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How does life on an increasingly degraded planet make us feel, how should it make us feel, and how can we talk about those environmental emotions in ways that foster more convivial futures? These are urgent questions at the start of the twenty-first century, for runaway climate change is impacting human moods as well as nonhuman atmospheres, mental health research claims, and forces us to rethink our psychology and vocabulary alongside our economy and technology. In this context, Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined the term solastalgia to designate “the homesickness you have when you are still at home,” “the lived experience of negative environmental change” (p. 200), and this term is now increasingly employed in academic debates and popular culture to contemplate the psychological fallout of global pollution, biodiversity loss, and destabilized weather. Building on that impressive success, Albrecht's book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (2019) develops his pioneering remarks on solastalgia in ways that are fruitful as well as flawed because they enrich the cultural debate on environmental emotions but fail to recognize its full complexity. Summarizing his argument, this review pinpoints the study's merits and limitations while reflecting on the underlying view of nature, emotions, and culture. To my mind, Albrecht deserves praise for his attempt to construct a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene psyche but also criticism for his limited dialogue with other researchers.
To be clear, Earth Emotions is a bracing attempt to advance the debate on global heating, which constitutes a human health and identity crisis, Albrecht convincingly argues, alongside a widening biological and social catastrophe. In going forward, we will need to address that psychological and existential damage too, and the concept of solastalgia helpfully alerts us to the unique form of “desolation” that arises when the fauna