Solastalgia : A comparative corpus-based study of environmental lexicon

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1. Introduction

Over the last few decades, the prominence granted to discourses regarding the environment, ecology and climate change has progressed from a soft breeze to a howling gale. This is due, in the main, to the escalation of cataclysmic, environmentally related events and to the consequent social and political interest that has given rise to the mobilization of novel organisations, bodies and, of course, words. This study focuses on the evolving environmentally related lexicon and the new meanings/acceptations that have progressively arisen, be they emergent, or born of the combination of pre-existing terms and lemmas.

The increasingly widespread practice among news professionals, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists etc. of listening, recording and collecting narratives (often those of Indigenous or First Nations populations) centred upon environmental alterations or disasters has enhanced the tendency to coin new words and encompass new, still unrecognised complexities of meaning. Neologisms, such as eco-grief, eco-anxiety, solastalgia, are progressively entering mainstream communication, and while the meanings of ‘eco-grief’, and ‘eco-anxiety’ are easy to apprehend, the term ‘solastalgia’ requires more in-depth analysis. The immediate reference is to ‘nostalgia’ (or homesickness), which stems from the Greek words νόστος (return) and -αλγία (a composite element constructed from ἄλγος, pain), i.e., the suffering induced by a yearning to return to one’s place of origin, more likely to arise when the absence from home is imposed rather than chosen.

With ‘solastalgia’ a new layer of meaning is added: the neologism is formed through the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the previously mentioned term -αλγία, to the effect of describing a form of emotional or existential distress, caused by a negative environmental change leading to the loss of the erstwhile comfort/solace derived from living in a healthy, unharmed environment.

Coined in the early 2000s by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, the term was initially employed to describe the feelings and emotions of a growing number of people distressed by the impact of open cut coal mining and power stations in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales. In his words:

The people I was concerned about were still ‘at home’ but felt a similar melancholia as that caused by nostalgia connected to the breakdown of the normal relationship between their psychic identity and their home. […] In addition, they felt a profound sense of isolation about their inability to have a meaningful say and impact on the state of affairs that caused their distress. ‘Solastalgia’ was created to describe the specific form of melancholia connected to lack of solace [derived from their relationship to ‘home’] and intense desolation. (2005: 48, our italics)

Accordingly, the research questions we set out to address in this study are:

How was the term solastalgia coined when it first appeared? In what way has the term evolved over time in both the layman and scientific context?

After providing context and background to the notion of solastalgia, we will illustrate our two-pronged methodological approach (corpus investigation and narrative analysis). We will then present and discuss our findings and draw our conclusions.

2. Background

Despite the morphological resemblance to the term nostalgia, a fundamental difference between the terms lies in the fact that while nostalgia is past-oriented, solastalgia can also be future-oriented in so much that it may induce people to take action against the alteration or destruction of their physical environment by participating in collective grassroots movements, such as Landcare or Dunecare which promote the indigenous culture.

Besides these collective uprisings, a further route towards healing passes through narratives, “We also recognise the importance of language. By translating and writing Aboriginal story, there are oftentimes unacknowledged depths to the meaning behind the words. We wish to acknowledge the space between each word, the content of ‘More than Words’” (Upward et al. 2023, our italics). In the context of stories, vital information about country and land and cultural heritage are shaped and transmitted through ‘dreaming’ and ‘songlines’. It was to fill in the gap between existing words and the new depths of meaning, that the researchers utilised the recently coined term ‘solastalgia’, which effectively conveys the sense of loss and grief. The term has since been embraced by indigenous scholars (Fook 2018, Maguire 2020, Standen et al. 2022) who are concerned with the mental and physical welfare of aboriginal people, increasingly exposed to the emotional consequences of climatic events.

In today’s pervasive, multifaceted mediascape, some controversy has emerged around the idea that such a sense of environmental grief and loss can effectively be perceived on a personal, individual level, with political manipulation being called into question. Even though harmful contemporary ecological events, such as the melting of the icebergs, fracking, desertification, land clearing etc. now reach us all in real time with a strong audio-visual impact, the different intensity of such feelings among diverse populations, depending on their levels of immersion/symbiosis with natural environments, cannot be ignored (Ponton 2023).

With the passing of time, the notion of solastalgia has gained momentum in the wide domain of mental health care, suffice it to refer to some of the titles of the PuBMed articles we have investigated (Albrecht et al. 2007, Breth-Petersen et al. 2023, Cáceres et al. 2022, Upward et al. 2023, see References). The shared aim of experts working in this ambit is to heal the condition by restoring a sense of unity between people and their ecosystem, through sustainable ethical responses to the desolation of the environment, not only for First Nations, but also on a global level (see among others, Testoni et al. 2019, Wood et al. 2015).

2.1. The emergence and the need for new words

As emerges from our corpus (see below 3.1) ‘nostalgia’, solace’ and ‘homesickness’ are also employed to conceptualise solastalgia which, in given contexts, has become an umbrella term to describe the peculiar feeling of “homesickness at home” characterized by distress, psychological desolation, guilt, fear, helplessness and melancholia brought about by environmental change or destruction.

Albrect (2019: 63–9) repeatedly remarked that a new term was needed to convey the emotions felt upon witnessing the degradation of the planet in the Anthropocene. As previously stated, the perception of changing environmental conditions has led to the emergence of negative emotional conditions which he defined as ‘psychoterratic states’, i.e. emotions that people feel in relation to the earth. In addition to nostalgia and solastalgia, these states include ‘biophobia’, ‘ecoparalysis’, ‘ecoanxiety’, ‘ecocide’ and ‘ecophobia’, together with neologisms such as ‘terrafurie’ and ‘meteoranxiety’, which he used to describe the emotional states people can experience in the face of environmental disasters. Recent additions in mainstream communication include ‘climate despair’ together with the emerging figure of the ‘climate-aware therapist’ to whom Americans are increasingly turning (Haupt 2024).

3. Methodology and Data

In order to carry out a thorough investigation, we opted for both a quantitative and qualitative approach. The latter adopted the multi-faceted ecolinguistics framework which is increasingly gaining momentum in the contemporary arena, while the former exploited the consolidated resources and tools of corpus linguistics to study two collected datasets and uncover linguistic patterns which go towards the construction of specific discourses that are crucial to the way knowledge of social reality is constructed.

3.1. Corpus building

When focusing a diachronic lexical investigation upon an emergent term such as ‘solastalgia’, it is crucial to remember that the way in which the term is initially disseminated and popularized will clearly condition the way it is subsequently employed, reiterated and re-contextualised by those who encounter it. We chose to investigate the term solastalgia by building up the Solastalgia Corpus comprising two separate diachronic sub-corpora both dating back to the initial emergence of the term.

Our initial aim was to investigate whether a higher number of topical occurrences would emerge in a more restricted scientific context or in the more generic field of a daily broadsheet. We investigated the emergence of the term within the PubMed Central archive and the online international version of the Guardian newspaper in an attempt to access widespread non-nationally connoted texts.¹

From a temporal perspective, our investigation spanned the initial emergence of the term ‘solastalgia’ until the 1^st of August 2023. The two sub corpora were respectively denominated the Eco-PubMed corpus and the Eco-Guardian corpus.

The Eco-Guardian sub-corpus spans a period from 2014 to 2023. It contains a total of 17 articles equivalent to 36,359 tokens and 31,120-word types, with a type-token ration of 0,85 (85%) thus encompassing a relatively high vocabulary variation. 15 out of the 17 articles which make up the small newspaper corpus belong to the ‘Climate crisis + Opinion’ section of the online newspaper. The other two belong to the book review section.

The Eco-PubMed sub-corpus spans a period from 2007 to 2023. It contains a total of 31 articles equivalent to 161,100 tokens and 133, 745 types, with a type-token ratio of 0,83 (83%). Here too the lexical diversity is relatively high. The greater number of articles in the Eco-PubMed sub-corpus points to the fact that the origin and first use of the term relate to scientific rather than lay communication.

3.1.1. Corpus investigation

To carry out our corpus investigation, we made use of the text analysis tool Sketch Engine. We uploaded the Eco-PubMed and Eco-Guardian sub corpora and proceeded to question the software. We opted to start by observing the frequency wordlists of the two sub corpora as such inventories can serve as a generic source of information which can illuminate a number of phenomena to then be investigated. We eliminated the function words (pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, articles) which tend not to be subject to linguistic innovation or change, and concentrated on the content words which could provide us with an initial reading.

The reason for the early cut off (first ten content words only) was due to the noticeable numerical drop-off which emerged between the 10^th and the 11^th occurrence in both the sub-corpora, a drop from 1,088 to 763 in the Eco-Guardian sub-corpus, and from 3,003 to 1,642 in the Eco-PubMed one.

We had expected a more marked difference between the two lists, considering the more popular, informative nature of the former and scientific nature of the latter. Due to space limitations, we will briefly outline the manner in which each term appears in the two corpora:

• Verb to be – mostly used to define the notion of solastalgia.
• People – mostly used as agents of destructive environmental actions.
• Climate – as the underlying discourse.
• Change – to describe the devastation reaped by man.
• Anthropocene – as a contextual situation of place and time.
• New – to signal novel information.
• Mental and research – both connected to the scientific discourse.
• Distress, grief and loss – to convey the emotional burden.

Table 1. The two sub-corpora frequency lists

Solastalgia Corpus – Word frequency list
Eco-Guardian sub-corpus	Eco-PubMed sub-corpus
1) is	1) is
2) climate	2) are
3) are	3) climate
4) people	4) change
5) change	5) solastalgia
6) solastalgia	6) mental
7) new	7) people
8) anthropocene	8) research
9) grief	9) distress
10) distress	10) loss

We next proceeded to investigate a number of concordance lines from the two sub-corpora, to provide a detailed, context-rich illustration of how the term ‘solastalgia’ fits into both the scientific and journalistic environmental discourse. This typically allows researchers to see patterns in usage, collocations, and thematic associations, and to gain insights into the meanings and social functions of a word; all the more so when the concordance lines are extended.

As can be seen from the examples reported below, two main discursive domains emerge around the term solastalgia: ‘definitional’ and ‘pain’.

Extended definitional concordance lines – Eco-Guardian:

• He combined the Latin word solacium (comfort – as in solace) and the Greek root – algia (pain) to form solastalgia, which he defines as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.”
• Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home become suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.
• Albrecht’s solastalgia is one of the bureau’s terms, along with “stieg”, “apex-guilt” and “shadowtime”, the latter meaning “the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously” – an acknowledgment of the out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness.
• Loss, this summer, after it was lost to climate change, was a pure expression of “solastalgia”, a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht and defined as “The pain or sickness caused by the loss of, or inability to derive solace from, the present state of one’s home environment.”
• In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe the anguish caused by environmental alterations due to droughts and destructive mining.

Extended Definitional concordance lines – Eco-PubMed:

• We examined how authors define solastalgia in their work using textual analysis of verbatim definitions employed. A common element of definition of solastalgia included: a description of the transformation of the environment (i.e., unwelcome environmental change associated with resource extraction).
• The concept of solastalgia can be defined as the distress caused by a change in an appreciated place and its cumulative impact on the mental health of those who live in that specific location.
• This definition includes two dimensions of the concept solastalgia:
  (1) desolate because of the degradation of the environment where an individual lives and (2) distress linked to this degradation.
• Our definition-related findings summarise the emotions associated with solastalgia, as described in Australian literature, its relationship to a sense of self, belonging and familiarity, and highlights the importance of ‘place’ as a conceptual comparison to other eco-psychological terms.
• All solastalgia definitions are place-centric, using the term “place” or the term “home environment”.

Extended pain concordance lines – Eco-Guardian:

• Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put.
• Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible.
• Take the threat seriously and risk succumbing to solastalgia or blot it out and be accused of opting out of reality.
• “We are searching for terms to capture this deep feeling of pain in Arctic nations – words like eco-anxiety or ecological grief – but for me, something called “solastalgia” perfectly sums up how people living on the frontline of climate change feel.
• Solastalgia is a “heartbreaking” phrase mentioned in the book to describe the distress of communities affected by the Australian droughts.
• For our generation, the toll isn’t just physical, but mental: solastalgia, the stress caused by environmental changes to one’s home, is on the rise.

Extended pain concordance lines – Eco-PubMed:

• Solastalgia integrates the ideas of solace, desolation, and place, capturing feelings of distress and pain as a result of expected or imminent environmental degradation and ecological loss in the face of the lived experience of a desired transformation of the environment.
• Solastalgia can be related to the ecological pain caused by the loss of species, ecosystems, and landscapes.
• The term solastalgia can harken back to our most basic, preverbal vulnerabilities based on distressing body-states and their relationship to hunger, pain, and separation from vital sources of life.
• The stories which narrate feelings of solastalgia allow us to see the joy of these memories but also the pain of their loss.
• The pain experienced as solastalgia when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault. It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging.
• For example, with solastalgia, a space that used to be a childhood favorite can become a trigger for intense emotional pain given the state of its present disruption.

Besides the predictable stylistic variation, in the two sub-corpora there is a degree of overlap. A possible reason for this is the incipient emergence of the term which is still striving to find its path in both scientific and mainstream communication.

Furthermore, a comparison of the two sub-corpora with the Environment corpus (an integrated Sketch Engine corpus) as a reference corpus revealed the following results (Table 2.)

Table 2. Keyness of the two sub-corpora[2] 

The Eco-Guardian Corpus	The Eco-PubMed Corpus	Acronyms
1) solastalgia	1) solastalgia
2) anthropocene	2) UOGD	Unconventional oil and gas development
3) Carew	3) distress
4) grief	4) grief
5) Utqiaġvik	5) PTSD	Post-traumatic stress disorder
6) Rasmussen	6) CROSSREF
7) Kigutaq	7) Albrecht
8) Albrecht	8) nostalgia
9) Rushton	9) post-wildfire
10) chinstrap	10) EDS	Environmental Distress Scale

In the Eco-Guardian sub-corpus, the term ‘solastalgia’ is key, followed by the names of the people (explorers, environmentalists, authors) mentioned in the broadsheet articles.

Conversely, in the Eco-PubMed sub-corpus, the key term ‘solastalgia’ is followed by terms which refer to the causes/effects of solastalgia. Predictably, ‘Albrecht’ appears in both lists.

3.1.2. Occurrences of the term across web-based sources

To give a clearer indication as to how rare the term ‘solastalgia’ remains today, reported below are the results of two online searches. Table 3 shows how rarely the term occurs in a number of news sources. 

Table 3. Emergence of the term in online news sources

Online news sources	Number of articles	Year of publication
The Economist	1	2022
The Telegraph	1	2023
Time Magazine	3	2017, 2021, 2023

Table 4 further illustrates the rare occurrences of the term solastalgia. To highlight the scarcity of the phenomenon, the occurrences of the phrase ‘climate change’ have been investigated on a comparative basis, across a range of web-based corpora

 Table 4. Emergence of ‘solastalgia’ in web-based corpora with ‘climate change’ employed as a comparative term

Web-based corpora	Words	Occurrences
BNC (100 million words)	solastalgia	0
	climate change	196
enTenTen21 (52 billion words)	solastalgia	432
	climate change	1,434,897
Now Corpus (51.1 billion words)	solastalgia	297
	climate change	1,049,633
Environment Corpus (61 million words)	solastalgia	4
	climate change	44,590
Ecolexicon Corpus (23.1 million words)	solastalgia	0
	climate change	7,611

Observing Table 4, it is interesting to note that in the Sketch Engine domain specific 61-million-word Environment Corpus, created in November 2011, the term ‘solastalgia’ only appears four times and only as a noun.

In the Ecolexicon corpus, described on the Sketch Engine platform as ‘an English corpus of contemporary environmental texts prepared by the LexiCon Research Group at the University of Granada’, the term solastalgia never occurs.

3.2. Ecolinguistic perspectives – an overview

Linguistic research on climate change pertains mainly to the domain of ecolinguistics (EL), whose main objective is to raise awareness of the role language can play in either ecological destruction or nature protection. EL shares the pro-active attitude and civic engagement of critical discourse analysis, in that it too aims to disclose what is hidden and to reveal forms of injustice, inequality or power abuse within the natural world. As Sune Vork Steffenson states:

For the last few decades, ecological linguists […] have sought to re-orientate linguistics to ‘external landmarks’ that could lead the language wanderer from the structural wasteland into a fertile terrain of human activity, saturated by language, interactivity and co-existence. (Steffensen & Fill 2014: 7)

The origins of the Ecolinguistics movement can be traced back to Haugen’s 1972 publication “The Ecology of Language”, which defined the notion of language ecology as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen 1972: 225), and influenced other linguists such as Fill (1998, 2001), Mühlhäusler (2000a, 2000b, 2001), Mühlhäusler and Peace (2006), Robbins (2012) and Garrard (2014), who investigated the interrelation of language, society and politics, and ecology. EL’s incipient purposes are:

to explore the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species and the physical environment. The first aim is to develop linguistic theories which see humans not only as part of society, but also as part of the larger ecosystems that life depends on. The second aim is to show how linguistics can be used to address key ecological issues, from climate change and biodiversity loss to environmental justice. (International Ecolinguistics Association n.d.)

‘Eco-linguists’ were encouraged to use language as an active response to the increasing dangers of environmental damage caused by uncontrolled technological development (Talebi-Dastenaee & Poshtvan 2021). One of the key features of EL is its ideological orientation to promote change through a more conscious and ethical language use. Indeed, in 1990, in his “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics” Halliday had already highlighted how linguists could make the difference by promoting a deeper awareness of the potential of language for doing either good or bad, as it is through language that humans acquire and shape their experience. Hence, in sensitive domains, such as racism, sexism, classism, and environmental issues, where human attitudes to sustainability need to undergo considerable modification, the use of language is of paramount importance. In his words:

The material and non-material conditions of a culture are reflected in the grammar of its language, which is not arbitrary; when these change the language changes in response. The language thus optimizes itself in relation to its environment: new forms will arise when called for – they do not need to be borrowed. (Halliday 1990: 179)

And again:

[T]he grammar presents them [natural resources] as if the only source of restriction was the way that we ourselves quantify them: a barrel of oil, a seam of coal, a reservoir of water and so on–as if they in themselves were inexhaustible. […] Production is a major semantic confidence trick; […] we don’t produce anything at all–we merely transform what is already there into something else, almost always with some unwanted side effects. (Halliday 2009: 165)

Ecological discourse analyses have also investigated how language and linguistic issues (lexico-grammar, discursive strategies, metaphors – see Goatly 2017) and the treatment of environmental matters through the media (e.g. the multimodal languages of advertising and corporate communication) can raise awareness about environmental challenges (Abbamonte 2021, Abbamonte & Cavaliere 2017, 2019, 2022); overall, EL has been identified as the future promise of a better science of language (Finke 2014).

Following the narrative or narrativist turn (Kreiswirth 1995), tales and stories have increasingly been prioritised as a way to promote positive changes, as further clarified in Arran Stibbe’s inspiring book, Ecolinguistics: language, ecology, and the stories we live by (2015) – in a planet that is becoming increasingly hostile to both human life and the lives of other species, a different kind of society, based on different stories, is needed. In his words:

Ecolinguistics can explore the more general stories we live by – patterns of language that influence how people both think about, and treat, the world
[. . .]. Ecolinguistics can investigate mental models that influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing [. . .]. There are certain key stories about economic growth, about technological progress, about nature as an object to be used or conquered, about profit and success, that have profound implications for how we treat the systems that life depends on. How we think has an influence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on. (Abridged and distilled from Stibbe 2015: iii and passim)

The consilience between language and the environment and the pragmatic value of the ecolinguistics stance and approach have been effectively represented by Stibbe in his works. In his view, by advancing critical language awareness, EL can unveil the modern, dystopic myths of unlimited progress and success, omnipotent science, endless growth and the human domination of nature. It is by critiquing these and other discourses underlying consumerism and individualism through powerfully fabricated stories and by seeking out stories which can guide human decisions and actions that a healthy environmental conscience will
emerge – the role of language being pivotal in leading people towards new forms of eco-civilisation (Stibbe 2017). As he states: a story is ‘a cognitive structure in the minds of individuals which influences how they perceive the world. Types of stories include ideologies, metaphors, framings, identities, evaluations, convictions, erasures and salience (2015: 207)’. For the purposes of our current research, (see section 3.3.1), we have exploited the ‘evaluation’ and ‘salience’ frameworks.

Stibbe’s search for new stories to live by is crucial to promote change at a discursive and societal level. In methodological terms, it can be said that a major feature of EL is its proactive, pragmatic stance – not merely based on scientific discourse or semantic analyses per se, but also on dynamic agendas of transitive actions, for a healthy, sustainable revaluation of social mores.

3.2.1. Stories of solastalgia – the EL perspective

To better illustrate the meaning and quality of the stories revolving around solastalgia, we have selected the most significant narratives from our corpus.

3.2.1.1. Eco-PubMed Corpus – solastalgia and pain

Narrative analysis serves to conduct research on numerous aspects of individual and social health, especially where emotional disorders are concerned. Reporting such narratives, whether partially or in their entirety, often conflicts with the word limit of research articles. Thus, in the Eco-PubMed Corpus, out of
the 31 research articles, only two articles report narratives, in abridged form.

I. In McNamara and Westoby’s article, ‘Solastalgia and the Gendered Nature of Climate Change: An Example from Erub Island, Torres Strait’ (2011) the major focus is on older women’s (‘Aunties’) experiences of climate and other environmental changes in the mentioned territories.^[3] By collecting, reporting and analysing such experiences, the researchers investigated the negative effects of the perceived climate change on women in particular. The Aunties’ responses revealed solastalgia, i.e. ‘feelings of sadness, worry, fear and distress, along with a declining sense of self, belonging and familiarity’, which eroded their identity. Here follows an excerpt from one of the Aunties who was a passionate earth artist:

It’s like an opening for me to really get into my culture, my identity, where I come from; it’s all about my artwork […] We live on the island surrounded by sea, and I took my artwork from here and the land […] The tide is getting higher now. We used to have the shells. There’s not much now. We used to go out and collect octopus but it’s really hard now to find octopus and for the shell as well, like clam shell or spider shell; it’s really hard. (ivi)

The ingredients of her art come from the land and sea and are now dramatically reduced by environmental changes. On the basis of Stibbe’s framework for narrative analysis, the salient⁴ area of her life is endangered, and her negative evaluation of such changes conveys her sense of loss. In this case, the term refers not only to the lack of solace she used to derive from her natural environment, but also to the waning of her artistic inspiration.

Another Aunty complained about feeling out of touch with her home environment, due to ongoing adverse changes:

We used to read the landscape. But now it changes, you have to guess now. Everything changes, make it so hard […] You never know, it just change like that, even the tide […] Like before, you can know what’s gonna happen. So hard now, guessing all the time, through from 2000 is sort of getting worse. I think it start changing in the 1980s, the changes start […] Am sad at home, think about the good old days, we always talk about the good old days. Now everything is changing, even the trees, you can see changes in them, even the fruits, like before, we haven’t had mango season. (ivi)

Her evaluation of the ongoing phenomena is consistently negative, and she expresses feelings of solastalgia: her native soil was a salient component of her life, but now she no longer recognizes it.

Comment. Through the lens of EL narrative analysis, (see note 6), we can see how the Erub Island inhabitants initially express positive evaluation of an area of life that used to be good and highly salient -i.e. their land, their soil, their very homes – only to progressively transform their appraisal into a deeply negative sentiment tinged with anguish. The climate and weather are no longer identifiable as a re-assuring cyclic alternation of the seasons; on the contrary, their devastating effects now underlie community distress.

II. A more immediate and direct effect of human agency is denounced in ‘Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining and Emergent Cases of Psychological Disorder in Kentucky’ (Canu et al. 2017: 802–10), where researchers report on how coal extraction techniques (MTR), used in Appalachia for decades and which have brought about dramatic environmental changes, have had a significant psychological impact on the communities living in the area, with an increased risk of negative mental health outcomes and feelings of solastalgia, as individual narrations show. In these narratives, major issues such as the destruction of historical gathering places, environmental disasters, and human damage are foregrounded. A sense of threat and personal loss are commonly expressed, as in the following excerpts:

 if you go up the river there, you’ll see that they’ve destroyed the very place I growed up. The place where I played in the creek and swung on the grapevines. (Carl Shoupe, a former Kentucky coal miner, p. 804).

our place defines us. We’re a distinct mountain culture, and our culture means something […] the blasting literally makes you feel like you’re in a war zone […] It shakes your house, damages your home […] You feel like you’re being attacked. It does something to your psyche […] the kids [in Whitesville] are sleeping fully clothed at night, plotting out escape routes, just waiting for the next Buffalo Creek (Judy Bonds, a resident of Whitesville, West Virginia, pp. 804–805).

Comment. Such statements show how the loss of connection with the land and the community, as well as an ongoing perception of physical danger can lead to long-term emotional and mental disorders. Again, as mentioned previously, the linguistic patterns that portray salient dimensions of community life and heritage become negative and convey a growing sense of distress. In the narratives from the PubMed sub-corpus, pain and mental distress emerge as the most commonly expressed feelings.

3.2.1.2. Eco-Guardian Corpus – solastalgia and resilience

The 17 Guardian articles address a wider, more mainstream audience; thus, predictably, the communicative strategies employed are more direct and aim to engage their addressees through emotion-tinged tonalities, while spurring them to action. Opinion columnists and science journalists address a variety of climate issues with a focus on the psychological consequences for people stricken by negative changes and disasters. Their journalistic voices become more persuasive when describing events that involved them personally, or when reporting the statements of empathetic novelists and nature writers. Topics include the decision not to have children owing to the lack of certainties induced by the climate crisis; how such a crisis can exacerbate long-standing socioeconomic and mental health problems especially in First Nation populations; the need to appreciate the interconnectedness of living things and the urgency to care of insects, birds and all animal and vegetal species; the eerie sound of icebergs melting; the grief felt for our dying natural world accompanied by a refusal to give in to despair; the awareness that solastalgia is more acutely felt by the indigenous populations, because of their deeper connections to their homelands and natural environment.

The Guardian frequently encourages active political engagement, granting a voice to those who support candidates who forward policies that mitigate climate change and promote climate justice. The pragmatic, proactive stance of the historical British broadsheet emerges clearly.

Narratives are a constant feature of the Guardian Corpus, but, again, owing to the constraints of length, they are not reported in their entirety in the articles. Here follow excerpts from four separate narratives:⁵

 (a) What happened to winter? Vanishing ice convulses Alaskans’ way of life

“All the indications are there will be a very early loss of ice this year, [said Rick Thoman, a Noaa climate scientist based in Fairbanks, Alaska.] In the 1990s they could do whale hunting in Utqiaġvik up until May or even June. There’s no real chance of that now – the ice will probably start breaking up by early May. […]

Native peoples of Alaska are very resilient; they’ve lived here for many millennia for a reason. Some will have to move; hunting will have to change. It can be done but it won’t be easy, it won’t be cheap. There will be a big cost, both financially and culturally.” […]

“A couple of years ago the ice was rubble, it was just breaking up,” said Nagruk Harcharek, who has spent many of his 33 years whaling near Utqiaġvik. “It was really late this year and everyone noticed. I’d be lying if I said people aren’t worried. […] Some families rely upon whales for their food. It’s so central to our culture. The spring hunt is spiritual – sitting out there on the ice edge is pretty quiet. There’s the unknown. There’s not much going on. You’re watching, waiting.” […]

“People are feeling the impacts of climate change, we hear that on a daily basis,” said Nikoosh Carlo, the governor’s climate adviser. “It’s a non-partisan issue here. For some communities, the next storm could wipe out critical infrastructure.”

[…] “We are capable of adapting to any changes,” said Charlie Hopson, a veteran Utqiaġvik whaler. “We’ve been around for thousands of years and we’re going to keep living. We do our own thing here. The government doesn’t know shit. We don’t need them.” (Milman 2018, our bold)

(b) ‘Solastalgia’: Arctic inhabitants overwhelmed by new form of climate grief

“The ability to use Inuit traditional skills passed down intergenerationally is how we have always adapted to a changing environment, and now it is helping us to do better research and monitoring,” says Kigutaq [a researcher]. “The work we do is an opportunity to feel pride in ourselves and our culture and to contribute to something.”

[…] Kigutaq says that it is this adaptability in the face of the unknown that has made Inuit leaders in the fight against climate change, learning to recognize what is happening and to not feel paralyzed by solastalgia. Above all, he says, it is particularly necessary to realize you are not alone, […] “The term solastalgia helps us to vocalize some of the feelings we are having,” Kigutaq says. “It can help create awareness and conversations – and the ability to connect with others who are experiencing the same thing.” (Michelin 2020, our bold)

In the 2018 narrative (a), voiced by different speakers, the connection between ice thinning and endangered population survival (difficulties in hunting whales, damage to infrastructures) emerges clearly, as does the threat to cultural heritage. Yet, the Utqiaġvik ability to adapt to change and their resilience are proudly stated (see words highlighted in bold). In the same vein, in the 2020 narrative (b), the Inuit heritage is positively and proudly appraised as well as their ability to fight climate change, which is enhanced through the awareness of being part of a community. Interestingly, there is also a positive evaluation of the term solastalgia that can help express and share such an emotional experience.

 (c) Torres Strait doctors issue call to arms over climate change impact on Indigenous health

Dr Sam Jones, who has lived in the Torres Strait for 10 years, said the doctors hold deep worries for their children’s future.

“Will there still be crayfish and turtles, dugong and sardines? These vibrant children of the Pacific, are they the canaries in the coalmine of climate change? Their health, their culture, their future depends upon us taking positive action now, together.”

The group of doctors is calling for a greater investment in primary preventative healthcare, and “a plan for rapid transition to a low carbon economy,” they said.

Torres Strait Island regional councillor Ted Nai, who also sits on the Torres and Cape Hospital and Health Service Board, agreed that “courageous, visionary leadership that is of a higher order than the mere party line and politics” is needed.

“We must act with moral leadership and create optimism and hope,” Nai said.

“We islander people, including the people of the Pacific, who are the most at risk of these climate change impacts, must ask how do we ride the crest of the wave of this global conversation, and showcase how to build resilient and thriving communities that can live sustainably into the future.” (Smith 2019, our bold)

In low-lying islands, such as the Torres Strait islands, the population is vulnerable, owing to both chronic disease and health emergencies caused by climate change, as the group of 23 doctors from the Torres Strait and northern Cape York state in the article from the PubMed sub-corpus quoted above (I). Yet, in this Guardian article, the need and will to create optimism and hope are salient, and resilient attitudes are granted positive evaluation (see the words in bold).

(d) The anticipation of moving outdoors at the end of the summer day in Australia has transmuted to dread

The summer I experienced when I first moved to Sydney three years ago was full of days spent in a near-sensual anticipation of heading outdoors. I fell in love with the air in all its sickly sweet promise, thick and nourishing with humidity […] This year, that anticipation of moving outdoors at the end of the day has transmuted to dread. I heed health advisory warnings that instruct us to stay indoors. I cancel classes and appointments. I notice the subtle tightening in my chest. […]

We in the cities are experiencing now what those in areas afflicted by drought, floods and fire have felt for some time: solastalgia.

[…] Indigenous people have long argued of the responsibility we humans have to the land. The sense of connection we feel to the natural world is vital, and it is no less so for those of us living in cities and built-up environments. […] It has become clear to me that going forward, nothing will be more important than sensitivity and hope – and nothing will be more dangerous than resignation.

[…] My hope is that I have a few ways of pushing against this sense of resignation within myself, the first of which is to remain aware of the ways in which politicians and mining corporations benefit from these exact feelings of hopelessness. (Antigny 2019, our bold)

This extended narrative on the devastating 2019 bushfires by the Sydney-based writer and opinion columnist Léa Antigny would deserve to be read in its complete version, since it effectively and concisely conveys the feelings and moods of the population and enshrines examples of nature writing. The appraisal patterns are predictably negative when the environmental damage and the emotional reactions to that dire, disconcerting situation are described, whereas the author’s sensory connection to the natural world and the longing to reestablish it are conveyed through highly positive sensorial patterns. The issue of the salience of land is amplified to include not only indigenous people but also people living in cities and the emotion of solastalgia is foregrounded, but, rather than resulting in existential pain or distress, it becomes an awareness-raising feeling that leads to an overcoming of the sense of resignation and raises the level of hope and the will to fight against the present situation (see the words in bold).

Comment. The fear of losing the connection to land and heritage, the physical dread, the perplexity, i.e. the complex emotion of solastalgia, are salient in the
Eco-Guardian corpus too and, accordingly, negative evaluation patterns abound. However, unlike the PubMed corpus, hope, resilience, courage and the convictions that shape the communities are foregrounded here. Against the backdrop of the
so-called ‘learned helplessness’ of neoliberalism, in the Guardian articles, political engagement is promoted, further informed by the SDGs, which include Goal 13 (‘Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’), with its focus on ‘Small Island Developing States’.

We can observe how Albrecht’s 2005 definition of solastalgia as encompassing ‘a profound sense of isolation about their inability to have a meaningful say and impact on the state of affairs’ seems to have been overcome by the proactive attitude of the communities stricken by climate distress yet engaged in mitigating its effects and promoting change. It therefore emerges from these narratives, that solastalgia can be considered not only past-oriented, but also aligned with future horizons of hope.

4. Discussion

As both our quantitative and qualitative analyses show, the term ‘solastalgia’ has only reached mainstream communication to a limited extent – (31 Pubmed articles vs 17 Guardian articles). This may be due to its lexical-conceptual complexity and to the relatively recent emergence of the term.

We expected the mainstream news media language (namely the Eco-Guardian dataset) to be more intrinsically empathetic with a higher occurrence of terms relating to pain and distress, but the PubMed articles have in fact shown a similar semantic preference for ‘pain’. When pondering this finding, we inferred that since the scientific domain involved is Mental Health Care, the attitude is necessarily compassionate.

A significant difference can, however, be found along the dimension of engagement. Indeed, in the Eco-Guardian sub-corpus, the journalistic voices also convey feelings of hope, resilience and courage, as well as positive convictions leading to political engagement vs. forms of helplessness. This is clearly due to the active political engagement and the pragmatic attitude of The Guardian, which constantly promotes climate justice as a node of socio-economic, race, gender and justice issues.

As regards the definitional dimension, it is strong in both corpora, for the reasons listed previously. The word solastalgia becomes progressively normalized within the language, gradually fitting into the established linguistic and discursive practices.

Through the lens of ecolinguistics, we noticed how not only differences (engagement) but also similarities (empathy, pain) emerged in the way both journalistic and scientific voices convey the complex notions implied in the word ‘solastalgia’. Indeed, the focus of the ecolinguistic approach on stories allows for a deeper understanding of the attitudes and emotions at play, with their nuances, as expressed in the diverse contexts.

5. Conclusions

 The integrated methodological approach we have adopted throughout this study has provided a twofold analytical perspective which has proved useful both for measuring the growing impact of ‘solastalgia’ in the two different contexts (mainstream communication, scientific dissemination) and, at the same time, investigating the subtler nuances of this neologism as they unfold across the journalistic narratives and in the scientific articles.

A further consideration concerns the way in which language is strongly related to the ecosystem, in particular to the climate-related changes in flora, fauna and physical features of an area, and can express/react to the forces that have altered the living conditions of speakers and their communities. The spread of ‘solastalgia’ has helped build a new awareness of ecosystem changes, to the effect of encouraging flexible and adaptive behaviours, and survival strategies.

Broadly, we can say that since discourse is intended as a set of “context-dependent semiotic practices” which are “socially constituted and socially constitutive” (Reisigl & Wodak 2009: 89), the meaning and connotations of a new word are negotiated through its usage in different contexts; power dynamics, societal values, and ideological stances subsequently influence the way in which the word is understood and used. More specifically, ecolinguistics has turned the spotlight on the fertile ground of human activity, and on how it advances in the existing environment and ecosystem through the transformative power of language.

Indeed, a major feature of ecolinguistics is its interventionist stance, aimed at reversing consumerist habits and promoting healthy interaction with the ecosystem. This makes ecolinguistics a useful critical approach to observe the emergence of new environment-related terms, especially as regards the narratives under consideration. Terms such as ‘solastalgia’, which fill the gap between existing words and new notions, are, therefore, crucial to the way knowledge of social reality develops in our interesting, ever-mutating Anthropocene, and are better understood through an ecological approach to language.

 

1. _{Although the two online repositories are widely used for research purposes, a brief description may serve to situate the archival context in a clearer manner: PubMed Central (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/) is an online archive containing over eight million full text versions of biomedical and life science journal articles which can be perused free of charge by the general public simply by inserting the desired term or phrase into a search box. Available to the public online since 2000, PubMed Central was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The Guardian International online version is one of the five global editions (UK, Europe, US, Australia, International) of the historical British broadsheet. Launched in 2015, the aim of this specific edition is to “Help the guardian.com become a destination for readers living elsewhere, giving them the option to see a more global selection of stories when they visit the site” (https://www.theguardian.com/info/2023/nov/09/how-to-access-the-guardian-global-editions).}
2. _{In corpus linguistics, Keyness refers to the measure of how much more (or less) frequently a word appears in one corpus compared to another, usually in comparison to a reference corpus.
   It helps identify words that are characteristic or prominent in a specific text or collection of texts.}
3. _{Interviews were conducted also with (male) Elders, yet only the Aunties expressed explicit feelings consistent with Solastalgia.}
4. _{Evaluation – an established story in people’s minds about whether an area of life is good or bad (e.g. low sales are bad). What to look for: Common appraisal patterns of language, which represent things positively or negatively and need to be investigated/denaturalized; […] Salience – a story in a person’s mind that an area of life is important or worthy of attention (e.g. animals are important). What to look for: Salience patterns, i.e. patterns of language which foreground an area of life that need to be investigated. (Distilled and abridged from Stibbe 2015).}
5. _{Narratives a) b) c) deal with First Nation populations, d) voices a Sidney-based writer perspective on 2019/20 bushfires.}

About the authors

Lucia Abbamonte

Parthenope University

Author for correspondence.
Email: lucia.abbamonte@uniparthenope.it
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5740-2025

Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Parthenope University, Italy. Major foci in her research have been on (multimodal) CDA, ecolinguistics, the socio-cognitive and pragmatic aspects of situated linguistic communication, among others. She has authored five books and numerous articles and essays. She is reviewer for international journals, and a member of I-LanD Interuniversity Research Centre for advanced study in linguistics, and of the CLAVIER.

Naples, Italy

Bronwen Hughes

Parthenope University

Email: bronwen.hughes@uniparthenope.it
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1959-7989

Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Università di Napoli, Parthenope, Italy. She holds a PhD in Linguistics and Modern and Comparative Literature, and her research interests lie in the fields of translation as a tool for second language acquisition, cross-cultural media studies, and gender diversity. She has published several monographic works and numerous research articles which appear in collected volumes.

Naples, Italy

References