The Last Word On Nothing

In 2005, the Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that, in four mellifluous syllables, perfectly encapsulated the Anthropocene’s discontents: solastalgia, the emotion you experience when an environment you’ve long loved is catastrophically altered. Solastalgia, as Albrecht put it, is “a form of homesickness one experiences without leaving home” — it’s what you feel when your ancestral lands are ravaged by coal mining, your homestead torched by megafire, or the only planet you’ll ever inhabit warped by climate change. In testament to its resonance, solastalgia — whose etymological roots twine with solace, nostalgia, desolation, and pain — has since become the subject of countless academic articles, the thematic backdrop for video games, and the inspiration for Estonian concertos. “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote in 2019, “has now well and truly entered popular culture.”

Albrecht’s all-too-apt neologism is also muse for a new essay collection, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, published last month by University of Virginia Press. The anthology — conceived, curated, and edited by the author Paul Bogard — features meditations by thirty-four writers, among them luminaries such as Kathleen Dean Moore, Scott Russell Sanders, and Meera Subramanian; Albrecht himself penned the foreword. (Although very far from a luminary, I have a piece in there, too, about a certain architecturally inclined rodent that I just can’t seem to quit.) “All of (these essays), in their own ways, engage the pain, grief, and sorrow inherent in the concept of solastalgia,” Bogard writes in the book’s introduction. “And all of them also have at least a hint — and often much more — of the possibility in this emotion.”

For the Last Word on Nothing, I chatted with Bogard about the power of Albrecht’s coinage, the perils of parenthood in the Anthropocene, and his forays into solastalgic rock-and-roll. 

BG: I’m curious if you remember where you first read or heard the word “solastalgia,” and whether it hit you like a thunderbolt or steadily grew on you over time through repeated encounters.

PB: I discovered it when I was doing the research for my book The End of Night, around a decade ago. And it did immediately resonate with me — it was a new way to think about my grief, and a word to describe it. At that point it hadn’t gained the footing or acceptance that it has now; it hadn’t spread quite as far. What’s been really fun, if fun is the right word, is the way that it’s grown on me since then. It’s no longer only about grief — it’s a word, for me, that speaks more about love. We’re grieving because of what we love, because we see what we love endangered and dying. The word has become more multi-dimensional in the years since I discovered it.

That theme of love is present in your own contribution to the anthology, in which you write about the challenge of simultaneously experiencing solastalgia while also “savoring the joy and wonder still available at every turn.” It seems like fatherhood has brought that conflict to the fore for you: Your daughter is at once inheriting a diminished world and a beautiful one still worth loving. How do you manage that tension in parenting? 

She’s going to be five in another month, and so for her it’s still all about encouraging her love of the world. We haven’t had any heart-to-heart about climate change or anything like that. That stuff is going to come, and it’s hard to even imagine this joyous little kid beginning to recognize some of the things that are happening to the world. But I do think about it; I’m so, so conscious of it. Becoming a dad took the emotions that I was feeling about the world already — the love that I have for it, the grief that I have about it — and just turned those emotions way up. So I think it’s going to be an ongoing project. Somebody should write a book about it.

Hopefully you! Returning to your first encounters with the concept of solastalgia: What made that word seem not only salient, but an appropriate subject for an anthology?

There’s something about that word that appeals to us as humans. I think we love the root, the solace. It’s just really evocative. It also serves as a good starting point to talk about other emotions. Solastalgia gets you pretty quickly thinking about love, as we’ve talked about, but also anger, and hope; it almost serves as a doorway. I’ve been intrigued by it for a long time. I thought a few years ago that I might do a book where I went on a journey to investigate solastalgia, and then that evolved into the anthology, which took on a life of its own. 

Ultimately the anthology’s contributions are all so different — this book contains everything from Kathryn Miles meditating on shifting baselines in the Gulf of Maine to Holly Haworth describing the tactile experience of navigating her neighborhood (to name just a couple of great voices). What surprised you about how writers interpreted your very loose prompt?

I suspected that this would be true, but there’s not a lot of repetition in the book. People write about a lot of different things and they come at it from a lot of different angles. I loved the chapter on anger, in part because I’m a good Minnesota kid and I’ve never learned how to be angry. So I’m reading other people and admiring their ability to channel their anger — Genevieve Gunther and Kathleen Dean Moore, for example. I really admire J. Drew Lanham writing about being a Black man and a birder in the south, experiencing solastalgia through birds. One of the reactions I had again and again was gratitude — I think people really invested so much of themselves in these essays. Every time I read a new one I was like, damn, thank you.

I noticed that wildfire was a common motif — it’s foregrounded in Suzanne Roberts’s and Elena Passarello’s essays, and present in the backdrop of others. Which makes sense in an anthology about solastalgia: It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic transformation of a beloved home environment than fire. What other images or themes seemed to crop up repeatedly?

I’m thinking a lot lately about being a parent, and so people writing about their children is powerful to me. That’s a theme that comes up again and again — it’s one thing for us to recognize changes to the world as adults, but it’s another to think about the world that our children are going to come into. I also liked the emphasis, from a few writers, on taking care of ourselves. There’s something important about slowing down and turning in, even as we’re trying to do everything we can outwardly. The response to feeling solastalgia doesn’t have to be all-out protest in the streets, waving our swords around — it can also be about how to take care of yourself so that you can fight another day. 

That’s a nice sentiment, that solastalgia can be an inward-looking experience. It feels like something that we’re sort of collectively going through as a society — and yet, each of our individualized solastalgic experiences is a little bit different. 

I think so. A big reason for the book is that I want people to know that they’re not alone, that there are other people feeling these same things. Emotion is often so personal, but there’s such value in sharing the way that we’re feeling. It’s hard enough to feel these emotions — and then to feel like you’re living alone in a world of wounds makes it even harder. 

Turning back to your own essay in the anthology: Your experience with solastalgia begins long before the word even existed. I wondered if you could talk about your own first encounter not with the word, but with the emotion itself.

That’s what I tried to do with my essay, to describe that path: At what point do we start to recognize what’s happening around us, and how does that make you feel, make us feel? I grew up in Minneapolis, and we have a cabin about three hours north. And so we’d constantly make this drive to the lake, and over the years, as I grew up, I just couldn’t help but notice the development that was spreading along the way. Even in those years, I had what we might describe as a solastalgic feeling about that — seeing the change in real time and being struck by it. And later, you know, I tried to be a rock-and-roll star, so I could be rich and famous and sing about my solastalgia. That didn’t quite take. 

I’m glad you brought up your thwarted musical career. In your essay, you mentioned that you used to write songs about “the animals and birds whose homes were being destroyed.” Do any of those songs survive on YouTube or elsewhere? And do you remember any of your solstalgic lyrics? 

Man, I don’t know if I’m going to admit any of that. I remember one chorus that was something like, “If I could buy all the land, keep it away from the builder-man.” Just that sense of wanting to stop this relentless development. I had a good childhood with lots of good relationships, which meant I had crummy rock-and-roll material. So I was trying to make songs out of biodiversity loss, which is a challenge.

I hadn’t thought of this until now, but your line about buying the land to keep it from the builder-man makes me think that the first lyrical reference to solastalgia must belong to Joni Mitchell: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” What could be more solastalgic than that?

Absolutely. No doubt about it.

Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity, not least because the AI software that I used to transcribe our conversation variously misheard “solastalgia” as “so nostalgic,” “solar cells,” “self started,” “solace data,” “cell histology,” “Silva style,” “soulless static,” “soloist logic,” and “Silvus daljit.”  Not even the robots are ready for the Anthropocene.