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Solastalgia, Climatic Anxiety: An Emotional Geography to Find Our Way Out,

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 3, 2023

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 To be published in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 3, 2023

Solastalgia, Climatic Anxiety: An Emotional Geography to Find Our Way Out

Abstract
This paper will discuss the notion of solastalgia or climatic anxiety (Albrecht, G. et al., 2007;
Galea et al., 2005) as a form of anxiety connected to traumatic environmental changes that
generate an emotional blockage between individuals, their environment (Cloke et al., 1991) and
their place (Nancy, 1993). I will use a phenomenological approach to explain the way in which
emotions shape our constitution of reality (Husserl, 1970; Sartre, 1983, 1993, 1996; Seamon &
Sowers, 2009; Shaw & Ward, 2009). The article’s overall goal is to describe the relationship
between environment and ‘climatic’ emotions to understand what we can do to improve our
well-being. I believe that scientistic and reductionistic ways of looking at climatic anxiety do not
consider this complex dynamic and fail to propose actual solutions for the well-being of both the
environment and the individuals.

Keyword

Place, Solastalgia, Anxiety, Emotions

Introduction

How would you feel if the place where you live slowly became hostile and incapable of

satisfying your basic needs? How would it feel to lose your home in a natural disaster?

The notion of solastalgia seems to address the emotional essence of these questions that I will

explore in this paper. In the first section, I will define solastalgia and the emotional texture that

the concept of place assumes in relation to the individual and its community. For this reason, in

the following sections I will reconstruct the emotional geography of people affected by

solastalgia, or climatic anxiety disorder, in order to shed light on the main constituents of reality

as it appears to them. Then, in the second part, I will discuss how a phenomenological approach

to emotions (Husserl, 1970; Sartre, 1983, 1993, 1996; Seamon & Sowers, 2009; Shaw & Ward,

2009; Kierkegaard, 1844) is conducive to understanding the role of emotions in the constitution

of our sense reality, and to what extent emotions influence our sense of belonging to a

community.

The third part will be dedicated to understanding the triggers of the solastalgic state of

mind and the way to sooth their impact on the individual’s life. Individuating the trigger and

extending compassionate acceptance toward our own corporeal limits as to how they can be

affected (through an affection) and affect others (as the result of modifications) (McCormack,

2003; Thrift, 2004) is already a good beginning to the healing process. In fact, the fears behind

solastalgic anxiety seem to be spatially located, although individuals are often not cognitively

aware of solastagia’s meanings and implications. This unawareness results in feelings of

isolation, disorientation, and the loss of a sense of belonging. The place that feels lost has

tangible and intangible qualities that are strongly informed by emotions. Losing one’s place in
the world reveals our own vulnerability1 as humans and puts us through trauma; even if this

trauma is embedded in our human nature, it might remain “beneath our consciousness (Levinas,

1972) and might still be difficult to fully grasp. Being human in the world means to be exposed

to the possibility of a vulnus (harm) that external agents can inflict upon us. Hence, this paper

will propose a strategy to recover the sense of place through compassionate acceptance of one’s

own vulnerability.

I. Solastalgia

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2005)2 to indicate

the emotional anxiety that derives from climatic impact on the environment. The term was first

introduced in 2003 at an Ecohealth Forum in Montreal. This word expresses the lost sense of

comfort (in Latin, solacium) combined with the consequent growing distress (from Greek, algos-

-ἄλγος) that arises from seeing one’s own space changing because of climatic problems. As a

different form of homesickness3, solastalgia is a kind of anxiety directed towards a place that

became unavailable to the individual who was inhabiting it. As we experienced during the covid-

19 pandemic, our favorite parks and beaches were still there, but we could not benefit from their

1
I do not use here the term vulnerability in its technical way as in Fuchs (2013), Quepons (2020), Baiasu (2020) but
in its etymological way as being exposed to vulnus (harm).
2
See, Galway, 2019, online: “The year 2018 had the largest number of papers published (17%) suggesting a growing
interest in solastalgia since the early 2000s. It should be noted that our review only covered articles published between
January and October 2018, and therefore did not capture the full year. The use of the concept is not confined to a
specific discipline; the solastalgia literature spans a wide range of academic disciplines, including public health, human
geography, anthropology, and philosophy.”
3
Home is a very difficult concept to describe. Eliot writes that "Home is where one starts from" (T. S. Eliot, 1943, p.
17). The jurist Beale considers home as "the place to which a person intends to return when they are away from it"
(Joseph H. Beale, 1935, p. 126). ”The home is the starting-point as well as the terminus. It is the null-point of the
system of coordinates which we ascribe to the world in order to find our bearings in it. Geographically "home"
means a certain spot on the surface of the earth. Where I happen to be is my "abode"; where I intend to stay is my
"residence"; where I come from and whither I want to return is my "home." Yet home is not merely the homestead -
my house, my room, my garden, my town - but everything it stands for” (Schutz, 1976, p. 119). Home seems to be
the terminus quo of our wandering in the world as well as a place of faith. Here Solastalgia can, of course, refer to
home but does not limit to it. For more literature on homesickness, see Peter Tijmes (1998).
presence and find joy in them. The lockdown deprived us from our place and generated, in some

individuals, a state of anxiety that originated, in fact, from this very complex notion of place

(Galway et al., 2019). Jean-Luc Nancy describes the notion of place as the common space of an

interactive community; in this space, our personal being unfolds and creates an interaffective

world where we can co-exist (1993, p. 78). I think it is this notion of place that collapses in cases

of solastalgia. The place, which was considered essential for the emotional and physical survival

of the individual and their community, is endangered. The place of the solstagic person is not

limited to the home or the home-land in which the individual feels attached, but it extends to the

familiar environment as it used to be before the occurrence of the dramatic changes produced by

natural and climatic disasters. The gym where we used to release our anxiety twice a week, the

church where we went to pray on Sundays, represent places that dramatically became

unavailable to us during the lockdown; global environmental factors negatively impacted our

lives.

Albrecht’s groundbreaking paper (2005) uses these words to define this lived-experience:

It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and

that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack

on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular

place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. It is an

intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that

continues to give comfort or solace. Solastalgia is not about looking back to some golden

past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the

loss of the present as manifested in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by

 forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short,

solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ (2015, p. 42)

As this passage shows with clarity, ‘place’ is a key term for understanding the quality of

suffering provoked by solastalgia. According to Trujillo (2009), place, in this instance, does not

indicate any ordinary space or a specific landscape to enjoy, but it is also the emotional structure

that holds together the lives of all those belonging to that space. Without this structure, these

lives will feel empty and amorphous. As Trujillo writes, “where the colonizers [and by extension

mining, agribusinesses, oil and lumber interests…] saw a space-landscape, natives saw a place”

(2009, p. 12).

In his paper Albrecht and colleagues describe cases of both acute and chronic space

degradation in which solastalgia arose: persisting drought in rural New South Wales and the

mining communities in the Upper Hunter Valley of Australia. Both environments became

unwelcoming for the communities that were still living there because of profound environmental

changes and poor management of natural resources. This transformation generated a sense of

loss and powerlessness for the individuals belonging to those communities; the environment on

which their vital and emotional survival depended was so endangered that the individuals were

left with a sense of personal deprivation and failure (Tschakert, 2010).

A variety of factors can trigger this condition: natural disasters--such as flooding,

drought, or earthquakes (e.g., Warsini, 2014)--resource extraction (e.g., Canu, 2017), climate

change (e.g., Tschekart et al., 2013), and political violence (e.g., Sousa, 2014). Acute triggering

factors can be floods, wildfires, or earthquakes which abruptly transform the environment into

desolation without its community having time to adjust to it; while the chronic factors involve a

gradual degradation of places, such as sea level rise or drought. Climate change leads to both
acute impacts and chronic degradation of places; the words that are commonly used to describe

these changes on the environment are: “cumulative”, “compounding”, “imposed”, “unwelcome”,

“unwanted”, “dramatic”, “negative”, and “profound/intense” (Galway, 2019, online; Albrecht,

2005, 2010; Pannel, 2018).

Given the fast-paced reality of the climate change,4 this form of anxiety will gradually afflict a

larger number of people, thus generating growing distress and a new range of mental, emotional,

and spiritual health problems. It is already observable how the global suicide rates have

increased 50% in the last 50 years and rates of psychological and psychiatric disorders have also

increased (WHO, 2014). In Asia, for example, psychiatrists have shown the interconnection

between rising temperature and suicides. A 2013 meta-analysis of 60 studies concluded that

every standard deviation of warming in global temperatures corresponded to a 4% rise in

interpersonal violence and a 14% rise in intergroup conflict (Kim, 2015). In 2015, the Lancet

Commission on Health and Climate Change recognized solastalgia as a key dimension for

understanding global mental health and its changes through climatic impact.

Important questions for bioethicists and environmental ethicists to address, given the

situation, are: “How can individuals and groups cope with solastalgic distress? Can the

restoration of degraded landscapes help people to cope with distress and enable healing? Can

interventions focused on collective healing enable coping with solastalgia in ways that promote

human and ecosystem health?” (Pannell, 2019). I will address some of these questions in the next

sections.

4
See, IPCC press release: “In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report
on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ◦C [14]. Soon after, the Fourth National Climate Assessment was issued by
13 U.S. federal agencies and presented a stark warning for climate change consequences [15]. In December 2018, the
24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) outcomes
highlighted the importance of staying within the 1.5 ◦C temperature rise target, as well as planning for how to achieve
this goal” retrieved from https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/11/pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf.
II. Emotions and reality

Emotions often have the power to affect reality (which I mean here according to

Husserl’s German real and reel where real indicates reality as the emotional intentional content

of one’s lived experience and reel points to reality itself that exists independently of us)5 and

shape it according to the intensity and the relationality that they engender. They are as concrete

as the meadow on which we are walking and the ceiling at which we are staring. Sometimes they

are even more real than that— getting them out of your head is often more difficult than walking

away from a room.

For this reason, in the 1970s geographers who specialized in human geographical

research integrated emotions into their studies of human life. The turning point of emotional

(Anderson & Smith 2001; Bondi 2005; Davidson et al., 2005; Pile 2009) and affectual geography

was in 2001 when Anderson and Smith proposed “a fuller program of work, recognizing the

emotions as ways of knowing, being and doing, in the broadest sense; and using this to take

geographical knowledges - and the relevance that goes with them - beyond their usual visual,

textual and linguistic domains” (2001, p. 8). From here, emotional and affectual geography

developed in a multitude of interesting directions: the affectual worlds of software (Shaw &

Ward, 2009; Budd & Adey, 2009), the naming of places (Kearney & Bradley 2009), and the

experience of pain (Bissell, 2009). In this sense, emotional geography became a way to help us

understand what the reality of the place looks like for a person who suffers from solastalgia and

5
According to Fink, both in Husserl’s Ideas (1913) and Logical Investigations (1900), phenomenology’s goal is to
clarify “everything which can be brought to the point of manifesting itself as it is, be it real or ideal” (1970, 85). In
phenomenology, reality refers to two different but related meanings: the intentional reality (in German, real--
translated in this passage with ideal) of what is believed as true and valuable by the experiencing subject, and the
core reality (in German, reel) which is conceived of as existing independently of our experiencing of it. On the one
hand, stands the real world (reel) as it is and, on the other, the world as it is experienced by us (real) – these two
forms of reality are of course very different from yet interrelated with each other.
to see how the affects that trigger the experience of intense fear can be listened to and eventually

treated. Since these affects represent “a transpersonal capacity which a body has to be affected

(through an affection) and to affect (as the result of modifications)” (Anderson, 2006, p. 735; see

also McCormack, 2003; Thrift, 2004a), it is important to find channels to allow affects to express

themselves without compromising, in a permanent way, one’s own sense of trust toward a

welcoming reality. For example, I think here about the sense of trust one might feel for crowded

places during recovery phase from the covid-19 pandemic or the fear one might have for being

out at sea after having been victim of a violent storm.

III. Emotional Geography of Anxiety

In his sketch for a theory of emotions (1996/1939), Sartre shows how natural objects can

become the trigger for intense fear; the anxiety that is attached to the intentional experience of an

innocuous object transforms the space into a dangerous place (Davidson & Smith, 2003; Smith

& Davidson, 2006). For example, a space that used to be a childhood favorite can become a

trigger for intense emotional pain given its state of present disruption. People suffering from

other forms of anxiety, for example arachnophobia, describe spiders as “emotional black-holes,

magically stretching and compressing the fabric of their world” (Smith et al., 2012, p. 61). In

another example, Sartre reports the case of a young woman who was fainting at the simple sight

of laurel (Sartre, 1939/1996, p. 50). In her case, psychoanalysis helped her to recover the

memory of childhood abuse that seemed to have been associated with laurel. As Fell remarks,

the world as it is experienced by an anxious person is “the physical and social environment

perceived as a set of attracting or repelling ‘vectors’ directed towards or away from various

objects” (Fell, 1966, p. 15).

 For a solastalgic person, the emotions attached to a certain place become a magic wand

capable of evoking the appearance of an overwhelming, often cruel and bleak, world which

Sartre described as “a world of dreams or of madness” (Sartre, 1939/1996). In this case, the

distressed person is the subject of a passive intentional experience that annihilates the sense of

linear time, as one normally experiences it, and brings them back to the spatio-temporal point in

which the disaster took place (in this case we are referring to acute solastalgia). Yet, only the

emotional and affective valence of that experience is present; the cognitive representation of it

has yet to be brought to the surface. Transforming that experience from one that is passive to one

that is active requires the commitment to a healing process that I will examine later in this article.

Phenomenological notions such as affective resonance (Mühlhoff, 2014), existential feelings

(Ratcliffe, 2007), and interaffectivity (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009) can help us to understand

how emotions have the power to shape our reality and our bodily existence in the way in which

we connect with others in our life-world.

Geographers working in the phenomenological tradition claimed that any thorough

existential presentation of the geographical life-world “must also recognize and examine the

personal and cultural dimensions of a particular environmental and placed experience” (Seamon

& Sowers, 2009). The arc described by affects, sensations, and then emotions, which describe

the trajectory of passive intentionality, gives meaning to the world of experience in such a way

that “the emotional subject and the object of the emotions are unified in an indissoluble

synthesis” (Sartre, 1996/1933). So long as this synthesis remains on a passive level, the subject

has no tools to free themselves from the bleakness evoked by those emotions. The reality of a

person external to those emotions can help to smooth the emotional turmoil triggered by the

object. The support of people who can participate in the reality of the person affected from
solastalgia and an external normal reality can help to mediate and bring meaning to the reality of

the space as it appears after or during the climatic change. “I think one of the problems of the

mining industry is, they play on the basic everyday person’s lack of resources. There’s no social

support for displacement, none whatsoever”. (Lea, cited in Albrecht, 2005, p. 52)

The environment is part of us and we are part of the environment; we cannot choose

when an emotion (instantiation of an environmental meaning) will arise and how long it will last.

As Sartre writes, “One cannot get out of <the emotion> as one pleases, it fades away of itself, but

one cannot put a stop to it… If we are really to be seized by horror we have not only to mime it,

we must be spell-bound and filled to overflowing by our own emotion” (1996/1939, pp. 75-76).

An emotion is as concrete as the bricks that make the walls that are in front of me. I cannot get

out of a haunting emotion unless I commit to its concreteness and start looking for the door. “The

linear time and geographical space that separates the phobic person from its trigger object

collapses because of the emotional reaction, the categories of the world act immediately upon the

consciousness, they are present to it at no distance” (Sartre 1996/1939, p. 90). When the affects

elicit an anxious reaction, the geographical distance that separates the person from the trigger of

their anxiety shrinks because the person is no longer present to itself. The trigger takes all the

space and, especially in the case of solastalgia, the trigger fills all the space of identity. The rules

and categories of the world as we know them disappear (Sartre, 1996/1939, p. 90).6 The timeless

6
Impossible to distinguish between what is felt and what is perceived [This sentence needs to be
rephrased; it seems to be incomplete]: we understand that the 'affective quality is so deeply
incorporated in the object that it is impossible to distinguish between what is felt and what is
perceived' (1983 [1940], 160). The world and the objects in it appear to take on the qualities that
emotion associates with them. The spider is not just something that is momentarily startling: it is
frightful as an integral aspect of its being. When I suddenly conceive an object to be horrible [ . .
. ] the horrible is now in the thing, at the heart of it, is its emotional texture, is constitutive of it. [
. . . ] Horribleness is not only the present state of the thing, it is a menace for the future, it
temporality of the emotions takes over the linear time of the individual. The rules and categories

of the world as we know them disappear (Sartre, 1996/1939, p. 90).

In another testimony on this problem we read:

“The environmental issues have certainly affected my health as in the physical but

emotionally, again it’s hard to quantify how much stress and emotion plays in somebody’s

health, but I certainly know that when things are running on an even keel, if that’s the right word,

if you don’t have those issues that you feel like you’ve got to really stand up and fight and are

you the only one that’s doing anything? You always find out that you’re not the only one that’s

doing something but at times you feel ... is anybody out there listening? I know how much worse

my asthma is.” (Brenda, cited in Albrecht, 2005, p. 53)

The space for individual identity disappears. The individual is left alone in that ‘no space’

and they are called to fight alone against the progressive crumbling of their physical and

emotional lives; the intimate space of self-identity and the space of fear are collapsed together.

Fear contaminates the reality of the new spaces (Douglas, 1993) and makes it very difficult to

generate a new meaningful sense of reality and identity. To get a glimpse into the passive pre-

verbal level of this problem, we can look at the dreams that the Jungian psychotherapist Martha

Crawford has collected from her clients suffering from anxiety triggered by climate change:

I dreamt that the clouds were very dark, stretching out over my town, and the rain and

wind were so bad we had to stay in the house. I looked outside at the clouds, and saw

some big billowing clouds below us. I realized they were rolling down the street, and

were not clouds at all, but a torrent of floodwater. I knew the water could come in

extends over and darkens the whole future, it is a revelation about the meaning of the world
(Sartre 1996 [1939], 82).
 through our front door, and I woke up from the dream in a panic of thinking about how to

get onto our roof to be rescued. (retrieved from: https://climatedreams.com/)

We flew over island after island, silently, bearing witness to the devastation. The people

were gone. There was no greenery. The waters were stagnant between the various islands.

Eventually, the plane ascended, and we flew away feeling a sense of impending doom.

(retrieved from: https://climatedreams.com/)

In both excerpts a “sense of impending doom” dominates the scenario. The “magic black hole”

into which the space of physical and emotional belongingness disappears transforms the life of

the solastalgic person into an eternal waiting area for something even worse to happen. Even

when the hole is avoided, one still knows that a threatening presence waits to suck them in.

IV. Approaches to Emotional Dysregulation

According to WHO's 2017 report, 260 million people suffer from anxiety disorders

worldwide; in the United States alone, anxiety disorders are the most common problems in

mental health (Narrow et al., 2002).7 I believe that these problems are still afflicting our society

so strongly because for a long time emotions have been discarded as inappropriate disruptions,

and their main cure was considered to be suppression.

7
See, Orsilio, Roemer, 2015, 15: “Anxiety disorders are in fact the most commonly experienced class of mental health
problems in the United States (Narrow, Rae, Robins, & Regier, 2002), with a conservative estimate of the 1-year
prevalence for any disorder of 13.1% for adults aged 18–54. Moreover, many anxiety disorders are associated with a
chronic course (e.g., Hirschfeld, 1996; Kessler, Sonnega, Bromet, Hughes, & Nelson, 1995; Noyes et al., 1992) and
diminished quality of life as evidenced by higher rates of financial dependence, unemployment (e.g., Leon, Portera,
& Weissman, 1995), poorer quality of life (Massion, Warshaw, & Keller, 1993), and increased risk for completed
suicide (Allgulander, 1994).The annual cost of anxiety disorders in the United States in 1990 was estimated to be
approximately $42.3 billion or $1,542 per individual with the vast majority of the cost deriving from nonpsychiatric
(54%), psychiatric (31%), and pharmacological (2%) treatment (Greenberg et al., 1999). The average health care costs
for individuals with anxiety disorders are double those of patients without those disorders even after adjusting for
medical comorbidity (Simon, Ormel, Von Korff, & Barlow, 1995)”.
 In psychology, emotional disorders have been often connected to cognition and treated as

cognitive problems, hence moving the focus from emotions to cognition. Anxiety disorders are

considered to be a disturbance in information processing which consequently leads to over- or

under-estimation of the danger or perceived threat (Beck et al., 1985). This cognitive way of

interpreting the disturbance is often associated with the person’s belief of their own inability to

succeed when facing the threat. As Clark (1986, 1988, 1996) remarks, catastrophic

misinterpretations of somatic sensations are more likely to generate panic disorders in the future

(Clark & Wells, 1995). Early theories on the development and treatment of anxiety disorders

generally suggested that fear develops through traumatic conditioning (e.g., Marks, 1969; Wolpe,

1958) and is maintained operantly through avoidance learning (Mowrer, 1947). For this reason,

anxiety has been defined as an irrational cognition (Bouton et al., 2001).

I believe that understanding how emotions affect anxiety is the best approach we can use

to the problem (Greenberg & Safran, 1987).8 Unlike Skinner that moves the causal role of

emotions in conditioning of human behaviors; and far from a classical cognitive approach which

considered emotions only a byproduct of cognition (e.g., Beck et al., 1985) or the outcome of the

epistemological life of the individual, I believe that emotions need their own space of

consideration. In fact, independently of cognition they often influence the genetic constitution of

cognitions.

Yet, Thompson (1990) stresses that emotions need to be restrained and under control

throughout all human life; their arousal should be diminished as much as possible in public and

8
See, Hayes, Orsillo, Roemer, et al., 2015, 38: “Although slower to emerge in the clinical psychological literature,
the importance of emotion has been embraced within numerous fields of psychology, including development (e.g.,
Eisenberg, Fabes, Guthrie, & Reiser, 2000), cognition (e.g., Gray, in press), social interaction (e.g., Lopes, Brackett,
Nezlek, Schütz,Sellin, &Salovey, 2004), abilities and expertise(e.g., Mayer, Caruso, & Salovey, 1999), and
neurobiological function (e.g., LeDoux, 1995)”.
private places (e.g. expression of anger, for example). Emotional hyper- and hypo-reactivity

(Berenbaum et al., 2003) have to be regulated either through control or suppression of the

emotional experience. This belief is restated in emotion theory, too, (see Ekman & Davidson,

1994) where emotions are defined as “disruptive entities that impede functioning and success”

(Frijda, 2009) and respond to the environment in an adaptive and goal-oriented way (Frijda,

2009). For this reason, the highly emotional reactivity of the human being (Efran et al., 1990) is

inevitable and will accompany them their whole life.

A less resigned model of emotional regulation has been proposed (Mennin et al., 2002,

2004) and considers emotional disruption caused by anxiety as “(1) heightened intensity of

emotions; (2) poor understanding of emotions; (3) negative reactivity to one’s emotional state

(e.g., fear of emotion); and (4) maladaptive emotional management responses.” Different from

previous more repressive models, this approach tries to read emotions according to their inner

autonomous structure and in relation to the impact that they have on the individual. In particular,

Barlow (2002) has described anxiety and mood disorders as emotional dysfunctions of the way

in which one is accustomed to processing emotions; hence, they do not need to be repressed but

only properly listened to and processed. The hierarchical structure of anxiety and mood

pathology (Clark & Watson, 1991; Brown et al., 1998; Zinbarg & Barlow, 1996) has shown how

negative affects negatively impact the symptomatology of moods and anxiety. This leads

analytic theorists to reintroduce emotions in the etiology of anxiety disorders, despite the

complexity that each emotion involves. Moreover, Friman, Hayes, and Wilson (1998) have

argued that anxiety and emotions, as general concepts, should not be avoided by radical

behaviors. Emotions, even those that bring us pain, are an important cue for understanding one’s

own sense of reality.

V. A Way Out Through Compassionate Acceptance

I believe that this technique has a better chance to help the solastalgic person than the

sole cognitive behavioral approach. Compassionate acceptance of the painful experience is, in

fact, the most powerful way to restore intimacy with one’s own pre-reflective disorganized

emotions and affections (passive intentionality) while restoring the sense of belongingness to the

lost place. Compassionate acceptance is key to re-establish an intimate relationship with one’s

own self and feeling the pain that the traumatic event involved (Leaviss & Uttley, 2015).

Through compassionate acceptance, we can tell the weaker part of ourselves that we can feel the

pain and we will not ignore it. It is, in fact, the temptation to ignore the trauma that triggers

anxiety and a deep state of loneliness and hopelessness.

Hence, the work that needs to be done to heal the overwhelming fear is to bring all the

pre-predicative passive feelings into expressions on a personal level so that the concrete space of

emotions becomes more sustainable and optimistic. The absence of social support to deal with

the practical and emotional consequences of displacement severely impacts personal well-being.

The reality of a person external to those emotions can help to smooth the emotional turmoil

triggered by the object. Via new technology such as zoom or skype, the support of people who

can participate in the reality of the person affected from solastalgia, through sharing an

intersubjective alternative reality, can help to mediate and bring meaning to the reality of the

collapsed space as it appears after or during the climatic change.

On an interpersonal level, it is necessary to transform the surrounding space into an

amicable one and to restore trust into the harmoniousness of life, even where practical limits are

encountered. For this reason, the person needs to feel the emotional support of other people who

can look at the emotional reality of that space with the same eyes but in a transformative way.
The solastalgic person needs to be seen in their entirety and needs to be given the tools to put

into practice a transformative action that renews the meanings and emotions of their present life.

The growing scarcity of primary resources and the risk of disease have to be tackled, and the

person needs to receive emotional and practical support to reorganize their own life according to

the best conditions possible.

The form of panic that solastalgia triggers is similar to existential anxiety. As existential

philosophers and psychotherapists remarked, anxiety as the awareness of our own limits and the

limits of our environment is a fact that we need to accept and make part of our daily life. Tillich,

for example, writes:

The description of anxiety as the awareness of one's finitude is sometimes criticized as

untrue from the point of view of the ordinary state of mind. Anxiety, one says, appears

under special conditions but is not an ever-present implication of man's finitude.

Certainly, anxiety as an acute experience appears under definite conditions. But the

underlying structure of finite life is the universal condition which makes the appearance

of anxiety under special conditions possible. Two of the threats to my existence are the

threats of the loss of time and the loss of space. Life is temporary, and the space that

belongs to me may be gone at any time. For example, when I think about running late to a

movie that I have looked forward to seeing, I notice that I say, "I am 'anxious' to get

there." Or, when I think about losing my place in line after waiting for twenty minutes to

get to the cash register, I realize that I get frustrated and angry. (Tillich, 2001, p. 24)

Losing space and losing time are constituent elements of existential anxiety because they

concretely point to the disappearance of our being that can, on a daily basis, damage our

integrity. As Malpas (2018) notices, as human beings we are embedded in a place. It is in this
place that our sense of subjectivity and objectivity unfolds; we are there for ourselves, and we

are there as a means for others to be. Moreover, this place is distinct from, but also related to,

space and time. If not in this space and in this time, this space would be different, and it would

define my meaning in a different way. Existential anxiety is an underlying condition of being

human, and now we know that this condition extends to the fragility of our planet. In the case of

existential anxiety, its concreteness is generated by the awareness of our transient state which

can be used as leverage to give us the courage to live in the time and space we have as

meaningfully as possible. From the standpoint of existential philosophy and psychology, anxiety

is “a natural, multifaceted response to both the freedom and the responsibility associated with

making daily choices about how to live one’s life” (Treanor et al., 2011). Solastalgia, as a form

of existential anxiety, can invite a transformative meaning of life, if given adequate practical

support to do so.

Conclusion

In this paper, I examined the notion of solastalgia and how it relates to the idea of place.

Following up the questions raised by Pannell (2016), I showed that individuals could cope with

solastalgic distress if the pre-verbal experience is brought forward through compassionate

acceptance of one’s own emotions. Taking care of the meanings constitutive of the emotional

and physical landscape and helping a transformation to occur, can initiate a healing process. Of

course, concrete support will still be needed for solastalgic people to survive a persistently

hostile environment. Interventions focused on collective and individual healing that enable

coping with solastalgia in ways that promote human and ecosystem health are possible and

necessary.
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