solastalgia

What does solastalgia mean?

Solastalgia refers to sadness or melancholy due to environmental changes and related loss especially as it affects one’s home place.

Examples of solastalgia

Climate anxiety affects many people. Farmers, ranchers, foresters, and indigenous populations often experience solastalgia, the distress people feel due to changes in their environment. Any climate event—flood, drought, wildfire, extreme rain or snow—can lead to worsening mental health, especially when more than one event occurs at the same time, such as droughts and heat waves.
—Robert Byron, The Independent Record (Helena, Montana), 28 Sept. 2022

For the Inuit in the Arctic, solastalgia is a daily reality. As the ice melts and the permafrost thaws, their way of life is disappearing. “The land is part of who we are,” says Nuka, a 60-year-old Inuit elder. “When the ice goes, it feels like a part of us is dying.”
—Ankit Monga, InnoHEALTH, 15 Apr. 2026

One trait that many Beaver Believers share, I’ve noticed, is a strain of chronic, low-grade solastalgia: homesickness for the ponded, biodiverse world that predated the fur trade. Unlike the solastalgia felt by mining-affected Australians, the homesickness of Beaver Believers is for a home they’ve never quite known—one they can only re-create through forensic ecology, or snippets of Meriwether Lewis’s journals.
—Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Live of Beavers and Why They Matter, 2018

Where does solastalgia come from?

Solastalgia was coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht in the early 2000s.

I define “solastalgia” as the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of place.
—Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, 2019

Another term, solastalgia (combining solace, desolation, and nostalgia), speaks to the pain and distress caused when your homeland is destroyed but you are not necessarily displaced. In other words, you yearn for what your home was before it was desecrated by mining, logging, fracking, military testing, or oil spills; it is feeling homesick when you are still at home.
—Craig Santos Perez, The Georgia Review, Fall 2020

How is solastalgia used?

Solastalgia is often invoked in environmental studies, nonfiction, reportage, and advocacy.