In 2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht published a paper naming a new emotion: solastalgia. The word describes the pain we feel when we see environmental change in the places we call home. In justifying his decision to make up a new word, Albrecht pointed out that English has very few words that connect emotional and environmental states. Albrecht found plenty of examples of solastalgia: among Australian farmers during lengthy droughts, residents of Louisiana following Katrina, and survivors of the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004.
In the years since, environmental scientists and environmental psychologists have honed the concept further, arguing that what we feel in this time of climate change is outright grief: a grief unique enough and pervasive enough to have its own name. Ecological grief, or climate grief.
Climate grief is a new name for what is, for me, a familiar emotion. Before I was a pastor, I was a scientist. For nearly 25 years, I studied the effects of a warming climate on the forests of the far north: the Alaskan boreal forest, the Siberian taiga. I knelt in front of trees, measured them, and counted their growth rings to learn their histories. I listened to their stories of life in a time of climate change: stories that spoke of an imperiled landscape, of an imperiled world.
