Soliphilie
Soliphilia (angl.) — de solidaire / solidus (latin, solide, total) + philia (grec, amour)
A political neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe the shared solidarity and responsibility that defend a beloved living place. An active antidote to *solastalgia*: where the latter names the distress of seeing one’s environment degrade, *soliphilia* names the committed love—from the local to the global—that resists this degradation. Albrecht intended it to be deliberately neutral in the left-right divide, because defending a living environment should belong to no side.
La soliphilie qualifie ainsi une solidarité de tous envers tous dans un sentiment d’unité. […] La soliphilie introduit également la notion politique d’engagement pour la sauvegarde d’endroits aimés, du local au global.
The word draws from a threefold root that Albrecht embraces: the French solidaire, in the sense of interdependent; the Latin solidus, meaning solid or whole; and the Greek philia, the love for one’s fellow citizens and neighbors. He initially considered solidarity, but the term struck him as too firmly anchored on the left to unite across divides. Soliphilia, by contrast, seeks a word that no one can claim exclusively, because the defense of a shared living environment precedes the left-right divide.
It is a neologism designed for action. Albrecht coined it in 2009 as the political response to solastalgia: transforming the negative emotion—the distress of watching one’s home unravel—into collective strength. Environmental damage ceases to be a personal matter and becomes the concern of the community, which can then address the root cause and restore the place. Soliphilia is what drives “the relentless work we must do everywhere on the planet to save threatened places.”
It extends the effort of reliance—reconnecting what destruction isolates—and intersects with the solidarities of the living that ecofeminism places at the heart of care.
Soliphilia ≠ biophilia: the latter denotes a love of life in general, while the former is the committed love of a place one defends. It also ≠ topophilia: attachment to a landscape can remain contemplative, whereas soliphilia is inherently political—a solidarity that takes action to preserve what we hold in common.