If you’re feeling a little down watching the world you grew up with evanesce around you – forests burning here, glaciers melting there, our once reliably gorgeous Northwest summers now blighted by heat and smoke – there’s a word for that: solastalgia.
The term describes a sense of loss or homesickness, as Madeline Ostrander has it, “from watching one’s environment unravel.”
So, you’re not alone. The question is, how you respond.
“I think in this part of the world, where people are experiencing wildfires, there is a sense of unease about what is this place we’re living in now, and what is it becoming,” says Ostrander, science journalist and author of “At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth” (2022). “Some people feel it in a way that is very front of mind and they can talk about it easily, but sometimes it manifests in other ways in our subconscious.
“I think overall there’s this sense of uneasiness, as we’ve had to go through these multiple heat waves that are unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest. Those are shocking.”
Ostrander is keynote speaker at the 2023 Bainbridge Island Environmental Conference, 12-5 p.m. March 25 at Bainbridge High School. The conference will look at climate change’s swelling impact on Bainbridge Island shorelines, forests, air quality, transportation, infrastructure, and sense of place – and tangible actions for citizens and community in response.
The conference is co-sponsored by the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation, Sustainable Bainbridge, EcoAdapt, IslandWood and the Bainbridge Island Land Trust. Registration is now open.
“Home” as a lens through which to view climate change is, well, natural. As Ostrander notes, the word “ecology” itself is rooted in the Greek oikos, or “home,” and logy, “study of.” (Likewise “economy,” or “management of home.”) Yet even after natural catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina and the groundbreaking film “An Inconvenient Truth” two decades ago, Ostrander found the climate crisis was generally seen as a distant phenomenon, a threat to some other place.
It was in the environmental justice sphere that the former YES! Magazine editor met people who’d made the connection: advocates whose work already centered on real-world impacts on vulnerable communities. Climate change, they saw, is not just a global issue but a set of local concerns.
“Over the past several years, it’s just become more and more and more obvious that we’re all being impacted,” Ostrander says. “It’s important to have this conversation about climate change as this thing that’s affecting the most basic issues of our lives.”
What’s more basic than home?
Deeply reported, rich in setting and populated with vibrant subjects, Ostrander’s stories occupy the liminal space between yesterday’s climate headlines and tomorrow’s.
In Eastern Washington, towns are menaced and residents displaced by wildfires of staggering scale. In Newtok, Alaska, a whole village picks up and moves miles as the ancestral ground melts beneath it. Richmond, Calif., reels from a devastating refinery accident. Rising tides threaten the coastal community of St. Augustine, Fla., its rich tapestry of cultural sites and whole swaths of the residential and commercial fabric.
In each place, Ostrander finds not just crisis but resilience, citizens moving past shock or denial and banding together for action – with creativity, optimism and hope – sometimes reimagining their very notions of Home.
“I thought that I was trying to give people a message about how climate change is connected to their home and what was at stake,” she says. “By the end of it, I realized that taking action at home is quite powerful.”
Climate projections say what they say, but Ostrander says citizens can still affect the pace and impact of ecological change.
Lydia Roush, the Park District’s Natural Resources Manager, will speak on proactive management of the island’s expansive public forests, an effort supported by the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation. The Foundation also supports active transportation alternatives through islandwide trails planning. Other community responses will be explored on the afternoon.
“There’s a lot of ways for communities like Bainbridge Island to go,” Ostrander says. “You can think about climate change for itself, but also look to models of other places that are taking action, and become a model yourself for other communities.”
Therein lies one antidote for solastalgia: its etymological cousin soliphilia, the sense of hope and solace – of joy, even – in joining your fellow islanders to take collective action. Doing what you can to protect Puget Sound waters, Ostrander says, or organizing neighbors to put up solar panels, can bring purpose and stave off resignation or despair.
(For the record, both solastalgia and soliphilia were coined by the Australian scholar Glenn Albrecht, from the trauma of watching an ancient landscape devastated by open-cut coal mining. He knew loss.)
Whither then, on an unruly planet, our Bainbridge Island home?
“I think there’s not a lot of reassurance one can give in a book about climate change that ‘everything’s going to be okay’ with some kind of certainty,” Ostrander says. “But there’s another kind of hope and optimism that says, let’s imagine and create what we want, and let’s work toward that and dig in and do our darndest to make things better in these places we care about.
“That kind of hope and optimism is really about getting to work. Anyone can say, ‘It’s part of what’s important to me to make my community and the places I care about better.’”
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Register now for the 2023 Bainbridge Island Environmental Conference, “Our Island Home on an Unruly Planet,” at www.islandwood.org. The conference runs 12-5 p.m. Saturday, March 25 at the Bainbridge High School Theater. Madeline Ostrander’s book “At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth,” is available for purchase at Eagle Harbor Book Co.