Solastalgie
de sola (solari / desolare, latin) + -algia (douleur)
A neologism coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress felt by someone who sees their own living environment transform or degrade without having left it. Unlike nostalgia—suffering from distance, the ache of return—*solastalgia* strikes someone who hasn’t moved: it’s the land that slips away beneath their feet. An emotion of the Earth, not a mental illness.
La solastalgie est le mal du pays éprouvé alors que vous vivez toujours chez vous dans votre environnement habituel.
Albrecht combines sola—the Latin root of solari (to console) and desolare (to devastate, to abandon)—with -algia, meaning pain. The word is modeled on nostalgia, but to mark the difference: where nostalgia names an unending absence of consolation caused by distance, solastalgia names that same absence of consolation without having left the place. The desolation comes to you.
Albrecht coined the term while listening to residents of the Upper Hunter Valley in Australia watch open-pit mining unmake their landscape. Neither uprooted nor in exile: they had stayed home, only to face a home that was no longer theirs. He emphasizes duration—this is the gradual erosion of an identity woven into a beloved place, not the sudden shock of disaster. And he rejects the clinical label: solastalgia “describes an existential state, an emotion, not a mental illness.” In his vocabulary, it is one of the Earth’s emotions, alongside ecological fear or grief.
The gesture aligns with the effort of reliance: to name what the destruction of the environment does to the psyche, making it thinkable and shareable rather than leaving it wordless.
Solastalgia ≠ nostalgia: the latter suffers from distance in space or time, the former from loss endured in place. It also ≠ eco-anxiety: the latter dreads a looming threat, while solastalgia mourns a degradation already here, before one’s eyes.