Glenn Albrecht is an Australian philosopher and ecologist who was for many years Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia and is now an Honorary Associate Professor in the Faculty of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. In his book Earth Emotions (Earthly Emotions, 2019) argues that we have lost awareness of our deep and long-standing connection to nature and that we no longer have the words to express the anxiety and sadness we feel as climate change and extensive development destroy the world we once took for granted. Albrecht has coined new words for these “earthly emotions”—solastaglia, ghedeist, soliphilia—that are now becoming widely used. In this interview, which published in the British magazine Beshara Magazine (Well-Being & Ecology, Issue 19, 2021) speaks to its editor Jane Clark and Jim Griffin from his home at Wallaby Farm in New South Wales about his own experiences and his vision of how, even in this late phase of civilization, we can reconnect with nature and enter an inspiring and creative future. Translation: Jiří Zemánek.
Jane: If I understand correctly, the basic message of your book Earth Emotions is the fact that there is a connection between the state of the Earth and our own mental and emotional states. We are deeply rooted in our relationship with nature and have both positive and negative emotions associated with it. But we don't really have words for them, at least in Western languages. That's why you set out to create them. The most famous, I think, is your term "solastalgia." Can you tell us a little about it?
Glenn: Sure. Solastalgia is the result of what I call “sumbiography,” a term I use for the sum total of the influences that have shaped my life through my interactions with both humans and nonhuman nature. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Perth, Western Australia, the most isolated capital city in the world, and one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots; renowned for the uniqueness of its flora and fauna. I grew up with a deep appreciation for nature, thanks in large part to my grandparents and my mother, who instilled in me a love of life and the beauty of the natural world around me. So I took it for granted that the positive and wonderful experiences I had as a child were universal.
And yet, as I grew up, Western Australia began to develop in ways that were typical of the rest of the world. Our great forests were being turned into wood chips and urban development was taking nature further and further away from the city; it was still possible to get to it, but it took half a day, then a full day. And so, as a child and later as a teenager, I began to realise that the world was changing incredibly quickly.
I wanted to be an ornithologist, but various events in my life steered me towards a more philosophical, psychological and sociological way of looking at the world. So I started working on my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. It was going pretty well until my supervisor had a heart attack and had to retire, which meant I had to find a new supervisor to help me with my thesis on organicism and Hegel. There weren't many people who could do it, so I ended up moving east with my family to Newcastle in New South Wales. That took me into a whole new area in terms of the environment. The place we ended up living in was the Hunter region. It's a beautiful subtropical region and also very rich in biodiversity.
Jane: So that's where you first encountered the impacts of industrial development?
Glenn: I have always loved birds and one of the things I wanted to do when I got to New South Wales was to explore the areas that John Gould and his wife Elizabeth explored in 1839-40 for their famous book Birds of Australia (Birds of Australia). This meant walking through areas of the Hunter Valley that are now coal mines; in fact, the entire region is now the world's leading exporter of hard coal. I had read about what the region looked like in 1839, while also travelling through the current landscape, which is 500 square kilometres of open-pit mining with massive power stations and railways transporting the coal. When I first saw it, a huge transformative emotional wave washed over me, and I experienced a sense of catastrophe, anxiety and deep unease. And that's when I realised I had no word to describe my own emotional state. Anxiety is a term that is used in many human experiences, but I wanted a word that related to the anxiety specific to environmental destruction. And it wasn't there.
Age of solastalgia
Jane: I believe that your starting point in formulating this new word was the concept of "nostalgia."
Glenn: Yes. The closest I came to the concept of “nostalgia” was the one defined by Johannes Hofer, a 17th-century Swiss physician. Nostalgia, classically defined, is a deeply melancholic feeling that people have when they are not present in their home and long to return. It is a kind of homesickness that can be alleviated by repatriation, returning to one’s homeland or home. But for the people living in the Hunter Valley, who are still trying to farm and lead a normal life surrounded by these gargantuan coal mines, life has become a misery without ever leaving their own homes. The term “solastalgia” encompasses the idea of comfort – the comfort that you feel in your home environment. And “algia” is pain, suffering and sadness. So “solastalgia” means the suffering that you experience when your home is destroyed while you are still living in it. And from there, that original idea grew. There is a magazine PAN (Philosophy, Activism, Nature), who was willing to accept my original short essay, which was intended to stimulate discussion on the subject and help turn it into a more thoughtful and considered article. In the period from 2005 to the present, solastalgia has become a widely accepted term by a wide variety of people. It is actually just the first of what I call “psychoterratic” or psycho-earthly. I am committed to the task of fully explaining all the positive and negative earthly emotions that we have, because while we may have had them in the past, we seem to have lost this kind of sensitivity in the last two or three hundred years since the Industrial Revolution.
Them: You relate solastalgia to how indigenous peoples – for example, Australian Aborigines – experience the loss of their homeland, and you point out that it is not a trivial matter: people are unable to function, suffer from memory loss and cognitive decline; many of them turn to alcohol and the like to cope with the deep despair they feel.
Glenn: The traditional inhabitants of Australia have been subjected to a double psychological shock. Colonisation itself has already brought with it a deep and extremely painful nostalgia for the loss of their culture and their place. Their culture is over 60,000 years old, so it is not something that can be waved aside and ordered to simply go into the 21st century and enjoy Netflix. And of course they still live in Australia and Tasmania, where climate change, global development and transnational mining are destroying what is left of their home, which is their spiritual, physical and material base.
Them: You use the term “lived experience,” and it seems to me that one of the great strengths of your writing is not just the creation of words that allow us to focus more on what we feel, but also the telling of the story, the lived experience that you bring to the narrative.
Glenn: Yes. That was a very important part of my work as a philosopher; I worked with people like the anthropologist Linda Connor and my close friend Nick Higginbotham, who is a social psychologist. When I first started thinking about these things, I knew I couldn't be the only person experiencing this kind of anxiety. So together we went out and interviewed people about what they were experiencing in the Hunter Valley, and we collected hundreds of testimonies from them about their own lived experiences.
But I have always seen this as a global issue. I believe that today, under the influence of climate change and globalized development forces, we are living in an age of solastalgia. It is no longer an isolated experience of people in certain parts of the world, but we are all now globally feeling the effects of ecological change and the loss of our environment – although for most of us it may be near the end of the spectrum at this point. Social scientists and humanists, philosophers, artists and other creative people are now using this term to explain the anxiety we all experience at the loss of the comfort, beauty, coherence and integrity of the world we once took for granted.
Mental health problem
Jane: Mental health issues are being talked about as an epidemic in the UK at the moment. They are coming to the forefront of the agenda, particularly in young people, where there has been a huge increase in depression, anxiety etc. My own feeling is that this is very much in line with what you are talking about. However, these conditions are seen as purely medical illnesses and are consequently personalised – the solution is seen in providing individual counselling or therapy. You mention that this is also a danger with solastalgia: that it could be seen as just a medical problem that can be ‘cured’ individually.
Glenn: However, solastalgia was not actually interpreted in this way. Most people understood that it was related to the dimension of existential lived experience, not just a state of the biomedical brain. It is a state of the soul – our spirit, our psychic and emotional coherence.
But generally speaking, as a philosopher and sociologist, I totally agree with what you're saying. I've always believed that these global mental health issues are more than just psychiatric and neurological problems. We've basically driven ourselves crazy by destroying the very foundations on which we live, and yet people still think they can cure this problem with therapy!
Them: What you're saying takes me back to the work of people in the 1960s and that radical psychiatric movement. Their view was that mental illness was, in a sense, a rational response to a crazy world.
Glenn: I grew up reading RD Laing and Thomas Szasz and other anti-psychiatrists who criticized the biomedical view of mental illness. Gregory Bateson was also, and still is, a huge influence; as early as the 1970s, he was able to see the connection between the destruction of our biophysical environment and the destruction of our own sanity—our own capacity for strength and health in our own psychological world. So it should come as no surprise that the two are closely related. Over the 3.5 billion years of evolution that it took to create humans, we have developed a deep and meaningful connection with other life. It is only in the last two or three hundred years that we have rejected this connection.
Jane: So you agree with the motto Radical therapist: "Therapy means social, political and personal change, not adaptation"
Glenn: Yes; in fact, in my first article on solastalgia, I wrote about how the indigenous people of Australia found relief from solastalgia by actively engaging in the repair of their damaged communities—their damaged ecosystem—by, for example, getting rid of feral animals and replacing them with native species. If the cause of your anxiety is the destruction of your environment, that is not your personal problem; it is an external problem, and its solution is political, economic, and requires a lot of other structural things.
So it's important to bring these structural things that are causing our problems to the forefront. If we can share the experience of making changes with people, that's a form of rehabilitation in itself. It's a form of repairing our own psyche and at the same time repairing the material base from which we grow, whether it's our community or the rainforest. It's the same structure inside and out.
Interconnectedness and the "ghedeist"
Jane: Solastalgia is a term for negative emotions related to our relationship with the environment, but you also talk about positive emotions. For example, you coined the word ghedeist, which embodies the spiritual aspect of our relationship to the world, our sense of deep interconnectedness with all living beings.
Glenn: This word comes from the Indo-European word ghehd, which means to unite and is associated with words like “good,” “together,” or “to gether.” And spirit is a German word meaning "spirit" or something associated with the intangible, vital energy or whatever word you want to use; it refers to spiritual energy. So I put those two terms together and tried to talk about a secular spirituality that comes close to what I feel when I'm at Wallaby Farm watching the birds or looking into the eyes of a venomous snake. I think that's something that we all have the potential to feel, mainly because we are products of evolution in both the Darwinian and Margulisian sense - I'm thinking of Lynn Margulis, who formulated a version of evolution based on symbiogenesis. The concept and idea ghedeist I have included this to encourage further thought about what it means to be a spiritual person in a material world. I am not a religious person in any conventional sense of the word, but I would say that I am a spiritual person, and I believe that there are many other people like me.
Jane: Lynn Margulis is strongly associated with the concept of Gaia, which is a way of perceiving the world as an interconnected whole. But ghedeist not the same as this concept, what do you say?
Glenn: Into the book Earth Emotions I wrote a chapter called "Gaia and the Ghedeist" because many people felt that the idea of Gaia was itself a spiritual reality and could become almost a god. But like Margulis herself, I have doubts that Gaia is alive in the sense that "she/he" has any intentions. You see, James Lovelock wrote a book The Revenge of Gaia), but I don't think we can talk about Gaia wanting revenge.
The meaning I want to express in words ghedeist, is much more connected to lived experience. My own life at Wallaby Farm is a good example of this. I walk on land that has been walked by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years. I sit on rocks that are millions of years old. I am surrounded by wallabies, koalas, reptiles – koalas have been living in Australia for 25 million years at various stages of their evolutionary development. So I have a sense of belonging to this place that goes back a long way.
And I interact directly with the living creatures around me. I often walk around with my camera and point it at the eyes of the animals I encounter; it could be a six-foot lizard or a brown snake that could kill me, or a parrot that has the most magnificent and colorful coloration of any animal on the planet. And when I do that, I cease to exist as an individual, isolated ego. I merge with a world that is completely inseparable from me. It is a kind of unified experience that we can all have as humans in the world we were born into—a world that has an ancient lineage and interconnectedness that we are only beginning to discover today.
Jane: This question of interconnectedness seems to be coming to the forefront of our consciousness in all directions. For example, there are many scientific papers being published on this topic at the moment.
Glenn: Yes, one of the things that I'm particularly interested in right now is the so-called "microbiome" - the fact that we are inhabited by trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that keep us alive just like a good glass of red wine; and the work of people like Suzanne Simard on the interconnectedness of trees and the extraordinary cooperation between them and other organisms. Her work is a fantastic resource for understanding that the relationship between fungi and trees - and indeed between fungi, trees and humans, if we behave properly - is not one of alienation and isolation. When we begin to fully understand this situation, we find that it is a deep immersion, a deep integration. These different forms of life do not exist and cannot exist in isolation. We all work together to share a common life.
The problem of cities
Them: This idea of Gheddeist It seems wonderful to me and is part of the spirituality I would like to live. But most people today live in cities, and this trend is expected to continue to grow in the future. There are already cities with 20 million or more inhabitants, and in many cases they are completely cut off from any natural environment. How can people develop any sense of connection to the land in such cities?
Glenn: Canadian ecologist Bill Rees, who came up with the concept of the “ecological footprint,” described cities in thermodynamic terms as entropic black holes that suck in resources from around the world and spew out pollution and disease.
They are part of the story of gigantism and homogeneity of modes of production, the kind of economy that is widespread throughout the world today. You cannot write about the things I write about without questioning this story, and I do not for a moment accept that cities as they are currently configured will exist for much longer. Their critique is necessary to question the foundations of our relatively young—three hundred years old—system of economic production, which has become rogue: rogue in the sense that it is now controlled by a small number of people who have a vested interest in maintaining it.
People like Frank Lloyd Wright were able to see this problem fifty years ago. Wright understood that the dominant model of the megalopolis was unsustainable and would eventually consume itself in a kind of parasitic globalized form of mass destruction. That’s why he advocated organic architecture. He argued that we needed things like high-density housing, but in his vision, the residential buildings were surrounded by farms. I’m also inspired by the Austrian artist Friedrich Hundertwasser, who was a man who rejected the idea that cities should be designed as a continuation of the box and the straight line – as inorganic.
Jane: Is this the man who designed the famous Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna?
Glenn: Yes. The box represents the cheapest possible way to create a building, but it doesn't really consider the humanity of its inhabitants, or even their connection to other life forms. There is a spiritual dimension to life, and that must find expression in architecture and engineering and in other ways in which we as humans must function.
In the book I’m writing now – about what I call the “symbiocene” – I spend quite a bit of time thinking about cities and high-density housing. We should be minimizing entropy in our cities, not maximizing it, and we need to create systems that are diverse and resilient. We know from complexity theory that if we create a homogeneous system, all it takes is one thing to go wrong and the whole system will fail. I’m afraid the UK has provided us with a useful case study in recent months – how something as simple as a shortage of truck drivers can bring society to a standstill. And of course Covid-19 is another example.
Symbiocene
Jane: So we can move on to talking about your concept of the symbiocene. In your book, you criticize concepts like sustainability or even resilience because they are too weak to make a difference, and too easily co-opted into the status quo as minor adaptations. You argue that we need a completely different approach.
Glenn: People talk about this being the age of the Anthropocene—the time when we began to dominate the Earth's environment, which has led us to our current state of disaster. I envision the Symbiocene as another age when we learn to live in harmony with the rest of creation—when the idea of symbiosis rather than competition becomes the basis for our reconnection with the rest of life.
Jane: Symbiosis is a process in which two or more different species work together for mutual benefit – like plants and fungi working together to form lichens! Or like mushrooms and trees working together in forests.
Glenn: Yes, it's important to note that symbiosis is not really a philosophical idea: it's based in science. It's Lynn Margulis at its best. As we've just said, there's a lot of scientific work out there today that shows that life forms not only compete with each other, but also cooperate and co-create. The more we understand about symbiosis, the more we understand that it's the future of life on Earth, whether we're a part of it or not. So I'm starting to put together a book that explores ways in which we might reconnect with the rest of the world's life and use our intelligence to transform everything that's currently parasitic or cancerous - I mean figuratively - into something that reconnects us not only with shape life, but also processes of life.
Them: Can you give us an example?
Glenn: I should start by saying that this is not a fully formed vision; it is a work-in-progress vision that allows us to see what we might be able to do. For example, if you think about electricity generation: solar and wind power are much less dangerous and much less destructive than coal or oil, but they are only temporary solutions. The next step is to have bacteria produce our energy. They could live in the walls of our houses and produce light that would shine without any accompanying heat or pollution. And this is not just fantasy; these things exist today. Or we could build houses out of bricks made from fungi that repair themselves. We are beginning to see a possible new world, completely non-toxic and repairable, where everything is biodegradable, where everything is compost for something else.
Them: Glenn, I think it's a wonderful vision that you're presenting - and maybe more than a vision, because you get into the details that need to be taken care of if that vision is to be realized. But many people, like Jem Bendell, who founded the Deep Adaptation movement1, would argue that we are in a race against time. The rate of environmental degradation is such that some kind of societal collapse is inevitable. So visions like yours will be overtaken by catastrophic events—a massive rise in sea levels or the burning of methane in Siberia or whatever.
Glenn: Of course I accept that as a possibility. People talk a lot about the loss of biodiversity, but the huge problem we face is actually the loss of humanity itself, which I call the seventh great extinction. But we are all working on the uncertain, unknown edges of climate science, and it is full of question marks. So I don't hold the same apocalyptic vision of the future: I think there is still a glimmer of hope.
I also think it is our responsibility as adults to offer our young people a path right now; and we need a vision of the future that is so compelling that they will want to jump right in. I believe that if we start thinking from the perspective of the symbiocene, we have the possibility of a future that is valuable not only in a practical and material sense, but that could also be beautiful, interesting, and endlessly creative.
The tipping point?
Jane: We seem to be living between two extremes at the moment – between depression and apathy. Some people feel that the ecological situation is so dire that it is too late to do anything about it, and that we must simply adapt to a completely different world. Others – who unfortunately still seem to be the majority – feel that the situation is either not urgent or can be remedied with a few technological innovations. Both of these lead to a certain apathy. In Australia, for example, coal is still being mined in the Hunter Valley, and we continue to cut down forests and deplete soil at an ever-increasing rate.
Glenn: Of course we should be doing everything we can to stop this decline. We should have stopped coal mining twenty years ago, we can't afford another degree of warming. At Wallaby Farm we try to live off our own fruit and vegetables as best we can. But in recent years we've had temperatures of 47 degrees and I've seen plants burn - literally burn - without there being a fire. I live with koalas, wallabies, snakes, lizards, parrots and we've seen birds simply fall out of the sky dead because the temperature was too high.
If COP26 fails, we will have an even hotter world and our properties – my life on Wallaby Farm – will end because it gets too hot or because we burn up. The need to reduce our carbon emissions is so urgent that I actually quite support people who want to suck carbon dioxide out of the air with big expensive machines because I think it is worth the investment. It is certainly a better investment than more coal-fired power plants that will continue to produce and pump this stuff into the air.
Jane: But it's not just a question of new ideas. There are huge vested interests in the current system, and people are not going to give it up. Do you see a change happening?
Glenn: I think change is inevitable because, as I said, our current systems are extremely fragile. A few weeks ago, Facebook went down for seven hours and it was a global crisis. The question is how to move this change in a positive direction.
In the book Earth Emotions I talk about this in terms of generations, and I describe the young people who are growing up today as part of the “symbiocene generation.” They are already churning out great leaders like Greta Thunberg, and there are amazing kids here in Australia. But they can’t do it alone. So there has to be a multi-generational collection of intelligent human beings who are just now starting to make an effort to confront the madness and destruction in the first place, and then start tearing down our existing structures so they can rebuild them.
In the 1950s to the 1990s, there were small movements through which people questioned the common sense of the then generally accepted model of development. We have at least reached the point where this model is being questioned - publicly and openly by people of good will. I see this as a conceptual and practical leap forward.
Them: Many people see this decade as a turning point: as the last chance to get things back on track.
Glenn: I don't think the concept of a tipping point is all that useful in itself, but it does say that the forces that are destructive and the forces that are creative are at least in some kind of balance today. We could talk about this in terms of war, but I would resist taking it as a literal reality. The situation clearly has the potential for psychological and physical violence, but I am a nonviolent person and I see war as completely negative and unnecessary. I hope we avoid the ultimate situation of MAD (mutually assured destruction), which would be the most terrible end of any nuclear war that humans would engage in.
But we are certainly at a critical point in our history as a species. If I only cared about humans, that would be enough. But I also care about the rest of the biodiversity that still exists on this wonderful place we call Earth. We humans may be able to adapt to a warmer world, but most other species cannot—and I feel an obligation to them. I mean, as we have learned, with all our interplanetary exploration and our deep-space antennas, this is the only place we know of that has life. I think it is worth fighting for—and I will use all the tools I have as a philosopher, a teacher, and a writer to make sure that it does not quietly go under.
Them: So you're going to dedicate yourself to writing your next book about the symbiocene?
Glenn: Yes. I see the symbiocene as a culturally transmissible idea that could be appealing to people and give them hope and a radical anticipation of the future. And also give them something to do. There is no end to the amount of work that needs to be done. We are talking about changing our political structures and different forms of democracy, which include, for example, integrating considerations of other life forms. We are talking about changing our educational structures, because the effort to create something like the Symbiocene is transdisciplinary; that is not going to happen in universities as it stands. And architecture – I am no expert, but I sometimes guest lecture to architecture students at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, and they are just blown away by the creative possibilities of thinking about these things differently.
So instead of worrying about unemployment for God knows how many decades, we could imagine the new universities, the new jobs, the new education – the new everything – that is needed. And we need to do it with a sense of determination so that we can begin to heal and repair the damage that we have done.
- Jem Bendell is Emeritus Professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria, UK. He is best known for his concept of “deep adaptation” (2018) for individuals and communities anticipating (or already coping with) the impacts of ongoing climate change. In 2019, he founded the Deep Adaptation Forum. ↩︎