Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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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. The final chapter, which reads like a science fiction imagining of a utopia, is uplifting and heartwarming, and presents a vision of a positive future that is rarely found in literature on the devastating effects of the Anthropocene.

And indeed, the book does a good job of defining a whole suite of terms to describe various Earth emotions. e. separating human cultures and all the xenophobia that comes with that) nor do we get a convincing argument as to how and why we can block such implications. What had been a fairly clear and compelling statement about symbiotic life (with more neologisms than necessary or helpful) unravels into a mess. There is no escaping however an association with the unique biosphere and environment of a local area which are usually responsible for creating the rhythms which have contributed to creating those identities. Starting with a recently defined negative earth emotion, 'solastalgia', the reader is taken on a psycho-terratic (psyche-earth) journey through all of the earth emotions and feelings in use in the public and academic literature.This is a concept of great use in describing the range of experiences of people on the frontline of the climate crisis and is my key takeaway from this book.

When exploring all the aspects of what goes to make up a ‘place’, as with the fragment pieces of a family tree it can become more difficult to discern with each year if you don’t already know the story. The emotional resonance of his work was strong, and I wanted to discover more about it – both his method, and his thinking.The description of the feeling of nostalgia and sadness associated with experiences of changes in place during the Anthropocene. He has created an extensive glossary of terms that relate to emotional responses to nature and environment. 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.

However, I’m not so convinced when it touches on other political or activist strategies for change which at times seemed to give a green light for ‘ends justifying the means’, when the whole ethos of the symbiocene should surely be to ‘ do as you would be done by’, and live and breathe the life it advocates.It is “the anxiety that is felt in the face of the threat of the frequency and severity of extreme weather events”, which for the most part, are due to climate change.

Ultimately, the readers have to navigate their local landscape with all the pitfalls and challenges on their own. It means a love of peculiar places, so it is about a strong sense of place, but infused with cultural and historical identity. Apart from the emotion typology which is at least fun and fruitful regardless of how stringent it may be (similar to how personality typologies tend to be bullshit but at the same time very fun and fruitful), the outlook of the book is just confusing and, I think, confused. For me, it validates such an approach to understanding my own responses to place, and my own lived environment, with a particular focus in my own case on not only my experiences, but those of my parents, my grandparents and their ancestors, who have lived in this same corner of Hampshire for centuries.

Sumbiocentric: “Taking into account the centrality of the process of symbiosis in all of our deliberations on human affairs”.