Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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There are two trees at the back of my neighbour’s garden that talk to me – and have done for almost 45 years. It leads children to have little or no empathy (at all) for wilderness = places largely untouched my humans. He shines a light on Potawatomi; a Native American language in which not only humans, animals and plants are alive, but most objects we consider inanimate – like mountains, boulders, winds and fire too.His study helps us to better understand the traumatism felt, for example, when The Hunter Valley farmers saw their farming land converted into coal pits. How many funky neologisms based on latin and germanic roots does it take to make the rather obvious point that "nature destroyed feels bad" and "animism feels good"? For me, it validates such an approach to understanding my own responses to place, and my own lived environment, with a particular focus in my own case on not only my experiences, but those of my parents, my grandparents and their ancestors, who have lived in this same corner of Hampshire for centuries. He argues that “Once a person realizes that the landscape they have before them is not replicated in even a general way elsewhere in the country or on their continent or even in the world, there is ample room for a positive Earth emotion based on rarity and uniqueness. Apart from the emotion typology which is at least fun and fruitful regardless of how stringent it may be (similar to how personality typologies tend to be bullshit but at the same time very fun and fruitful), the outlook of the book is just confusing and, I think, confused.

A book for our time, which offers optimistic possibilities to address our earth emotions now and into the future. It has helped reinforce to me why social, economic, political, cultural and historical factors are important in this respect, but now better understanding that they are informed by environment and nature at their heart. Albrecht offers a framework within which to understand and acknowledge the dissociation of humans from the living world. Men, women and all other genders can use their ‘Green Muscle’ in non-violent ways to support the movement into the Symbiocene, especially where hostile opposition is already a serious consideration.It begins in the South West of Western Australia for the first two decades of his life, before switching to Newcastle in New South Wales, and in particular, the Hunter Valley. His encouragement of patriotism, tribalism and regionalism seem to be in good faith, but also slip into the risk of being weaponised by eco-fascists.

As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. The book helpfully provides a glossary of all the ‘ psychoterratic’ terms at the back of the book, for ease of cross-reference.Earth Emotions as a book intrigued me for its offering of a discussion of the “full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world”.

I found the new terms fascinating and intriguing and after reading the book I still see them the same way. He has created an extensive glossary of terms that relate to emotional responses to nature and environment. Solastalgia is the nostalgia (= homesickness) you have "when you are still located within your home environment". As a fellow old hippy, I want peaceful change as well … but with the global ascendancy of the militaristic and violent Right, peace seems a long way off. I strongly recommend this book to anybody, David, who enjoys more than just a getaway story for distraction.Albrecht steps up to meet the need to better express the evolving relationships between our sense of place, our emotions and our wider biophysical health. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. e. separating human cultures and all the xenophobia that comes with that) nor do we get a convincing argument as to how and why we can block such implications. These and other negative Earth emotions obviously lead to various mental and physical issues as well. Terrafuric: Coined by Albrecht, “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.