliberately do nothing or too little to give children an experience of a beautiful, secure and predictable future world. After all, a major reason why we work so hard and burn so much energy is … to give our children a better world to live in.

The level of scientific knowledge we have about climate chaos issues has reached the point for urgent and extensive action. Right now, we have firm scientific evidence that global warming has been escalating since the industrial revolution, that it is linked to historically unprecedented increases in the levels of carbon dioxide and other human produced gases in the atmosphere, that the sea level is rising at twice the rate of the previous one hundred and fifty years and that it is the human industrial activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels that is responsible for all of the above. In response to all of the information documented about the possibility of irreversable climate chaos, the immediate need to drastically curtail or even cease the mining and burning of coal and oil should be on our agendas. At the very least, ramping-up our commitment to clean, renewable energy in all of its forms should be an international priority.

Even if evidence of the effects of climate chaos was not available to us, the application of another foundation of sustainability ethics, the precautionary principle, or the idea that we ought to minimise risk or possible harm to current and future generations before actual scientific proof of harm is before us, should be on top of political and policy agendas. Failure to consider and fully implement the precautionary principle through the Kyoto framework or any other multilateral government agreement marks the current generation of political leaders and climate sceptics as standing on ethically thinning ice. As the temperature and the sea level rises, the climate sceptics, along with the glaciers, are in retreat (rapidly!).

Politicians and many business leaders in Australia and the USA in particular have used national and international forums to make Faustian bargains with the future in an effort to achieve the impossible goal of infinite economic growth in a finite world. The tragedy of climate chaos represents a failure to seek long overdue reconciliation of human life within the limits of planet earth. It is to be hoped that the purveyors of the hubris of infinite growth will burn forever in an even hotter climate than the rest of us.

[i] IOL, Effects of climate change seen in the Arctic,
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=qw1144790291815B224
(accessed 11/09/2006) See also: http://nsidc.org/data/arcss122.html

Risk Free Energy

2007-03-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

Risk Free Energy: Reframing the Energy Debate

Glenn Albrecht PhD

Now that the ‘inconvenient truth’ about global warming is out and the climate sceptics are retreating almost as fast as ice sheets and glaciers, we are faced with a new and important issue … what do we do next with respect to global warming and our energy needs?

After the failure of governments to take global warming and climate chaos seriously, we need a new frame through which we can consider our options. Risk Free Energy (RFE) can provide us with a new frame to see our energy future.

In the past, political and industry leaders, particularly in the USA and Australia attempted to frame the debates about the enhanced greenhouse effect and global warming around the issues of ‘change’ and ‘uncertainty’. The preferred discussion was about climate ‘change’, as change is natural, not always bad and might even be good for us. We parroted the mantra that reducing carbon dioxide levels would destroy jobs and that certainty in the economy was more important than the scientific uncertainty of climate change.

The twin frames of ‘change’ and ‘uncertainty’ that dominated the debate for over a decade ensured that the public remained ignorant about the importance of global warming and enabled business-as-usual in the form of increasing greenhouse gas emissions from big coal and big oil. But reality has trumped spin and the world now shows clear signs of major and rapid change as a result of global warming. The tide and the temperature are rising.

In response, political parties and big business have advocated ‘clean coal’ and ‘zero emissions’ nuclear power as key solutions to our warming problem. The use of the words ‘clean’ and ‘zero’ in relation to coal and nuclear energy give the appearance of security and safety.

However, clean coal is at best an oxymoron and at worst a filthy lie. The open cut mining of coal is one of the most destructive activities undertaken on the face of the earth. It creates massive and permanent damage to regional landscapes wherever it is undertaken. The burning of coal pollutes big time and it is not just carbon dioxide that we should be concerned about; millions of tonnes of highly toxic chemicals spew out of the chimney stacks of coal-fired power stations world-wide.

The capture and storage underground or undersea of carbon dioxide (geosequestration) is a high risk ‘solution’ to the problem of carbon dioxide pollution. It will be at least twenty years before new power stations are operating with connections to this untested technology. Meanwhile, another 20 years of additional carbon emissions would have been added to the earth’s atmosphere.

More pointedly, there can be no guarantee that the stored carbon dioxide would remain ‘safe’ for the indefinite future. Should huge volumes of stored carbon be released by geological instability, the warming problem will massively and suddenly escalate. Carbon geosequestration is yet another form of Russian roulette with the future. The fact is, concentrated carbon dioxide buried in the ground is potentially toxic and dangerous for all time.

The nuclear energy option promoted as clean and zero emissions is another example of false framing. A nuclear power plant is hugely costly to build, carbon intensive in its construction phase, limited by 50 year uranium supplies, not fail-safe and is open to the ever present danger of human fallibility. There is no solution to the problem of intractable nuclear waste and plutonium is highly dangerous for 20,000 years. The use of refined uranium in weapons and the possibility that they will be used by terrorists is inviting Armageddon. It is simply too risky to allow nuclear proliferation; nuclear energy is a dangerous dead-end in the energy debate.

To avoid further imposition of risk on the citizens of planet earth we need a new frame to evaluate our energy options. Both coal and nuclear energy are high risk options for our future. By contrast, genuine contenders for a sustainable energy future must satisfy all of us that they present no short or long term risk to the health of the planet and its inhabitants. If RFE fails, it will be a safe fail; if humans display characteristic fallibility and make big mistakes, the fall-out will be inconsequential and the sources of such risk free energy must be renewable and freely available to all. In short, RFE is the new frame that must allow evaluation of all energy options into the future … we must ask not only if it is really clean, but is it safe?

Link to Healthearth website

2007-03-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

More information about Solastalgia and research undertaken by Glenn Albrecht and his colleagues can be found at their website at http://www.healthearth.net/

Turtle Tears

2007-03-23T00:18:00.000-07:00

Turtle Tears

A leatherback turtle
caught in the wrong millennium
comes ashore one last time.

A long life cut short
by a long line of torture
… dying of detritus.

Hooks worm their way into flesh
necrotic nets garrotte the neck
body buoyed down and drowning.

Turtle tears soak the sand
a final sight of its hatching beach
a final sigh that traverses the world.

Ocean waves crash in the death shell
all ears hear the sighs and cries
too late to untangle the extinction.

Copyright: Glenn Albrecht.

[Written on the news (January 2006) of a two metre long, 150 year old, 350 kilogram, leatherback turtle that beached itself on the Victorian coast and died of injuries incurred as a result of entanglement in discarded fishing and boating gear]

Solastalgia: A new psychoterratic illness

2007-03-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

Cultures all over the world have concepts in their languages that relate psychological states to states of the environment. The Hopi have used the word koyaanisqatsi to describe conditions where life is disintegrating and out of balance. The Portugese use the word saudade to describe a feeling one has for a loved one who is absent or has disappeared. The North Baffin Inuit of the Arctic have applied the word, uggianaqtuq, ((pronounced OOG-gi-a-nak-took) is) to the climate and weather. The word means to behave unexpectedly or in an unfamiliar way and has connotations of a “friend acting strangely” or in an unpredictable way. The weather has become uggianaqtug for them.

Worldwide, under the relentless impact of development and climate change, humans are experiencing epidemics of physical and mental disease that have connections to the environment, yet we have very few concepts in English that address environmentally induced distress and illness. I propose two new categories; psychoterratic and somaterratic illness that make the connection between the state of the earth (terra) and mental and physical health. In addition, I suggest that one very old concept, nostalgia, needs to be re-examined as a legitimate psychoterratic disease to be seen along side solastalgia, an important new concept in our understanding of environmentally induced health and illness. What with relentless development pressure and climate chaos (global warming + climate change = climate chaos), both somaterratic and psychoterratic illnesses are likely to increase dramatically.

Nostalgia

We have one word in the English language that very closely connects human distress to the place where we live, our ‘home’. The word, ‘nostalgia’, was once a concept linked to a diagnosable illness associated with melancholia experienced by people who were distant from their home and wanted to return. Nostalgia (nostos = return to home or native land, algia = pain or sickness) or literally, ‘homesickness’, was considered to be a serious medically diagnosable psychosomatic disease with the potential to cause death in those afflicted right up to the middle of the C20.

The indigenous peoples of the earth who have been dispossessed of their lands and its cultural meanings are also likely to experience the pathology of nostalgia. The nostalgia for a past where former geographical and cultural integration was both highly valued and sustainable is for them an ongoing painful experience. Worldwide, displaced indigenous people experience physical and mental illness at rates far beyond those of other groups of humans. Their social problems; unemployment, alcoholism, substance abuse, violence, disproportionately high rates of crime and incarceration, lead to community dysfunction and crisis. People, who are dispossessed, either by force, or via disaster, will experience the serious distress of nostalgia.

However, in general, reference to ‘nostalgia’ as a sickness resulting from a longing or desire to return home while one is away from ‘home’ is no longer in common use. The more frequent modern use of the term loses its intense connection to the geographical ‘home’ and suggests a ‘looking back’ to a positively perceived period in the past.

Dispossession is one trigger for environmentally induced distress. But what about the idea of environmentally induced distress in people who are not displaced? There are places on earth that are not being completely ‘lost’, but are being ‘transformed’. People who are not voluntarily nor forcibly removed from their homes can also experience place-based distress in the face of the lived experience of profound environmental change.

It seems that we lack an appropriate concept for the distress humans directly experience that is caused by environmental change. There is therefore justification for the creation of a new concept that captures the space or territory connected to this particular constellation of the factors that define environmentally induced distress. The people of concern are still ‘at home’, but feel a similar melancholia as that caused by nostalgia connected to the breakdown of the normal relationship between their psychic identity and their home. What these people lack is solace or comfort derived from their present relationship to ‘home’, and so, a new form of psychoterratic illness needs to be defined.

From Nostalgia to Solastalgia

There are few words in English that closely connect psychological and environmental states. One such word is, ‘desolation’ and its meanings refer both to a personal feeling of abandonment (isolation) and to a landscape that has been devastated. The word ‘solace’ also relates to both psychological and physical contexts. One meaning refers to the comfort one is given in difficult times (consolation) while another refers that which gives comfort or strength to a person. A person or a landscape might give solace, strength or support to other people. Special environments might provide solace in ways that other places cannot. If a person lacks solace then they are distressed without the possibility of consolation. If a person seeks solace or solitude in a much loved place that is being desolated, then they will also suffer distress. In both contexts there is anguish or pain (algia).

Therefore, I suggest ‘solastalgia’ to describe the pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive, solace connected to the present state of one’s home environment. Solastalgia exists when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under assault (physical desolation). It can be contrasted to the spatial and temporal dislocation and dispossession experienced as nostalgia. Solastalgia is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the value of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the immediate and given. In brief, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at ‘home’.

Any context where place identity is challenged by pervasive change to the existing order has potential to deliver solastalgia. Transformative technologies and emergent disease (for human and non-human life) have enabled change to occur to cultural and natural environments at a speed that makes adaptation difficult if not impossible. While some might respond to such stress with nostalgia and want to return to a desired past place or time, others will experience solastalgia and express a strong desire to sustain those things that provide solace.

The factors that cause solastalgia can be both natural and artificial. Natural disasters such as drought, fire and flood can be a cause solastalgia. Human-induced change such as war, terrorism, land clearing, mining, rapid institutional change and the gentrification of older parts of cities can also be causal agents. The concept of solastalgia has relevance in any context where there is the direct experience of negative transformation or desolation of the physical environment (home) by forces that undermine a personal and community sense of identity, belonging and control.

In areas affected by prolonged drought desolation to both farmers and the landscape occurs. Research undertaken on the mental health aspects of the drought have concluded that it is not just large scale landscape change (loss of vegetation, dust storms, dead animals, starving animals etc), it is also smaller scale events like the loss of a much loved farmhouse garden that finally trip people over into solastalgically induced depression and illness[1]. Similar situations occur when citizens and communities experience severe impacts from open caste mining. Dust, noise, machines, explosions and pollution all have their effects and a once much loved landscape can be dramatically transformed by such activity. Research in Australia conducted by the author and colleagues has found clear connections between the loss of ecosystem health and felt declines in both physical and mental health of those affected by large scale industrial activity.[2]

The concept of solastalgia can also be applied to understanding the social impacts of disease epidemics. For example, in the epidemic of foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2001 between 6.5 million and 10 million animals were slaughtered prevent the spread of the disease. The loss of the animals and their absence in the rural landscape and economy was a cause of great distress in rural England. A study from Lancaster University found that the epidemic had far-reaching psychosocial impacts. Those farmers and people in their communities directly affected by the sudden change to the environment felt “distress, feelings of bereavement, fear of a new disaster … flashbacks, nightmares, and uncontrollable emotion”[3].

With an increasing incidence of emergent diseases such as HIV AIDS, Asian Bird Flu and SARS, whole social environments can be rendered rapidly ‘at risk’ of complete devastation and transformation. When, for example, thousands of animals must be slaughtered or whole communities and institutions (e.g., hospitals) must be isolated from the rest of the world, solastalgia is a likely outcome for those affected. The HIV pandemic in Africa affects community integrity so profoundly that all sense of ‘home’ and family relationships is desolated. In such circumstances ‘home’ becomes pathological and those who are living with the disease as well as those who are their carers experience acute solastalgia as well as a devastating disease burden.

The most poignant moments of solastalgia occur when individuals are directly involved in or directly experience the transformation of a loved environment. Living through the terrorism of 9/11 2001 or a hurricane such as Katrina in 2005 and watching houses and whole urban landscapes of New Orleans devastated by subsequent flooding would be a traumatic case of solastalgia. Those who were voluntarily displaced but then return ‘home’ to such devastation would manifest distress of a solastalgic kind. Equally, those who survived the tsunami in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand in December 2004 and remained in their utterly transformed environments would have experienced deep solastalgic distress. At a less directly traumatic level, witnessing the removal of much loved trees for new development in an urban environment can be the cause of a profound distress that can be manifest as intense visceral pain and mental anguish.

A diagnosis of solastalgia is based on the recognition of the degree that distress within an individual or a community is connected to the loss of an endemic sense of place. All people who experience solastalgia are negatively affected by their desolation and likely responses can include the generalised distress and feelings of loss and bereavement outlined above but can escalate into more serious health and medical problems such as drug abuse, physical illness and forms of mental illness. So powerful is the connection between a loved place and the experience of negative transformation, that for some people, suicide is seen as the only form of relief from psychoterratic distress (particularly indigenous people).

Positive outcomes from the negative experience of solastalgia stem firstly from the recognition of the psychoterratic cause of the distress. There is potential empowerment in the clear acknowledgment of that which needs to be confronted. Secondly, a commitment to engage in action to cooperate with and support distressed people and heal distressed environments is itself a profoundly healing act. As was found in the British context of foot and mouth disease, engagement in human support networks is an important counter to the solastalgic distress caused by various forms of disaster.

In Australia, voluntary land care groups have formed to offer mutual support for each other (solidarity) and engage in direct action to restore and repair of distressed environments. Indigenous communities in Northern Australia have been able to achieve important advances in human health while at the same time actively repairing their damaged biophysical environment. In all cases, it is clear that good human health (mental and physical) is intimately tied to ecosystem health.

Many people sense that something is wrong with our relationship with the planet and their unease just might be an expression of deep-seated solastalgia about non-sustainability. Climate chaos is already causing profound changes to our sense of place. The intense desire to be organically connected to life and living landscapes is, in part, a desire to overcome solastalgia by finding an earthly ‘home’ in the connection with living things and life processes on this planet. As put simply by Albert Schweitzer, “ethics is nothing else than reverence for life”.[4] In all aspects of life; social, cultural, psychological, political, scientific and economic; humans need to redirect their energy and intelligence to an ethically inspired, urgent practical response to overcoming the causes of solastalgia.[5]

Notes
[1] see News in Science, Judy Skatssoon, Drought Prompts New Type of Mental Stress (accessed 22/08/2006) http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1374921.htm
[2] See L. Connor, G. Albrecht, N. Higginbotham, W. Smith, & S. Freeman, (2004) Environmental Change and Human Health in Upper Hunter Communities of New South Wales, Australia, EcoHealth Vol. 1, Supplement 2, pp. 47-58. (Published online: 28 October 2004, Hard Copy Vol. 1 (Suppl. 2), 47-58)
[3] see BMJ, UK foot and mouth epidemic was a human tragedy, not just an animal one (accessed 22/08/2006) at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-10/bmj-ufa100605.php
[4] Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics translated by C.T. Campion. (London: Unwin, A & C Black, 1967), p.11.
[5] See Glenn Albrecht, Solastalgia: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity, in PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature) 2005 Issue. 3, 41-55.

Carbon Conservation Parks

2007-03-20T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Anvil Hill Carbon Conservation Park

With a new baby granddaughter in the family I have been thinking about buying her a present. I would like to buy her the equivalent of my past lifetime’s worth of carbon dioxide pollution and lock it away so that it never enters the atmosphere. I have been eyeing off the proposed Anvil Hill mega coal mine in the Hunter Valley of NSW as a possible source of the coal that I would put into my carbon safe. I want to prevent Anvil Hill from ever becoming an active coal mine but I want to buy some of its coal, give it to Lilly, and leave it in the ground forever. I think millions of others worldwide would also like to ‘invest’ in the idea of a carbon conservation park.

Lilly will be only 33 in 2040 when carbon dioxide levels, assuming they do not increase any faster than the current rate of 2% per annum, reach 450 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. It is a gloomy thought, but we might already be dangerously close to that mark if the impact of all the greenhouse gases (e.g., methane and nitrous oxide) is taken into account. At this point, many of the world’s top climate science experts agree that a dangerous ‘tipping point’ could occur with the world’s climate spiraling out of control into much higher temperatures, polar meltdown with massive sea level rise and totally unpredictable weather systems. I will have to tell Lilly that largely due to the lack of Australian and USA political leadership, the Kyoto Protocol failed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and that in 2007, no major political party in Australia was prepared to immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, I have to tell her that both major parties, just before a national election, committed to major increases in our emissions for at least another two decades.

Coal miners and coal engineers love their children and grandchildren just as much as environmentalists do. We need to give to our children a sense of hope about the future and demonstrate that we are all prepared to make sacrifices right now in order to take excess greenhouse gases out of our economy and our atmosphere. Of course we must immediately cut our energy consumption and engage in massive energy conservation measures. It is equally obvious that a moratorium on all new coalmines and coal-fired power stations must be implemented while the energy conservation measures and the genuinely clean and safe renewable energy technologies of the post-combustion economy are put into place.

However, we still need to do more. A globally set cap on greenhouse gas emissions to bring the concentration down from its present 380 pmm to safer levels (less than 300 ppm) is urgently needed. From now to 2040 the Greenhouse Gas Index (GGI) will be far more important an indicator of our sustainability than the Dow Jones or the All Ordinaries. Right now, at a personal level, other than direct investment into clean, safe renewable energy technologies, the strongest ethical and practical statement we can make about our commitment to reducing the GGI is to buy pure carbon and permanently take it out of our economy. A clear demonstration that this mature, well-educated and affluent generation is prepared to pay for past greenhouse gas intensive lifestyles and forgo the immediate and future benefits of cheap carbon-based energy and leave it in the ground for the benefit of the common good is what the next generation needs to see right now.

We do not have the time (perhaps 20 years) to wait for speculative carbon capture and storage technologies that only partially reduce emissions even if they succeed. Conventional carbon offset businesses also offer only a limited solution to our current emissions. When we grow a new forest as a carbon offset we buy the equivalent of our carbon pollution as carbon dioxide sequestered in the living and dead matter in trees. However, the problems with forest carbon offset schemes are that the actual amount of carbon sequestered is not easy to calculate and that it can be converted into fugitive carbon dioxide by natural or human-made disaster. If a fire goes through our offset forest, and the forest is not regrown, most of our carbon goes up in smoke. Forests are also long term propositions and we cannot wait another 50 years before a significant amount of carbon is locked up in trees.

Other schemes for C02 offsets seem dodgy. Early dry season burning in Arnhem Land, burning methane from coal mines, non-audited alternative energy schemes in developing countries and low energy light bulbs that never get turned on give the whole idea a bad reputation. A radical new approach to carbon accounting is needed.

Let’s examine the proposed Anvil Hill coal mine in the Hunter Valley as a case study in carbon accounting. Over its projected life of about 20 years it produces 10.5 million tonnes of coal per annum. If the coal is sold on the open market, at $50 (Aus) a tonne, the current historically high price, this coal is worth about $525 million per annum for the shareholders of Centennial Coal, minus about 7% for royalties paid to the government (calculated after costs such as washing and transport to port have been deducted). The final value would be less than $500 million per annum. If, theoretically, the carbon dioxide produced by Anvil Hill is captured and sequestered, at the current cost of about $100 per tonne of coal, it would deliver to Centennial a $500 million loss per annum. I can feel a huge public subsidy for carbon capture and storage coming on.

Moreover, if we convert 10.5 million tonnes of dirty coal via combustion to the 27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (its 100 year global warming impact), then according to the Stern Report, it generates $109 per tonne in costs in damage to the earth and our economies or over $1.0 billion per annum. Again, Anvil Hill makes a $500 million loss per annum. The economics of business-as- usual and carbon capture and storage just do not add up. It is obvious that options other than burning coal are urgently needed.

With a shift in imagination we can think about Anvil Hill’s annual 27 million tonnes of C02 equivalent as a guaranteed and instant pure carbon offset, one that can never be subject to accidental carbon dioxide release. With the current price for carbon offsets in NSW at $20 a tonne, then by selling the pure coal as a carbon offset, the value of the coal would be about $500 million per annum. To offset the 27 tonnes of C02 equivalent per annum generated on average by each person in Australia, it would cost me a mere $500.

After consulting with my carbon accountant, I give baby Lilly on her first birthday a certificate showing her that I have purchased the equivalent of my past 10 year’s generation of greenhouse gas emissions. As my financial situation allows, I will be able to offset the total of my past 54 years of treating the earth as a ‘free’ waste bin for my greenhouse gas emissions.

As others worldwide make similar bequests of pure carbon, never to be used in the future, for their children and grandchildren, we speed up the decarbonisation of our economy. However, I still have to pay more in the here and now for carbon-based fuels in the form of other carbon taxes that are designed bring the GGI down to below 300ppm. No purchase of ‘indulgences’ here where I continue a carbon profligate lifestyle without taking carbon out of the economy. I pay twice for my carbon, once for my past consumption and again as I consume carbon in the last days of the combustion economy. Ultimately, as the economy becomes carbon neutral, my carbon tax noose is loosened. I have offset my lifetime’s emissions and I pay no more carbon taxes in a post-carbon and post combustion world.

The Anvil Hill Carbon Conservation Park option looks like good value as it includes the complete preservation of landscape values, ecosystem services (water supply, arable soil, biodiversity) and no additional cumulative impacts on farmers and residents of the Upper Hunter. The shareholders of Centennial have a return on their investment and the State of NSW gets offset royalties from permanently sequestered carbon. I see no reason why coal from any other working coal mine cannot be bought by those who wish never to mine or burn it; after all, it is a free market.

Moreover, it would be optimally ethical for the State government to invest all of its new carbon offset royalties into clean, renewable and safe energy technologies with all new employment going to ex-coal industry workers. A final bonus is that we will not have to develop hugely expensive ‘cleaner’ coal technology as we save a lot of money by leaving coal in the ground. All this money then goes into developing clean, safe renewable energy. This is a win, win, win situation and the Anvil Hill Carbon Conservation Park will become world famous as a turning point that helped prevent the tipping point into global climate chaos.