Solastalgia: Being Homesick at Home

Naming the grief we feel as our world transforms

Mojave, CA // @zakkoltun on Instagram

I recently finished reading an absolute stunner of a book, Is a River Alive? by Robert MacFarlane. In the book, MacFarlane discusses the particular grief he feels when the creek behind his childhood home has dried to a trickle. It’s the same feeling one might experience when the forest they walked through each morning has been clearcut, or when the coastline they knew intimately has been reshaped by storms that come harder and more frequently than they used to. Although you are still technically “home”, there’s a sense that home is disappearing beneath your feet.

Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht gave us a word for this feeling: solastalgia. He defines it as “the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory” (p. 45). The term blends Latin roots meaning solace and desolation with the Greek suffix -algia (pain). Unlike nostalgia—which describes the longing for a home you’ve left behind—solastalgia is the homesickness you experience while you’re still there, watching your environment transform in ways you find distressing.

Albrecht first identified this phenomenon while working in Australia’s Upper Hunter Valley, where residents contacted him in palpable distress about large-scale coal mining operations that were fundamentally altering their landscape. Although these people continued to live in the same houses on the same land, the environment that had given their lives meaning and context was vanishing. Their experience revealed the existential dislocation of environmental change happening to them.

It’s hard to imagine a place changing much more drastically than what Wendell and Jane Southworth have experienced in their years living alongside The Salton Sea, once home to a bustling resort town in Southern California. The sea has continued to shrink as inflow from the Colorado River has declined, leading to extremely high salinity and toxic dust pollution. Watch the short video below to get a visceral sense of how Wendell and Jane’s lives have changed as their home has changed.

The Age of Solastalgia

Albrecht has called our current time “the age of solastalgia.” Climate change, deforestation, industrial development, and ecosystem collapse are accelerating at rates that outpace our capacity to process them. Our human-created and natural environments are changing so rapidly that there’s a fundamental mismatch between our lived experience of the world and our ability to comprehend it. Much of the knowledge passed down from previous generations feels inapplicable or stale in the world we’re inhabiting, and what we thought we knew about weather patterns, seasonal rhythms, and environmental stability has become unreliable guidance for navigating our present reality.

The phenomenon manifests differently depending on how closely your livelihood and identity are tied to place. Research shows that agrarian communities and Indigenous populations experience particularly acute solastalgia because their connection to land isn’t merely aesthetic or recreational but fundamental to survival and cultural continuity. Entire ways of being in the world are lost when the environment changes.

Unsurprisingly, wealth seems to offer some insulation. Following destructive wildfires in the western United States, higher-income families experienced significantly less solastalgia than their lower-income neighbors because they had the resources to relocate or rebuild. For those without such flexibility, environmental change is more likely to compound into chronic distress.

Place and The Self

What makes solastalgia particularly insidious is its temporal dimension — its chronic nature. Solastalgia equates with ongoing loss, or chronic present-tense devastation. One wakes up each day to an environment that’s a little less familiar and perhaps a little more hostile, or a little further from the place that once offered comfort. There is a sense of powerlessness that intensifies the distress; often, all a person can do is watch their home transform under forces that are entirely beyond their control.

This matters because our sense of place is often intimately connected to our sense of self. We don’t just live in environments, we construct meaning and identity through them. Leigh Fletcher has done some beautiful writing about this in her Substack, The Place Between. When our environments destabilize, so does our psychological foundation. We’re might be left disoriented, grieving a home we haven’t technically left.

Solastalgia can serve adaptive functions, though. When processed collectively rather than suffered in isolation, environmental grief can catalyze action. I wrote about this more extensively in the piece I published last week:

Climate Anxiety is Death Anxiety

Solastalgia can drive communities to seek solace together, to engage in restoration work, or to create new forms of connection with place even as that place changes.

Control What You Can Control

I recently had the pleasure of joining a book club on Substack where we’re exploring themes of spiritual ecology and working to heal the fractured relationships between people, the living earth, and the sacred. I read Is a River Alive? with this crew. I wish we could meet IRL (of course), but there’s something quite healing about connecting with an international circle of people who are all deeply concerned about the world and our place in it. If you’re interested in joining, check out the group (led by Amrita Bhohi ) here. We’ll be reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance this December.

We’re not solving climate change or physically healing our places by reading together, but I think groups like this create the psychological conditions that might allow us to stay engaged in solstalgic states rather than retreating into denial or despair. Albrecht himself notes that solastalgia can be “future orientated” when it motivates people to “actively seek to create new things or engage in collective action that provides solace and communion in any given environment” (p. 48). The pain of watching home disappear can become fuel for reimagining what home might become, and spaces for collective processing offer the possibility of this kind of transformation.

Although it isn’t my typical mental orientation, I’m going to choose to be optimistic here. Changes to home—whatever and wherever home might be—will become increasingly difficult to ignore as the effects of climate change continue to get worse. By bringing our solastalgia into community, though, we might gain the vocabulary and psychological conditions necessary to better articulate our collective grief, and, just maybe, transform environmental mourning into environmental care.