Solastalgia

Pleasant memories of places past: that’s nostalgia. But what do you call the grief that comes when the modern world leaves nary a trace of the place that raised you?

By Tracy Thompson
Feb 15, 2025

On windy days, I imagined myself under water, and the wind in their leaves was the surf above my head. They were old trees. The oak we used as second base in the front yard was so thick that my sister and I together could not put our arms around it. In mast years, the acorns rained down like hail.

It’s been nearly seventy years, and I still visit them regularly in my dreams. In these dreams I am fighting developers for their survival. In some dreams, the developers have already taken most of the trees and erected a massive hotel or office building, and I am bargaining with some nameless commercial entity to save what’s left. In others, my childhood home is a little green island in a sea of ugly commercial buildings, and I am trying to decide whether to stay or go.

The feeling is always the same—a despairing urgency about living things I cannot save, which also happens to be a fairly accurate description of the way I feel about the planet these days. In recent years, this feeling has become widespread enough that there are names for it. “Eco-anxiety” is one—the existential distress at seeing the despoiling of the planet. But the word that seems most apt and personal is “solastalgia”—a word coined in 2007 by environmentalist and philosopher Glenn Albrecht. Nostalgia is a longing for an imagined past; solastalgia is a longing for a very real place that has been rendered alien by the encroachment of industry, the ravages of war, fire, flood, or environmental degradation. Native Americans on the Trail of Tears felt it; refugees from Gaza no doubt feel it. It is a complex mixture of grief, a feeling of exile and estrangement, and an incurable homesickness for the feeling of belonging to the soil living beneath your feet. That connection is something not all of us have been lucky enough to experience. But I did. I learned it before I could talk, from my grandfather.

I called him Paw Paw. His real name was John Kleckley Derrick—J.K. to his friends and “Kleck” to his wife. He was born in 1885 on a farm in Campbell County, Georgia, which no longer exists; today the area is known as south Fulton County, a part of the Atlanta suburbs encompassing College Park, Red Oak, Fairburn, and Palmetto. My grandmother, Cora Derrick, grew up on a nearby farm. John married Cora in 1907, and at some point, he left the farm to work in the rail yards of Atlanta as a carpenter for Southern Railways. There is no record of any biological children. In 1934, when it must have been clear there never would be—Paw Paw was forty-nine, Grandma two years younger—they adopted my mother, who was eight. When Paw Paw retired, he bought a farm in south Fulton County about a mile north of Red Oak and deeded some of the land to my mother when she and my father got married, in 1947. I grew up in a house across a cornfield from Grandma and Paw Paw, the only grandparents I ever really knew.
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https://www.salvationsouth.com/solastalgia-tracy-thompson-environmental-grief/?src=longreads