Solastalgia: Naming the Grief of Climate Change

After the 2017 wildfires in Sonoma County, Erica Tom remembers the immensity of ash. Walking through the remnants of her childhood home, the ash billowed in little clouds and stuck to her boots — a white mud she just couldn’t clean.

“What I can really remember viscerally is walking through the place where my family room had been, where my bed had fallen,” says Tom. “It was twisted by the fire. It looked like a giant had gripped it with a giant hand and just let it fall.”

A scholar and director of Native American Studies at Sonoma State, Tom says she suffered post-traumatic stress from the fires, but she also felt something else for which she didn’t have a name. She leaned towards fire, trying to understand it through taking classes in fire science, volunteering in the fire academy, and providing mind-body medicine to fire survivors in her community.

“This is all good for healing post-traumatic stress, but it did not address the feelings of loss and disconnection from my home,” says Tom. “My home, the structure in which I grew up but also my home, the hillside in which I grew up, and my home, the ancestral lands of the Southern Pomo, the Coast Miwok, and the Wappo people.”

Tom found the word solastalgia helpful in naming her experience after the fires. Crafted in 2007 by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, solastalgia is the homesickness you feel when you are still at home, while all around you, your home environment is being desolated in ways you cannot control.

The loss and grief solastalgia tries to capture has many layers. It can be tied to the immediate impacts of disasters such as floods, hurricanes and fire, but also to slower changes — the grief experienced when plants and animals disappear, landscapes change and people are no longer able to access traditional foods and medicines. But while solastalgia can encompass some of the nuances of emotions related to environmental loss, it may still miss the specificities and subtleties of Indigenous peoples’ experiences.

The IPCC, the U.N.’s body on assessing climate change science, identifies in its latest report that mental health challenges, including anxiety and stress, are expected to increase as temperatures rise. Moving due to rising sea levels would likely involve painful loss for anyone, but for Tribes the depth of loss includes an irreplaceable cultural and spiritual connection to a particular place.

“Solastalgia is not a new concept or condition,” says Valerie Small, affiliate faculty at Colorado State University and member of the Apsaalooke Nation. Indigenous peoples have experienced unwanted environmental changes since the beginning of colonization. But Small thinks the word is “perhaps more applicable to Indigenous peoples because we’re more connected to our environment, either traditionally or spiritually.”

“We’ve already suffered generational trauma from being forced onto reservations — in some cases hundreds of miles away from our traditional homelands — and from the forced assimilation during the boarding school era that took children away from parents for prolonged periods. Now due to climate change, we’re dealing with the loss of species that we depend upon for cultural ceremony and traditional food sources.”

Small’s Ph.D. research investigated the loss of plains cottonwood — a native tree important for ceremony — on the Crow Indian Reservation. She found that the plains cottonwood tree was the canary in the coal mine, showing that important traditional food species such as chokecherry and buffaloberry were also becoming difficult to find. Climate change, invasive species and agricultural practices led mostly by non-Indigenous landowners outside the reservation were driving the loss of these species.

The mental health impacts of such loss can’t be separated from historical and present traumas, argues Small. “A lot of people in the Western world tend to try to separate and put things into boxes. But [mental health] is not at the individual level, rather for Tribes, it’s experienced at the community-level — it’s a spiritual and cultural connectedness to land and place.”

A review of the literature on solastalgia found that nearly all the studies on the topic examined it through a Western worldview rather than using multiple Indigenous worldviews. The study suggests that using the term solastalgia to describe Indigenous experiences is akin to “trying to knock a square peg into a round hole.”

“I’m a person who believes that words are useful — we use them a lot. But sometimes, words are inadequate to grasp what we want to convey,” says Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University and a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma. He stresses how Indigenous identities were formed through thousands of years of symbiotic relationships between nature and culture. There can be a profound disorientating effect on Indigenous peoples when homelands and seascapes change dramatically because of climate change.

At a climate meeting he convened in 2006 at Haskell Indian Nations University, Wildcat remembers how Oscar Kawagley, a Yup’ik elder, described global warming as a very threat to his unique human identity.

"My dear friend Oscar has this marvelous saying: 'The cold made me who I am. Who would I be without the cold? What would I be without the cold?'"

For Wildcat, no one word could capture the depth of that relationship, but there is still a value in developing new language for climate-related emotions. “I don't have any problem with solastalgia,” Wildcat adds. “To the extent that we keep it understood that it really is about a sense of loss in terms of one's relationship to a place, to a landscape, and to a seascape. To the extent that we can capture that and talk about that in a shorthand way…maybe it's beneficial.”

Garret Barnwell, a clinical psychologist based in South Africa, has found in his therapeutic practice that terms such as solastalgia can be affirming. They can resonate with some people who are distressed by the destruction of the environment and climate change. But there’s almost something “inauthentic” about describing colonial traumas as solastalgia, he says. Barnwell’s research in Limpopo, South Africa found that generations of people had a sense of psychological integrity through close and ancestral relationships with land. But when connections to place are severed, words like solastalgia do not capture the extent of disconnection, trauma, and loss.

“For people I’ve seen in therapy myself, this term helped me make sense of my own feelings and provide care for others going through the same thing,” he says. “I live with those contradictions in the sense that I feel quite critical of the term solastalgia but still use it.”

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Tom says that while we might still need new language such as solastalgia, we also need to uplift the voices and languages of Native American cultural knowledge bearers. Tom has found solace in leaning toward traditional ecological knowledge and using good fire to restore plants and land. She suggests that healing in the context of solastalgia could come from tending our relationship to land, igniting our sense of responsibility and love.

“Let us turn to support Native peoples who continue to fight to keep their languages and life ways alive,” says Tom. “In these languages are also philosophies and ways of being in good relation with the land, ourselves and each other.”

In his book, Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, Wildcat puts forward some new language of his own — the idea of ‘indigenuity,’ the application of ancient Indigenous wisdom to solve modern problems. If connection to the land can be a source of climate grief, it can also be a place to heal and look for solutions.

“We need to solve problems, recognizing that the greatest sources for solutions are not within ourselves. They’re in the world where we have many other-than-human relatives: plants, animals, the land, the air and water,” he says. “If we start paying attention, we will be able to see ways to address some of the destruction humankind has created. These would be exercises in indigenuity.”