Dette er tittelen på boka den australske økofilosofen Glenn A. Albrecht ga ut i 2019. Han er kjent for begrepet «solastalgia». Både han og begrepet var nytt for meg, men dette var en fin bok!
SOLASTALGIA: The pain or distress caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sence of desolation connected to the present state of one´s home and territory. It is the lived experience of negative environmental change. It is the homesickness you have when you are still at home.
Glenn A. Albrecht (2019:200)
(Solace kan bety «trøst», og desolation «øde, forlatt og ensom».)
Formålet med boka er å lage nye ord for å fange følelser vi har til dyr og landskap (other than human). Dette har jeg tenkt litt på, men ikke på langt nær så mye som Albrecht. Blant annet var det spennende med en kobling mellom ødeleggelse av natur og psykisk helse. Her siterer han fra Elyne Mitchell som skrev følgende allerede i 1946:
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 this unity is swiftly apparent in the lack of «wholeness» in the individual person. Divorced from his roots, man loses his psychic stability.
Elyne Mitchell sitert i Albrecht (2019:115)
Litt senere henter Albrecht opp dette igjen, og skriver:
In the «great separation» we lose our emotional compass with respect to the Earth and cosmos. As mentioned in chapter 2, it was Elyne Mitchell who first alerted me to the vital connection between the state of the Eart and emotional-mental states. Psychic instability and solastalgia were allied concepts. She was influenced by Carl Jung, who, while famous as a psychologist and a student of subjective experiences, was also a scientific realist, in that he saw all human emotions and thoughts as issuing from «the universal soil» shared by all other organisms. As a result, when human become isolated from their «roots», emotional alienation occurs. Jung clearly articulated the loss of a primordial identity with «nature» as a source of the loss of emotional energy in humans.
Albrecht (2019:132)
Så kommer et sitat fra Carl Jung, og fotnoten forteller at det er hentet fra boka «Man and his symbols» fra 1964:
As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional «unconscious identity» with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.
Carl Gustav Jung sitert i Albrecht (2019:132)
Jeg synes disse avsittene er fascinerende. Stadig vekk opplever jeg en slags metastase – at det sprenges og hugges rundt meg, og jeg får en slags «klausfølelse». Det er solastalgia. Smerten jeg kjenner på når jeg er hjemme, fordi landskapet rundt meg ødelegges.
Avslutter med litt undring. På s. 142-143 har han et sitat fra Bonnie Bassler fra en artikkel jeg klarte å finne via litteraturlisten.
You have 1010 bacterial cells in your gut. You only have 109 human cells making up your whole body. So there are 10 times more bacterial cells in you, or on you, than human cells. By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by numbers, it’s not even close.
Bonnie Bassler sitert i Albrecht (2019:142-43)
Boka er relativt lettlest, og inneholder mange nye ord. Solastalgia har jeg sett en del steder, men her er det også mye annet!
Albrecht, Glenn A. (2019) Earth Emotions – New Words for a New World
Cornell University Press
