A new word: the kind of sadness that is affecting many human beings as their climate and familiar landscape shifts:
It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as [Glenn Albrecht] wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"
I guess we're all getting used to it. And, of course, this impulse toward environmentalism is a deeply conservative one. We need to harness it to wrench a shift in attitudes on climate change on the right.
(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/01/-solastalgia/221921/
