Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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Jim: Glenn, I think it’s a wonderful vision that you’re putting forward – more than a vision, perhaps, as you’re getting into the nuts and bolts, the detail, that needs to be attended to if it is to come to fruition. But many people, such as Jem Bendell, who founded the Deep Adaptation movement [/], would say that we are in a race against time. The rate of environmental degradation is such that some sort of societal collapse is inevitable. So visions such as yours will be overwhelmed by catastrophic events – enormous sea rises, or methane burning off in Siberia, or whatever.

During the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, there were tiny little movements through which people questioned the sanity of what was then a widely-accepted universal model of development. We’ve at least got to the point where that’s being contested – and it’s been contested publicly and openly by people of goodwill. I see this as a conceptual and practical leap forward. Control of your emotions comes from within. When you learn to obey the laws of nature from the inside, the astral plane, they manifest on the outside, the physical plane. In the Anthropocene humans live inside a category mistake called ‘the environment’. Negative emotions are stirred when what we love about home, place and land is being violated. Abnormal, life-threatening growth will be replaced by growth that is normal in that it assists in the maturity of organisms and the completion of a life-span. Dr Glenn Albrecht is freelance environmental philosopher and farmosopher. He has pioneered the domain of psychoterratic or psyche – earth relationships with his concept of solastalgia. He is the author of Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World and writes at Psychoterratica.

Glenn: Yes. The box is the cheapest possible way of producing a structure, but it does not really consider the humanity of its residents, or indeed their connections to other life forms. There’s the spiritual dimension to life, and this needs to find its expression in architecture and engineering, and other ways that we must operate as humans. Lay face down on the ground and unburden yourself of all your woes and worries, then be silent and listen to what Mother has to say. The noises you hear deliver a message.

Philosopher Glenn Albrecht, in writing Earth Emotions, is creating a language that ties together humanity and our surrounding environment, both in the positive and negative. He has created an extensive glossary of terms that relate to emotional responses to nature and environment. The book begins with the negative in concepts like "solastalgia", "the existential and lived experience of negative environmental change" (p38), then follows with the affirming in concepts like "Symbiocene" or a future epoch of mutualism between people and their environment. You must also remember that water is the giver of life, but does have destructive qualities as well. Furthermore, water reacts to energy. Given the body of the human male is 60% water (55% in females), there is a theory that positive and negative energy directed towards a person can have an effect on our physiological and mental health. Ten years ago the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave a long speech discussing -- to put it one way -- how the future would look in the future. He coined the phrase “dark euphoria” to express a certain outlook that now feels ever more pervasive. “Things are just falling apart,” he said, “you can’t believe the possibilities, it’s like anything is possible, but you never realized you’re going to have to dread it so much.” In moments of collective distress, people have tried to name the pain that comes from the disruption of home: a complex set of feelings that includes longing, love, grief, existential angst, and even a lurking sense of dread. Loss of home can evoke the pain of dispossession, profound cultural and personal disorientation, and righteous anger, all of which can haunt a society for generations.Glenn: This comes from the Indo-European word ghehd, which means to unite, and is connected to words like ‘good’ or ‘together’ or ‘to gather’. And geist is a German word which means ‘spirit’ or, you know, something which is connected to the non-material, the élan vital [/] or whatever word you wish to use; it refers to the spiritual energy. So I put the two together to try and talk about a secular spirituality that comes closer to what I feel when I’m on Wallaby Farm bird watching or looking into the eyes of a poisonous snake. This is something that I think all of us have the potential to feel, largely because we’re products of evolution in both a Darwinian and Margulisian sense – I am referring to Lynn Margulis [/] who formulated the symbiogenesis version of evolution. I put the idea of ghedeist out there to stimulate further thinking about what it means to be a spiritual person in a material world. I am not a religious person in any conventional sense of the word, but I would say I am a spiritual person and I believe that there are lots of other people like me. Having never spent any time on a polar ice cap, my response to photos of their melting cannot be called solastalgia. My mood is, rather, a combination of mermerosity (the “anticipatory state of being worried about the possible passing of the familiar and its replacement by that which does not sit comfortably in one’s sense of place”) and terrafurie (“the extreme anger unleashed within those who can clearly see the self-destructive tendencies in the current forms of industrial-technological society and feel they must protest and act to change its direction”), with a certain amount of meteoranxiety as well. Meteoranxiety is “anxiety that is felt in the face of the threat of the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events” and should not be confused with a phobia regarding meteors -- though I have that, too. E. O. Wilson made an important observation when he stated that “people will travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can’t put into words.” What remains 'silent' about this activity most likely includes a sense of close connection with something larger than the self, of being at one with the rhythm of the waves, fresh air, the daily pulse of tides and the proximity to non-human life. There is also the horizon: nothing impedes a view into curved infinity.

In esoteric wisdom, Earth relates to the body. If you do not look after yourself and are unfit or unhealthy, it becomes more difficult to build other energies created from the three other elements.

I have argued that a new era in human-nature relationships - one I call the Symbiocene - will emerge from the chaos of the Anthropocene. I have also suggested a new consortium of humans, Generation Symbiocene, led mainly by the young, can take the reins of this revolutionary movement.