Essay by Eric Worrall
A green language expert has channelled a 17th century medical student to capture the profound emotional impact looking at an open cut coal mine can cause.
The Era of Climate Change Has Created a New Emotion
What word might describe losing your home while staying in one place?
…
As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to pondering language about and human relationships to the natural world. As a person, he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region, a sublime area of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. The valley here offers a stopover along a flyway that runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand how coal mining was threatening the well-being of the valley’s feathered and human residents. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter, akin to the mountaintop-removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes, had increased almost twentyfold. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge toxic metals into water supplies.
…
Over a period of decades, Albrecht has devoted himself to searching for language that might describe a type of sadness, shock, and loss that now seems more and more common—grief of displacement, unease with our surroundings, a sense that damage and disaster might lie just down the road. He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up. There, thanks partly to the early impacts of climate change, regional rainfall had dropped by about 15 to 20 percent since the 1970s, and the jarrah trees he had loved since he was a child—eucalypts with lustrous wood—were dying en masse.
…
In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, assembled a set of case studies to document the pain of home disruption. Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that turned the region into “a smoldering land, amputated of half its population,” writes the historian Thomas Dodman, and left this part of Europe in a state of economic stagnation and political instability.
…
To Hofer, nostalgia was also a medical condition whose symptoms included fever, nausea, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and respiratory problems, along with “palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.” Untreated, it could be fatal, and there were documented deaths among Swiss soldiers attributed to this malady.
…
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/07/climate-change-damage-displacement-solastalgia/670614/
Perhaps Albrect is trying to say greens are too upset to think straight. If this is the case, I sure hope they make the effort to try.
In his 1688 dissertation, which is credited with creating the word “nostalgia”, Doctor Johannes Hofer recommended blood letting, laxatives and narcotics as a cure, but I recommend greens consult with their doctor before trying any of these remedies. Learning some science might also help.
When I see an open pit mine, I see a future lake.
So why is it OK to have tarmac highways that alienate orders of magnitude more area from home building, so much more area than coal mines, so small that most people have never seen one?
Poor old romantic author is unhinged from reality and deduction. Good candidate for a solitary life so normal people are not contaminated by his ignorance. Geoff S
A guys got to control his obsessions. To paraphrase Dirty Harry.
he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region
He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up.
Walked it all pushing a wooden barrow with his meagre belongings did he or……?
Hofer’s “nostalgia” seems far more closely related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than it does a fond remembrance of the past.
I’m sure gonna miss having White Christmases.
“ blood letting, laxatives and narcotics ”
I would suggest a softer treatment: as food, bread and water as much as the apetite; and starting everyday with a single tablespoon of castor oil as breakfast.
Oh look at that ugly coal mine, things were so much less traumatic, back when we slaughtered whales so we can make candles of their fat.
Oh look at that ugly concrete dome, they say it is one huge atomical bomb, if it explodes, the Earth will move from its circuit. Things were so much better when we burned fossilised dung.
Oh look at them whale carcasses, life was so much purer when we sat around dung fires, scared of the dark outside.
Oh look at that lovely coal mine, it make so much less mess than all those trees we had to chop down, the leaves got in everywhere, you know!
Oh, look at that fancy expert who never had to pick up a shovel or hammer in his life, who has never built anything useful or helpful, telling us how to engineer a system he could not possibly comprehend beyond the level of soundbites.
Oh, and don’t forget the war, any war, just as long as you can imagine heaps of dead and dying, remember them in all bloody, gory detail, and then associate that trauma with the crap I just spewed in your ear, and be afraid…so very afraiaiaiaid…
“It’s not easy being green”, Kermit the Frog.
Kermit, of course, has the brain of an amphibian.
And – he’s green!
Auto – just sayin’.
Eco-alarmist nonsense.
One thing is clear, Madeline Ostrander and Albrecht did not bother to actually visit Appalachian landscapes.
According to Merriam Webster:
Albrecht’s and Madeline Ostrander version of symptoms describe PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), not nostalgia according to Hofer and Merriam Webster.
Merriam Webster also note:
Trust alarmists to try and make their misplaced nostalgia for things they do not know or understand sound like a dangerous illness.
Unlike the survivors of the Thirty Year War, neither Albrecht’s and Madeline Ostrander has actually experienced severe traumatic distress. As typical hypochondriacs
Hofer would have been party to this definition of hypochondria, “depression or melancholy without real cause, (1660s)” is a close description of Hofer’s nostalgia meaning. One is without obvious cause, the other identifies “homesickness” as the cause.
Now, if allegedly nostalgic alarmists are so distressed that they’d pine away for their imaginary fantasy spaces…