CAUGHT BETWEEN FLOODS AND FIRES: A SENSE OF SOLASTALGIA
[Solastalgia] is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation.
The last weekend of October, I presented at the GreenSpirit conference in Worcestershire. Friday night through Saturday the rains were relentless. In a matter of hours, the river had breached its banks, flooded the lowlands, swept across the bridge, and essentially turned the quaint village of Cropthorne into an island.
Back home in California, it was a different story. Our neighbors called to ask what, in face of possible evacuations from wildfires, we wanted them to remove from our home. My husband and I read about the fires as we looked out at a swollen river, still rising, in the English countryside.
So the question I ask is this: Amid all this climate upheaval, what happens to our sense of belonging?
Packing up my mother’s London house, after her move to a care home, I experience what’s commonly known as nostalgia. Every item returns a memory, and a sense of loss that this charming home is going to belong to someone else in a couple of months.
But this is different from losing the place you still live in because it is under assault.
I first fell in love with the San Francisco Bay Area back in 1982. The overwhelming beauty helped me to get sober and over the many years I have lived here, I have walked almost every trail in Marin County, coming to know the land and its inhabitants intimately.
Now, every summer, instead of celebrating endless blue-sky days, I watch anxiously as temperatures soar to unnatural heights and grasses dry to a crisp. I wonder, where, exactly, the next fire will strike.
Just about everyone I know, knows someone who has suffered from climate disruption. A friend’s mother was flooded out of her home in Texas, moved to California, and within her first weeks had to evacuate due to wildfires. How must she have felt?
Weather events, after all, don’t just impact the outer landscape, they affect our inner landscapes too. We feel loss, anxiety, uncertainty. We wonder where we belong, and where, anymore, we can feel safe in a world where rain pounds down with unnatural violence, and flames turn into fiery dragons that leap across highways, and droughts extend into decades.
The places that once nurtured us, body and soul, are changing before our eyes and beneath our feet. We are losing the joy of places that once helped raise us and root us in a sense of belonging
It’s starting to be that we no longer feel at home in our own homes. And soon, if we don’t act, we may find that everything has shifted so dramatically around us, we no longer recognize the ground of our being.
