Contemplative Inquiry

“Two decades ago, the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the landscapes that we love, and from which we take comfort and form identity, are changed so much that they feel eerily unfamiliar. He defined it as ‘the homesickness that you have when you are still at home’.

….

“Algorithms want to befriend us, have sex with us, and take our jobs. And all the while, the lands on which we live are becoming less: less biologically diverse, less fertile, less healthy and alive. Whole worlds are disappearing on our watch: white, icy and silent worlds; green humid and screeching worlds. Living on a planet warmer than it has been for more than a hundred thousand years, to which our species is not adapted, is the very essence of uncanny – that which is most familiar, our collective home, has become strange. A tropical storm tearing through the mountains of Appalachia, a heat wave the Arctic, a burnt orange summer sky, a delicate blossom in winter.

“It is this – the combination of marauding bots and the scrambled seasons, coupled with ever-intensifying inequality and tattered social supports – that makes the world feel off-kilter and isolating to so many of us … But mainstream politics has created no spaces with which to grapple with this pervasive and unsettling feeling, brushing our collective homesickness aside in the name of progress and pragmatism.

“And so it has been primarily fascists who have been able to harness the potent emotions of worldlessness and loneliness. And of course they have harnessed them to say: the reason you feel homeless in your home is not because the earth under all of our feet is changing in new and frightening ways, or because synthetic life is indeed attempting to replace our relationships and labor, but because Syrian or Somali immigrants have moved in down the road, and because the pronouns of trans kids are confusing to you. Unwilling to grapple with the deepest reasons for our human distress, fascists promote the fantasy of turning back the clock to an idealized past, foreclosing the possibility of building a more inclusive and less disorienting future”. (1)

End Times Fascism And The Fight For The Living World, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (1) is an informative, powerful and timely book. I will review it in a future post.

Here, I want to look further at solastalgia  – and its absence. For influential apocalyptic currents within Endtimes Fascism do not seem to experience it. They do not seem to value this world at all. Christian Fascism looks forward to the end of the world and the second coming of Christ as King described in the Revelation (2). Secular Silicon Valley leaders hope for a future of superior artificial or hybrid beings, free from the messiness of being human. Both groups have become influential in recent years.

For me, an early Christian text  sanctified my embrace of an Earth Spirituality (modern Druidry) which stands in absolute contradiction to these currents:

“The disciples asked him:

‘When will the Kingdom come?’

Yeshua answered:

‘It will not come by watching for it.

No one will be saying, Look, here it is!

Or, Look, there it is!

The Kingdom of the Father

Is spread out over the whole earth,

And people do not see it.” (3)

Despite its patriarchal language, I have long been inspired by this text. The only way to find what is here called ‘the kingdom’ is in the here and now. It may be an experientially transfigured here and now. But it has to be here and now for there is nowhere else actually to be. The immanent divine is present if we are open to it.

I believe that this is how best to approach solastalgia. I do not in any way to deny or repress its sadness, for sadness  is a valid response to what I see. I accept and include it as part of what I am given. I also seek ways to support the healing of the earth, all beings and myself. Political engagement is part of my response.

(1) Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor End Times Fascism And The Fight For The Living World Penguin Random House UK, 2026

(3) The Gospel of Thomas: The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus: Logion 113 (Translation from the Coptic, introduction and commentary by Jean-Yves Leloup. English translation by John Rowe from the original French. Foreword by Jacob Needleman). Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2005).

(2) Holy Bible: Revelation King James Version, Green World Classics edition, 2017