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I shall situate the emerging literature on eco-grief, climate grief, and ecological grief within the concept of solastalgia. I argue that the concept of solastalgia, as created and developed to the present, has strong affinities with the eco-grief literature. Solastalgia, the lived experience of negative environmental change, has much to offer those who seek clarification about the relationship between the state of human emotions and the state of the built and natural environment. In order to negate the distress and grief of emergent solastalgia, I have also created a new meme, the Symbiocene, which is the locus for the full expression of positive emotions that counter, or are the opposite of, solastalgia and other negative Earth emotions. I shall conclude with the idea that Generation Anthropocene, the ongoing cause of negative Earth emotions, shall be confronted by Generation Symbiocene and their suite of positive Earth emotions. This war of the emotions, I argue, shall determine the fate of humans on the Earth.
I created the concept of solastalgia in 2003 in order to give conceptual clarification to the experience of people whose home environment was being changed in unwelcome ways. By the term “environment,” I was thinking of the biophysical spaces and landscapes within which people live and which they call “home.” I wanted the human emotional, psychological, and cultural equivalent of what biologists called “ecosystem distress syndrome” (Rapport & Whitford, 1999).