Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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Terrafuric: Coined by Albrecht, “the extreme anger unleashed within those who can clearly see the self-destructive tendencies in the current forms of industrial-technological society and feel they must protest and act to change its direction. As a fellow old hippy, I want peaceful change as well … but with the global ascendancy of the militaristic and violent Right, peace seems a long way off. Earth Emotions as a book intrigued me for its offering of a discussion of the “full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world”. Philosopher Glenn Albrecht, in writing Earth Emotions, is creating a language that ties together humanity and our surrounding environment, both in the positive and negative.

The book helpfully provides a glossary of all the ‘ psychoterratic’ terms at the back of the book, for ease of cross-reference. Defending themselves against charges of inaction or incompetence, the same politician responds in a monotone voice, from a pre-scripted reply that “we’re straining every sinew”. It has helped reinforce to me why social, economic, political, cultural and historical factors are important in this respect, but now better understanding that they are informed by environment and nature at their heart. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia―love of life―for our home planet.The book did a good review of the current climate crisis around the world and the negative psychological responses of the people to the crisis. The more of the uniqueness is understood in, for example, Australia, as a unique assemblage of plants, fungi, digging marsupials and soil, the more it can be appreciated. As a result, this will have to lead to a ‘ Sumbiocracy’ – new forms of mutually beneficial government.

So many snatched moments when we grab this emotion, especially out on walks, for example, along a beach, or listening to birdsong. The increasingly pervasive feeling of sadness and loss for a world that’s being irreversibly altered". How many funky neologisms based on latin and germanic roots does it take to make the rather obvious point that "nature destroyed feels bad" and "animism feels good"? That being said, many mainstream scientists don’t even yet accept that we have entered the ‘Anthropocene’, preferring instead to rely on the previous classification of ‘ Holocene’, negating the overwhelming, exponentially increasing impact of human endeavour on the planet’s finite resources and life support systems. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia.Yateley Common – definitely part of my sumbiography – and much of it is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

And indeed, the book does a good job of defining a whole suite of terms to describe various Earth emotions.

In Earth Emotions, Glenn Albrecht, explores the need for new more suitable terms for new feelings, new sensations in our world of upheaval, forced migration, forced displacement and changes to and within our familiar physical, cultural and emotional environment in which, he argues, we are in symbiosis. At one point, the globalized "melting pot" of eco-systems is presented as "a reality" we can no longer change, and so is the globalized "melting pot" of cultures. When I did move back home, I was desolate to discover the ‘big tree’ that we used to race to at the end of the street had been felled. At this point, Macfarlane introduces us to two words that Albrecht has developed in the book “Earth Emotions”.