Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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Maybe I’m just become too much of a hippy, or betraying that I’m someone who once flirted with the Quakers, but I don’t want to take on the personality of those that I’m ‘taking on’, especially when it comes to use of ‘masculine muscle’. It was a ‘thought bubble’ within a much larger discussion of evolution, sex, gender and intelligence and how to build on what we are … to what we want to be.

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. The second is ‘ solastalgia’, a term coined by by Albrecht to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ – a distinctive kind of unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control, so a very specific kind of homesickness.

I found the new terms fascinating and intriguing and after reading the book I still see them the same way.

The purpose of these terms is twofold: first, to allow people make better sense of themselves and of their relationship with the planet; second, to encourage development of a more meaningful and optimistic outlook toward the planet. There is no escaping however an association with the unique biosphere and environment of a local area which are usually responsible for creating the rhythms which have contributed to creating those identities. Author hopes our planet to exit Anthroposcene, because there can not be “good Anthropocene”; current ~scene is only gona lead humans to destruction and possible extinction.Symbiocene’ is characterised in terms of social organisation ‘by human intelligence that replicates the symbiotic and mutually reinforcing life-reproducing forms and processes found in living systems…. 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. As a result, this will have to lead to a ‘ Sumbiocracy’ – new forms of mutually beneficial government. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia.

This is a deeply philosophical book about the changing emotional connections humans make with the lands upon which they live. DOUBLE-DUTCH' moves - elegant communication like the steps which mesmerized me in Malcolm McLaren's famous track.

This book has to be one of the weirdest books I have read in a long time, and the weirdest book I have read and enjoyed in even longer. Yateley Common – definitely part of my sumbiography – and much of it is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The benefit of biophilic experiences, it is argued, is that they can also increase health and well-being. But the question I have now is if it’s really the new terminology that we lack to finally feel motivated enough to take actual action in battling climate change?