A while back I learned a few new words for the anxiety that climate change brings — a kind of distress people say hits younger generations especially hard. Words like eco-grief and eco-angst. But the one that hit me hardest was solastalgia.
Sol·a·stal·gia (noun)
Derived from nostalgia, solastalgia is a form of homesickness you get while still at home — because the environment around you has changed and no longer feels familiar. The term refers specifically to change caused by chronic agents like climate change or mining, and describes the negative psychological toll of ongoing environmental destruction on a person’s homeland. It is often “exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.”*
Source: https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/portfolio/solastalgia/
That last part is the one that stays with me: the powerlessness, the feeling of being overwhelmed by something you can see happening around you, structurally, for so long already. This has not been a good week for green. Not a good month, either. Not a good year for green spaces on this island.
I felt it most sharply a few days ago, driving out to a plot to gauge the extent of some interference. The vegetation on the site was still waiting to be surveyed — but between getting the official go-ahead for the work and the survey date, planned for less than a week later, everything had already been cleared. All the vegetation, and every ecosystem it held, removed in the name of “maintenance.”
I had the radio on. Less than a kilometer from the plot, a RAYE song came on. Everyone knows “Where Is My Husband?” — but have you heard “Environmental Anxiety”? It’s not a hopeful song. It’s also not wrong. Our future as the only Earth we’ve got is not looking bright, and small islands like Curaçao are usually left carrying the consequences of the rest of the world’s industrialization and development, without ever getting to share in its benefits. The mass tourism the island is under right now — more, more, more — is just another form of extraction.
Land is sold and stripped of everything living on it, and they call it “cleaning,” not clearing, for the sake of “development.” It astounds me every time. That nature is treated as an inconvenience, an afterthought, and that the bottom line is what actually counts — that has always been true. But the speed and the shamelessness of it right now feels like something new.
I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this down. I don’t have some epiphany about how to turn it around. I’m just really, really sad. And tired. Here I am — researching, documenting, educating, advising — and the machines come anyway.
I feel homesick for a Curaçao that no longer exists.
*Albrecht, Sartore, Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman, Kelly, Stain, Tonna, Pollard (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australas Psychiatry. PubMed Commons
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