Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A. Albrecht (review)

How does life on an increasingly degraded planet make us feel, how should it make us feel, and how can we talk about those environmental emotions in ways that foster more convivial futures? These are urgent questions at the start of the twenty-first century, for runaway climate change is impacting human moods as well as nonhuman atmospheres, mental health research claims, and forces us to rethink our psychology and vocabulary alongside our economy and technology. In this context, Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term solastalgia to designate "the homesickness you have when you are still at home," "the lived experience of negative environmental change" (p. 200), and this term is now increasingly employed in academic debates and popular culture to contemplate the psychological fallout of global pollution, biodiversity loss, and destabilized weather. Building on that impressive success, Albrecht's book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019) develops his pioneering remarks on solastalgia in ways that are fruitful as well as flawed because they enrich the cultural debate on environmental emotions but fail to recognize its full complexity. Summarizing his argument, this review pinpoints the study's merits and limitations while reflecting on the underlying view of nature, emotions, and culture. To my mind, Albrecht deserves praise for his attempt to construct a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene psyche but also criticism for his limited dialogue with other researchers.

To be clear, Earth Emotions is a bracing attempt to advance the debate on global heating, which constitutes a human health and identity crisis, Albrecht convincingly argues, alongside a widening biological and social catastrophe. In going forward, we will need to address that psychological and existential damage too, and the concept of solastalgia helpfully alerts us to the unique form of "desolation" that arises when the fauna and flora, the weather and the seasons change around us (p. 38)—a negative mindset that will only spread and intensify as those changes accelerate in the coming years. Like climate change, solastalgia is here to stay, and Albrecht skillfully explains its features via detailed comparisons with related forms of ecological grief and hope. Furthermore, Albrecht is right that our course can only be reversed with the help of a new cultural narrative that counteracts bad "Earth emotions" like ecophobia (p. ix) without parroting facile slogans involving "sustainability" and "resilience" (p. 93), and that underlines the priority of the planet we are living on—in sharp contrast to the fantasies of entrepreneurial "space invaders" like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (p. 161). In line with recent research on vegetal life and multispecies knots, Albrecht also makes a compelling case that this new cultural narrative should cultivate empathy for animals, plants, and fungi, and for symbiotic processes involving life forms that are invisible to the human senses, like the bacterial life inside our bodies and inside the earth's crust. In one memorable example of this multispecies entanglement, he explains how small kangaroo-like marsupials called woylies help to make water and nutrients available to Australian woodland ecosystems by digging into the soil and breaking up waxy eucalyptus residues that otherwise turn the ground hard and water-repellent (p. 125). Instead of adopting the morose tone of much Anthropocene discourse, moreover, Albrecht feels that this new narrative should provide optimistic conceptual tools for what he names "Generation Symbiocene" (p. xi). Those who want to address ecological grief will accordingly find an invigorating roadmap here, which follows a confident trajectory from negative to positive earth emotions.

Even more interesting, in my opinion, is that this argument about eco-affects is embedded in the story of Albrecht's life and research on Australian communities impacted by drought and the mining industry, especially in the formerly bucolic Hunter Valley (pp. 49-60). Emphasizing the Australian connection further, Albrecht singles out the relatively obscure work of twentieth-century writer Elyne Mitchell as a precursor of recent ecological thinking on a par with that...