Soliphilia Solialgia

I agree with many others who saw the outpouring of 'Occupy' dissent as an expression of ethical or moral outrage. It was 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’ represented. 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’ gave 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.

Creating a language for our psychoterratic emotions and feelings

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.”

Solastalgia, Soliphilia, Eutierria and Art.

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

Soliphilia and Citizen Power

Soliphilia

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