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Solastalgia - new word, new illness

Sri Lankan born Glen Albrecht, who moved to Australia as a boy, is now a Doctor of Science of the School of Environmental Studies in New South Wales.

A significant contribution he is making is in identifying a new environmental ailment, a disease, and shaping a new word, Solastalgia, out of the familiar Nostalgia ( from Nostos = return to home and algia = pain or homesickness.) Nostalgia as we know is that sickly sweet sentimental feeling all of us have towards something we had, but no longer have. But Solastalgia is quite different. It's the devastation and desolation caused by loss of home, your solace and comfort.

Unlike Nostalgia which is normally felt when you live away from home like our expatriates and are, as a result extremely patriotic, Solastalgia can be felt even when you live in your homes like those displaced by the terrorists or resettled by governments to build a dam.

The word seems to be catching on, I note, to judge from having bumped into it the other day on the Internet. It was knocking on the door of entrance to a collection of new words called Double-Tongued Word Wrester.

I think it was Yeats the poet who emphasised the importance of place in our psychological lives and how empty it becomes when we are deprived of it. As he said 'To be rooted in a dear perpetual place' and went on I think to write about how harmoniously the chestnut tree lives,
'great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf,
the blossom or the bole?
Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance
How can you know the dancer from the dance?'

Glenn Albrecht's interest in the subject is not so much out of academia as his own personal experience of living in the drought ridden Hunter Region of New South Wales.

A drought prevailed there once for three years and one day he found the whole place dust covered with a mining company involved in what is called open cut coal mining. That is, not digging for it like the famous 'Forty Niners excavating for a mine,' but doing it on open ground.

It left quite a few hearts burning over the issue. As he was well known in that region as an activist and environmental conservationist, soon neighbours started ringing him up.

"Residents within the Hunter region would often ring me up at work and talk to me about their concerns about particular environmental issues and I would help and advice as best as I could.

However, I began to notice the increasing number of people who were concerned with the sheer scale of the environmental impacts in the Upper Hunter Region of NSW.

In their attempts to halt the expansion of open cut coal mining and to control the impact of power station pollution, individuals would ring me up at work pleading for help with their cause.

Their distress about the threats to their identity and well-being, even over the phone, was palpable." Some of these issues have been raised but not too widely for over half a century, but they seem to have had no impact because of the conspiratorial official silence being observed by most governments all over the world who believe in industrial progress but not too concerned with man's well-being and happiness.

The impact of the devastation caused to land and people right from the beginning of the industrial revolution has been ignored; and continues to be ignored at such world conferences like Rio and Tokyo and now Bali, although it remains a very serious crime against humanity.

Many important books have been written on the theme of Soils and Civilisations but there has always been only a yawning gap between the two - soil and civilisation. In 1946, another Australian environmentalist, one of the pioneer environmental scientists, wrote in her study Soils and Civilisation a memorable passage.

"But no time or nation will produce genius if there is a steady decline away from the integral unity of man and the earth. The break in the unity is swiftly apparent in the lack of 'wholeness' in the individual person. Divorced from his roots. Man loses his psychic stability."

Mention of 'psychic stability' reminds me of an elderly woman we once employed who had been displaced by the building of the Kotmale reservoir and resettled in Polonnaruwa.

She was never able to put down her roots in the new place she had been given. And time and again she had mental relapses, which unfitted her even for domestic work. Her loss of solace and home showed plainly. Governments behave as if man lives only by bread. They have never taken to heart the words of wisdom in the Bible that there are more besides bread that man lives by but very little provision is made for these.

On the one hand we reward some people for helping to keep our environment in some shape like the monk who does it single-handedly at the Namal Uyana in Anuradhapura. On the other we let something equally important and affecting the lives of 12,000 or more people as in Eppawala just drift.

When it comes to it I think we are more avaricious than generous. How different when it comes to the so-called savages. The rights claimed by them, wherever they are situated whether in Canada or Australia, are not to exhaust the natural resources of the world which they know will only begin their own destruction.

Governments far from listening to the wisdom of Biblical men don't seem to be listening to the words of wisdom uttered by even the more materialistic minded men of our times like Economists.

They have been saying for instance that the subjects of economics should be open to questions well beyond the range of economics. Joseph E Schumpeter a teacher at Harvard put it this way in 1942 , "Non-economic motives are an essential element of economic theory."

And Lord Keynes put it even better. He said that "no part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside an economist's regard."

Alfred Marshall, a nineteenth century British economist, warned that "economics cannot be compared with the exact physical sciences, for it deals with the ever changing subtle forces of human nature." But all such wonderful thoughts like - 'golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers come to dust' because another machine age has come to dominate our thinking.

And that is the computer age. And the computer has became king. Maths and computer models have now become the standards by which mankind is ordained.

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