Solastalgia is the feeling of existential distress caused by environmental change. The term was coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who describes it as “the homesickness we feel while still at home.” The new book Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World gives voice to the feeling.

Editor Paul Bogard and contributors Leah Naomi Green and Cynthia Belmont join us on the program to share their pieces and explain their relationship with our changing world. Host Douglas Haynes also has a piece in the anthology.

Paul Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, which was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.  He is also author of The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Outside, Audubon, Conservation, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere.

Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast. She teaches Environmental Studies and English at Washington and Lee University. Her chapbook, The Ones We Have, received the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Ecotone, and Pleiades.

Cynthia Belmont is a professor of English, Writing, and Gender and Women’s Studies at Northland College. Her writing has been published in the  Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Harpur Palate, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Flock, among others. She has a piece featured in the anthology Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

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