Spring Voices Lecture Series with Glenn Albrecht

Join us for a presentation by Glenn Albrecht on "Solastalgia: Its Creation, Applications, and Future."

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Solastalgia is an emotion or psychological state produced by the lived experience of negatively perceived and experienced environmental change. It is specifically related to forms of human distress connected to the degradation of one's home environment at all scales. In this lecture, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht will explain why her created the concept of solastalgia in 2003 in the context of the impacts of coal mining and severe drought in Eastern Australia. As he and others have developed the concept over time, the application of solastalgia to the emotions generated by climate chaos and other forms of environmental desolation has increased. There is now an expanding domain of relevance where solastalgia has also been applied in other intellectual and creative spaces, including environmental law, literature, art, music and film. It is Albrecht’s hope that as humans address the conditions that cause solastalgia (mal-development, greenhouse gas emissions, land clearing, industrial agriculture, over-use of pesticides etc), the need for this concept/word will disappear. I conclude that if 'we' can build the Symbiocene, a new era where humans reunite with life in nature, our positive Earth emotions will thrive and the negative emotions tied to the ecocide of the Anthropocene will be "on the run."

Glenn A. Albrecht is an Honorary Associate in the School of Geo-sciences, The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He retired as Professor of Sustainability, Murdoch University, in mid-2014. He continues to work as an environmental philosopher and published a book, Earth Emotions, with Cornell University Press in 2019. Earth Emotions was published in French and Spanish in 2020. In numerous publications and public talks over the last two decades, Dr. Albrecht has developed the theme of the psychoterratic (psyche-earth), or negative and positive emotional states connected to the state of the Earth. New concepts developed by him are now becoming well established in the international scholarly literature, new research theses and as inspiration for many creative people in the arts. He currently lives at Wallaby Farm on Wonnarua Land in NSW. He describes himself as a "farmosopher," combining thinking and writing with growing food and protecting a haven for wildlife. While he is best known for creating the concept of solastalgia, his most recent work develops the meme of the "Symbiocene," a future state where humans re-integrate with the rest of nature.