Solastalgia: When the Place We Call Home Begins to Disappear
I have often thought about environmental change in two different ways. One is through eco-anxiety: the uneasiness of thinking about climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and the kind of planet future generations may inherit. The other is more intimate. It is the feeling that comes when I look at a place I know and realize that it is no longer quite the place I remember. That feeling is harder to describe because it is not entirely about the future. It is about something that is already happening around me. It is about watching a familiar environment change while remaining physically present within it. Learning about solastalgia gave me a language for that experience.
The term was coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress associated with environmental degradation or transformation experienced while people remain connected to their home environment. The concept was initially developed through work examining environmental change, including drought and open-cut coal mining in Australia. Albrecht constructed the word from ideas associated with solace and pain, deliberately distinguishing it from nostalgia: nostalgia involves longing for a place or time from which we are separated, whereas solastalgia describes a form of distress experienced without leaving home. In the words of its most recognizable formulation, it is sometimes described as a kind of "homesickness while still at home."
That deceptively simple distinction opens an enormous field of thought. Solastalgia asks us to reconsider something environmental science sometimes struggles to capture: a place is not only a physical location or ecological system. It can also be part of memory, identity, livelihood, culture, security and belonging. When the physical environment changes, therefore, the consequences may extend into the psychological and social worlds of the people who live there.
When home changes without you leaving it
Homesickness is usually easy to understand. A person leaves home, travels somewhere else and misses the familiar landscape, people and routines left behind. Solastalgia reverses this geography. The person remains, but the environment that once provided familiarity and solace begins to change.
Imagine returning to the neighbourhood where you grew up. The street still has the same name. Your house may still be standing. The route to school is still recognizable. But the large tree near the corner has been removed, the vacant land has become an apartment complex, the pond where children once played has been filled, and the small patch of vegetation where birds nested has disappeared. Nothing necessarily looks catastrophic. Yet the landscape feels strangely unfamiliar.
This is what makes solastalgia so difficult to communicate. You have not lost your home geographically, but you may feel that part of what made that place home has been taken away.
The distinction is important because environmental change is often discussed in terms of measurable physical variables: hectares of forest lost, groundwater levels declining, temperatures increasing, species disappearing, wetlands shrinking or pollution concentrations rising. Those measurements are indispensable, but they do not capture the entire human experience of environmental transformation. The same landscape can simultaneously be an ecosystem, a livelihood, a cultural space, a childhood memory and a source of psychological security.
Recent research increasingly recognizes this connection. A 2025 scoping review of two decades of empirical research found that solastalgia is closely associated with place attachment, place identity and sense of place, and that climate change, urbanization and mining are among the environmental changes most frequently examined. The review also emphasizes that solastalgia is shaped by social, political and socioeconomic conditions rather than being a purely individual psychological response.
Why places become part of us
Human beings do not simply occupy environments. We develop relationships with them.
A child walking the same road to school every day learns its turns, trees, sounds and smells without consciously trying to memorize them. A family may gather under the same tree for decades. A farmer learns the behaviour of a particular piece of land through years of observation. A fishing community develops knowledge of tides, seasons and coastal conditions. A village may organize festivals, rituals and everyday practices around particular landscapes. A person may remember a grandparent through the garden they maintained or associate the arrival of the monsoon with the sound of frogs from a nearby pond.
Repeated experience gradually transforms physical space into place.
Place is not simply where something is. It is what that location comes to mean.
This is why the concepts of place attachment and place identity are so important to understanding solastalgia. Place attachment refers broadly to emotional bonds with particular places, while place identity concerns the ways places become incorporated into our understanding of who we are. Place dependence adds another dimension: people may rely on a place because it provides livelihoods, recreation, social relationships or other practical functions. These concepts frequently appear alongside solastalgia research because environmental change can threaten all of them simultaneously.
A paddy field, for example, may be economically valuable to a farmer, culturally meaningful to a community, aesthetically important to residents and deeply embedded in someone's childhood memories. If the field disappears, its loss cannot be adequately represented by its market value alone.
The physical landscape and the psychological landscape overlap.
That is one of the central insights of solastalgia.
The difference between solastalgia, eco-anxiety and ecological grief
Because environmental emotions are receiving increasing attention, there is a danger of treating every form of environmental distress as the same thing. They are related, but they are not identical.
Eco-anxiety is generally broader and often involves worry, fear or distress concerning environmental crises and their consequences. A person may experience eco-anxiety while thinking about climate change, biodiversity collapse, extreme weather or the future of humanity even when the threatened environment is geographically distant.
Ecological grief refers more directly to sorrow and mourning associated with ecological loss: the disappearance of species, ecosystems, landscapes, ecological relationships or ways of life. It can occur even when the person has no direct relationship with the place being lost.
Nostalgia involves longing for a past time or place and does not necessarily involve environmental degradation.
Solastalgia, by contrast, is particularly tied to environmental change affecting a place with which a person is connected while they remain there. It is therefore strongly place-based. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of maintaining these distinctions because conflating them can obscure the different psychological and social mechanisms involved.
In real life, however, these emotions can overlap.
I can experience eco-anxiety when I think about the future of the climate. I can experience ecological grief when I think about species disappearing. I can feel nostalgia when remembering a landscape from childhood. And I can experience solastalgia when I look at a familiar place today and recognize how much it has changed.
The same person can experience all four.
The past, the present and the future inside one landscape
Environmental emotions become especially complicated because environmental change collapses different experiences of time into one.
The past tells us what the landscape used to be.
The present shows us what it has become.
The future raises the question of what it will become next.
Solastalgia lives particularly strongly between the past and present. We remember what a place was while experiencing what it is becoming. Eco-anxiety often pulls us toward the future: what will happen to this place, and what will happen to other places like it? Ecological grief can connect all three.
This is one reason environmental change can feel psychologically exhausting. A person is not simply observing an ecological process. They may simultaneously be remembering, grieving and anticipating.
The ordinary landscapes we never thought we would lose
One of the most profound aspects of solastalgia is that the landscapes people grieve are not necessarily spectacular.
They may be completely ordinary.
A roadside tree.
A backyard garden.
A small stream.
A pond behind a school.
A patch of paddy field.
A village pathway.
A grove near a house.
A beach that local people visit every evening.
These places often escape formal conservation attention because they may not be rare, nationally significant or economically valuable. Yet ordinary landscapes are precisely where people develop everyday relationships with nature.
We rarely photograph what we believe will always be there.
That is why environmental loss can produce such a strange experience of memory. A person may have hundreds of memories of a landscape but almost no photographs of it because nobody expected it to disappear.
Then one day the tree is gone.
The pond is gone.
The field is gone.
And the person realizes that they have been carrying a landscape in memory without realizing that they were documenting it internally.
A landscape can disappear before it physically disappears
There is another subtle dimension to environmental loss.
An ecosystem does not have to vanish physically before its social meaning begins to disappear.
Consider a river.
If pollution becomes severe enough that people stop swimming, fishing or gathering beside it, the river may still exist physically. Water is still flowing. A satellite image may still show a blue line.
But the river's role in community life has changed.
Likewise, a pond may remain as a water body but cease to function as a community gathering space. A forest may remain on a map while access restrictions, ecological degradation or social transformation weaken people's relationship with it.
In this sense, environmental transformation can involve the erosion of relationship, not simply the destruction of physical matter.
Solastalgia helps bring that less visible form of loss into view.
The particular pain of slow environmental change
Some environmental losses are sudden. A flood destroys a home. A wildfire burns a forest. A cyclone transforms a coastline. Such events create recognizable moments of crisis.
Slow environmental change is different.
A pond becomes slightly more polluted each year. Vegetation around it declines. Fish become less common. People stop visiting. Children stop learning to swim there. Development gradually surrounds it. Eventually the pond is filled.
At no point is there necessarily a single dramatic moment of loss.
The loss occurs in increments.
This can make it particularly difficult to mourn because there is no clear beginning or end. Recent research suggests that slow-onset environmental changes can be associated with prolonged distress, although the intensity and form of solastalgia vary considerably among people and contexts.
The person does not wake up one morning and discover that their world has vanished. Instead, they repeatedly encounter small reminders that the world they knew is becoming something else.
Development and the question of who gets to change a place
Solastalgia also forces environmental psychology into the territory of politics.
Environmental transformation is rarely only about nature. It is also about decisions.
Who decides that a forest should be cleared?
Who decides that agricultural land should become a development project?
Who decides where a road should be built?
Who determines which environmental impacts are acceptable?
Who benefits from the transformation?
Who bears the costs?
Who is consulted?
And who has enough political and economic power to resist?
This is why solastalgia cannot always be treated as an individual psychological problem. The distress may arise from a genuine loss of control over the environment in which people live. The 2025 review emphasizes power, marginalization, socioeconomic vulnerability and environmental justice as important dimensions of solastalgia research.
If a community loses a landscape because of a decision it had no meaningful role in making, telling its members simply to "be resilient" can be profoundly inadequate.
Resilience should not mean becoming better at tolerating preventable environmental destruction.
Sometimes the appropriate response to psychological distress is not merely psychological treatment.
Sometimes the environment itself needs to change.
Mining and the transformation of home
Mining provides one of the clearest examples of this problem. Large-scale extraction can transform hills, forests, water systems, agricultural land and settlements while simultaneously disrupting livelihoods and cultural relationships with place.
This is particularly significant because mining-related transformation can be difficult or impossible to reverse within a human lifetime. A community may watch familiar topography disappear, water systems change and landscapes that once provided orientation and identity become industrial spaces.
The original research that helped establish the concept of solastalgia examined precisely these kinds of environmental transformations in Australia.
The psychological experience in such situations may therefore contain not only grief but powerlessness: the sense that something fundamental is happening to one's home environment without one's ability to stop it.
That dimension makes solastalgia relevant to environmental justice.
Solastalgia is not exclusively rural
It is tempting to associate solastalgia with farmers, Indigenous communities or rural landscapes. But cities can produce it just as powerfully.
Urbanization changes the emotional geography of places.
An open field becomes a tower block. A quiet road becomes a major traffic corridor. Mature trees are removed. A neighbourhood market disappears. A lake is filled. An old house is demolished. A community gathering place becomes commercial property.
The city may become wealthier, denser and more technologically advanced while becoming less recognizable to the people who have lived there for decades.
Urban development is therefore not simply a question of land use. It can also be a question of place continuity.
A city needs infrastructure, housing and economic development. But the question is what kind of development allows people to retain meaningful relationships with their surroundings rather than constantly replacing them.
Kerala and the emotional landscape of environmental change
This becomes particularly interesting in Kerala, where ecological systems and everyday cultural life are deeply intertwined.
A paddy field is not simply agricultural land. It can be part of the seasonal identity of a village, a habitat for species, a flood-management system and a landscape remembered through childhood.
A pond can be a water resource, biodiversity habitat and social space.
A home garden can provide food, shade, medicinal plants, birds, insects and memories of family life.
A backwater is simultaneously an ecological system, livelihood space, transport landscape and cultural symbol.
A river can be a source of water and biodiversity while also being part of religious, social and personal histories.
The Western Ghats are not simply a biodiversity hotspot described in scientific reports; for communities living around them, they are lived landscapes.
When such environments change, environmental loss can therefore become cultural and psychological loss at the same time.
This makes Kerala an especially interesting setting for interdisciplinary research into solastalgia, because environmental science can be combined with psychology, geography, sociology, cultural studies and community knowledge.
When the monsoon itself begins to feel unfamiliar
Climate change becomes psychologically interesting when it stops being an abstract graph and begins altering familiar seasonal experiences.
For someone who has grown up with the monsoon, rainfall is not merely a meteorological variable. It can carry memories: the smell of wet soil, the sound of rain on roofs, swollen ponds, frogs calling after rainfall, vegetation turning intensely green, children changing their routines, and the arrival of seasonal flowers.
When climate variability changes these patterns, the scientific data may show altered rainfall timing or intensity. But the human experience can be more subtle:
"The monsoon doesn't feel the same anymore."
That sentence is not a climate dataset.
Yet it can represent a lived experience of environmental change.
This is one of the reasons place-based psychological research is valuable. People experience climate change through specific landscapes, seasons and routines, not only through global temperature statistics.
Children may inherit stories of landscapes they never knew
Perhaps one of the most troubling consequences of environmental degradation is intergenerational.
A parent may tell a child, "When I was your age, we used to swim there."
The child looks at the same location and sees a polluted canal, a road or a building.
The child inherits the memory without inheriting the environment.
This raises a fascinating research question: can people experience ecological grief for landscapes they never personally knew?
The answer is not yet simple, but the question becomes increasingly important as environmental change accelerates. Children may grow up hearing stories about forests, rivers, wetlands and agricultural landscapes that have already been transformed.
Environmental loss can therefore become part of family memory.
Biodiversity loss can also change the sensory experience of home
Biodiversity is usually quantified through species richness, abundance, habitat quality and ecological indicators. But biodiversity also gives places their sensory character.
Birdsong.
Butterflies.
Frogs.
Insects.
Seasonal flowers.
Fruit.
Different colours.
Different smells.
Different sounds.
A landscape with declining biodiversity may therefore become not only ecologically poorer but experientially poorer.
A person may not know that three bird species have disappeared according to a biodiversity survey, but they may notice that mornings have become quieter.
They may not know that insect abundance has declined statistically, but they may notice fewer butterflies in the garden.
This is another reason why ecological and psychological perspectives should not be separated too rigidly.
The danger of turning every environmental emotion into a disorder
There is an important caution here.
Solastalgia is not a psychiatric diagnosis. It is an emerging interdisciplinary concept used to understand emotional distress associated with environmental change.
That distinction matters.
If a person is distressed because their beloved landscape has genuinely been destroyed, the emotional response should not automatically be treated as evidence that something is wrong with the person.
Sometimes sadness is a reasonable response to loss.
Sometimes anger is a reasonable response to environmental injustice.
Sometimes grief is evidence that a relationship mattered.
The danger of over-medicalizing environmental distress is that attention can shift away from the environmental conditions producing it.
A community watching its wetland disappear does not necessarily need to become psychologically better at accepting wetland destruction.
It may need a meaningful opportunity to prevent or reverse it.
But environmental grief can also become a source of action
Solastalgia is not inevitably a pathway toward helplessness.
People respond differently.
Some withdraw. Some experience grief. Some leave. Others become politically active, participate in restoration, organize community campaigns or develop new relationships with nearby environments.
The empirical literature documents responses ranging from distress and withdrawal to community resilience, political mobilization and place-based restoration.
This is important because the emotional bond that makes environmental loss painful can also become the foundation for environmental stewardship.
If someone says, "I cannot bear to lose this place," they are also saying, "This place has value."
The challenge is to convert that recognition into agency rather than helplessness.
The science of solastalgia is developing
Solastalgia began primarily as a conceptual framework, but researchers are increasingly developing ways to measure it.
A major development came in 2024 with the publication of the Brief Solastalgia Scale. Researchers evaluated the earlier nine-item solastalgia subscale using three independent adult samples totaling 4,229 participants. Their analyses supported a shorter five-item scale with strong psychometric properties and comparable measurement across validation samples, gender categories and age groups.
This is important because measurement allows researchers to investigate questions that were previously difficult to examine systematically: whether particular forms of environmental change are associated with greater distress, how solastalgia relates to nature connectedness and well-being, whether certain populations are more vulnerable, and whether interventions or restoration efforts change people's experiences.
But a scale can measure the intensity of distress. It cannot fully measure what a particular place means to an individual.
For that, qualitative research remains essential.
A questionnaire might tell us that someone has high solastalgia.
An interview might tell us that the reason is the disappearance of the pond where their father taught them to swim.
Both forms of knowledge matter.
The future of solastalgia research should be interdisciplinary
A particularly powerful research design would combine environmental data with psychological and cultural data.
Imagine studying a Kerala village over twenty years. Researchers could use satellite imagery to document land-use change, biodiversity surveys to track ecological change, hydrological data to examine water systems and climate records to understand changing rainfall. They could then measure place attachment, place identity and solastalgia, while conducting interviews with residents about childhood memories, livelihood changes and cultural practices.
The resulting picture would be far richer than any single dataset.
The satellite image might show that wetland area has declined.
The resident might say that the wetland was where children learned to fish.
The biodiversity survey might show fewer species.
An older resident might describe how the seasonal arrival of birds has changed.
The psychological assessment might show increased environmental distress.
These are not competing accounts.
They are different dimensions of the same socio-ecological transformation.
A new kind of environmental archive
There is enormous potential for communities to document environmental change themselves.
Old photographs can be collected. Older residents can be interviewed. Disappearing trees can be mapped. Seasonal observations can be recorded. Children can be asked to draw the landscapes their grandparents remember. Historical maps can be compared with current satellite imagery.
This could create something like a community environmental memory archive.
Such an archive would have scientific value, but it would also have cultural value. It could preserve knowledge about landscapes that may otherwise disappear from collective memory.
Digital technology makes this increasingly possible. A family photograph taken twenty years ago can now be compared with satellite imagery or current street-level photographs. Environmental memory is no longer confined to physical albums; it can become a form of spatially organized digital history.
Can restoration heal solastalgia?
Ecological restoration is usually evaluated through ecological indicators: water quality, vegetation recovery, species return, soil condition, habitat quality and ecosystem function.
But perhaps restoration should also ask whether people's relationship with a place has been restored.
Do people return?
Do children use the space?
Have community activities resumed?
Do residents feel that the place is recognizable again?
Has ecological restoration strengthened attachment and belonging?
These questions are still developing areas of research, but they point toward an important expansion of what restoration can mean.
Restoring an ecosystem does not necessarily recreate the exact landscape someone remembers. A newly planted forest is not immediately equivalent to an old forest. A reconstructed pond is not automatically the pond of someone's childhood.
We cannot always restore the past.
But we can sometimes create the conditions for a new relationship with a living future.
The problem with telling people simply to adapt
Climate adaptation is essential. Communities need to prepare for changing environmental conditions.
But adaptation should not become an excuse for accepting every avoidable form of environmental degradation.
If a community is distressed because a wetland is being destroyed, the solution cannot always be to teach people how to cope emotionally with the disappearance of wetlands.
Sometimes the better intervention is to protect the wetland.
If residents are grieving the loss of mature urban trees, the answer cannot always be to tell them that cities inevitably change.
Sometimes planning decisions can preserve mature trees.
If a community's relationship with a river is being destroyed by pollution, psychological resilience is not a substitute for water-quality improvement.
This is why solastalgia has an important political implication:
mental well-being can depend partly on whether people have meaningful power over environmental decisions.
A more complete idea of environmental health
Environmental health is usually discussed through clean air, safe water, healthy ecosystems, low pollution and reduced exposure to environmental hazards.
Those things remain fundamental.
But perhaps environmental health should also include the ability to feel at home in one's environment.
A person needs more than a physically habitable space. Human well-being can also depend on familiarity, continuity, belonging, access to nature, social relationships and meaningful places.
This does not mean that every change to a landscape is harmful. Places naturally change, and societies need to develop. The important question is whether change destroys the ecological and cultural relationships that communities depend upon—and whether those changes are necessary, avoidable, equitable and democratically decided.
What solastalgia teaches us about sustainability
Sustainability is often expressed through numbers: carbon emissions, energy efficiency, water consumption, waste generation, biodiversity indicators and land-use statistics.
Solastalgia adds another question:
Can a society be considered sustainable if people continually lose the places through which they experience belonging?
This does not mean environmental policy should attempt to freeze landscapes in the past. Nor should emotional attachment override legitimate development needs.
It means that sustainability should include continuity.
A sustainable city should not only provide housing and transport; it should also preserve trees, public spaces, water bodies, biodiversity and elements of local identity.
A sustainable rural landscape should not only maximize agricultural output; it should also protect ecological functions, cultural relationships and the long-term viability of communities.
A sustainable coastal region should not only manage economic activity; it should also recognize people's relationships with the coast.
In this sense, sustainability is partly about preserving the possibility of belonging across generations.
My own eco-anxiety and solastalgia
This is perhaps where the subject becomes personal for me.
Eco-anxiety makes me look forward and ask what kind of world is being created.
Solastalgia makes me look around and ask what kind of world is disappearing.
The first is often about anticipation.
The second is about recognition.
Sometimes I find myself thinking about environmental issues in a very large way—climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, extreme weather and the future. But then the scale suddenly becomes smaller. I think about a particular landscape, a familiar tree, a changed season or a place that no longer feels quite the way it once did.
That shift from the global to the intimate is important.
The environmental crisis is often presented as something enormous and distant. Solastalgia reminds me that environmental change can also be experienced through the smallest details of everyday life.
A landscape does not need to be globally famous for its disappearance to matter.
It only needs to be someone's home.
Perhaps grief is evidence that a place mattered
There is a tendency to think that environmental emotions are obstacles to rational decision-making.
But perhaps some environmental emotions are forms of knowledge.
Grief can tell us that something was valued.
Anger can tell us that something feels unjust.
Anxiety can tell us that a threat feels real.
Attachment can tell us that a place has meaning.
These emotions should not replace scientific evidence, but neither should they automatically be dismissed as irrational.
The challenge is to bring emotional knowledge and scientific knowledge into conversation.
A wetland can be measured scientifically and loved emotionally.
A forest can be mapped spatially and remembered autobiographically.
A river can be analyzed chemically and experienced culturally.
A landscape can have ecological value and emotional value simultaneously.
What should we do with solastalgia?
Perhaps the goal should not be to eliminate it.
Some environmental grief may be entirely appropriate.
If a forest disappears, grief acknowledges that it mattered.
If a river is degraded, anger may acknowledge that something valuable has been damaged.
If a childhood landscape disappears, sadness may be a natural response to genuine loss.
The danger is not necessarily that people care too much.
The greater danger may be that repeated environmental loss eventually makes people care too little.
Indifference can be more dangerous than grief because grief at least tells us that something matters.
But grief alone is not enough.
It needs to become knowledge, participation, conservation, restoration and political agency.
We need to document what is disappearing, understand why it is disappearing, protect what can still be protected, restore what can be restored and give communities a meaningful voice in decisions about the places they call home.
The landscape outside the window
Perhaps the best way to understand solastalgia is to forget the enormous environmental statistics for a moment and look at the place immediately around us.
What was there twenty years ago?
Which trees have disappeared?
Which birds are no longer common?
Where were the fields?
Where did the water collect during the monsoon?
Which streams have changed?
Which places did your parents know that you can no longer find?
Which places do your children know only through stories?
These questions are deceptively simple, but they reveal something profound.
Environmental change is not only happening to distant forests, glaciers and oceans. It is happening in the landscapes through which people construct everyday life.
And when those landscapes change, something more than ecological structure can be lost.
A piece of memory can disappear.
A cultural practice can weaken.
A livelihood can become impossible.
A childhood world can become unrecognizable.
A sense of belonging can become fragile.
That is the deeper significance of solastalgia.
It tells us that environmental destruction does not necessarily end at the boundary of an ecosystem. It can cross into identity, memory and the experience of home.
Perhaps the real question is not how to stop loving places
If attachment to places makes environmental loss painful, we could theoretically respond by becoming less attached.
But that would be the wrong lesson.
The answer is not to care less.
It is to build societies in which caring does not continually lead to grief.
We should not teach children that the places they love will inevitably disappear.
We should not accept the disappearance of every pond, field, tree and wetland as the unavoidable price of development.
We should not treat every landscape as replaceable simply because another landscape can be created somewhere else.
And we should not measure environmental sustainability only by whether economic systems can continue functioning.
We should ask whether people can continue forming meaningful relationships with the living world around them.
A future worth belonging to
Perhaps this is where solastalgia can become a concept of hope rather than only loss.
If solastalgia tells us that places matter, then it also tells us what is worth protecting.
If grief tells us what has been lost, it can help us understand what should not be lost again.
If memory tells us what a landscape once provided, it can guide restoration.
If attachment creates vulnerability, it can also create stewardship.
And if eco-anxiety asks, What will happen to the future?, solastalgia asks another, more immediate question:
What is happening to the place that is already here?
The two questions belong together.
We need to worry about the future without becoming so overwhelmed by it that we fail to notice the present. We need to acknowledge environmental grief without becoming trapped in it. We need to recognize that some losses cannot be reversed while still acting decisively to prevent those that can.
The ultimate goal is not to preserve every landscape exactly as it was.
Nature changes. Societies change. Places evolve.
The goal is to make that change more thoughtful, more just and more ecologically responsible—to ensure that development does not automatically mean erasure, that adaptation does not become resignation, and that future generations inherit not merely a habitable planet but living places in which they can build their own memories.
Because perhaps the deepest question hidden inside solastalgia is not simply, "What happens when our environment changes?"
It is:
What happens to us when the places that helped make us who we are begin to disappear?
And perhaps the answer should shape how we think about sustainability itself.
We are not only trying to preserve forests, rivers, wetlands, coastlines and biodiversity because they provide ecosystem services. We are also trying to preserve the possibility that a child can grow up somewhere, love that place, build memories there, and decades later return to it and still recognize something of the world that helped make them who they are.
Perhaps that is what environmental sustainability ultimately means at its most human level: not simply keeping the Earth habitable, but keeping enough of the living world intact for people to continue feeling that they belong to it.
And perhaps the opposite of solastalgia is not simply happiness.
It is continuity.
A river that remains a river.
A tree that is allowed to grow old.
A wetland that survives another generation.
A field that remains more than a development opportunity.
A forest that continues to be a forest.
A season that still carries the memories associated with it.
A child who can inherit not only stories about the natural world their grandparents knew, but the living world itself.
A place that changes, certainly, but does not disappear so completely that the people who remain there have to become strangers to their own home.
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