Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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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. As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Glenn Albrecht is one of the most important eco-philosophers of our time, though the term 'eco-philosopher' may be too narrow.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. For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. By unpacking all of that at first hand in an almost autoethnographic fashion, it helps with his wider ‘psychoterratic’ mission. 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. Topophobic: “Fear of entering a biophysical place” which might explain a lot of contemporary behaviour, especially when linked with a systematic fear of ecosystems and life as subsequent generations separate from nature and life (expressed as Ecophobia and Biophobia).

The most obvious, and strongest interest is in the lexicon itself, and how it interacts with my own pre-existing interest in issues to do with ‘place’ (a bastardised word if ever there was one in modern public policy-making); ‘the particular’ (the detail, the unique, the small things which seem to disappear each day with ever increasing homogeneity demanded by the dominant economic model); as well as with the environment more generally, and with local history, and how all manner of public policy splices through all of these at various levels. 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. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory. The book promotes an antidote to the Anthropocene in the form of the 'Symbiocene', a future era where positive earth emotions will flourish.He established the now widely used and accepted concept of solastalgia, or the lived experience of negative environmental change. The first is “ Symbiocene” – the name Albrecht wishes to rechristen and remould the current geological and climactic epoch – the “Anthropocene” – which has seen human activity have such a dominant, overwhelming, and almost certainly scarring impact on our planet, and prospects for future survival. it is a bad thing and we only have to accept it because we can't change it, not because we agree with it? Though occasionally weighed down by the philosophical/linguistic analysis, Albrecht offers several interesting frameworks – in particular, the Symbiocene – that provide fruitful territory for artists to imagine into being.