Wired Magazine, January 2008
(Global Mourning
How the next victim of climate change will be our minds.)
By Clive Thompson
This article hit me right between the eyes. I live in NYC and almost daily when I wake up most days at 5AM, I see a beautiful blue sky turn opaque. This is truly having an impact on my mental outlook. The culprit, chemtrails.
Highflying jets. I mean highflying! Way up there and moving at what must be an incredible speed across the skies. They blow out this never-ending trail of what looks like engine exhaust but it is not, across the skies. There are at least 3, sometimes 4 of these high fliers painting the skies with x’s and what look like Tic Tac Toe formations. These lean plumes then expand, interlock and create a filter that screens the sun’s rays.
This has been going on for at least ten years. Now, if global warming is this much of a concern that billions of dollars are spent annually to do this, well then, we must be really screwed up as a human race.
Discovery Channel in April, 2007 did a show on this. People who want to know more should go to Discoverychannel.com and see if a copy of the show can be had.
Of course there were the NASA folks and some other government folks who deny this even happening.
I can say this. Whenever I introduce people to this phenom, at first they think I’m nuts. Then after a few weeks of observation, they freak out. You will too.
Al Gore’s, “Inconvenient Truth,” completely ignored this potentially harmful disease-causing spectacle. I am sure a revelation to this problem would have ignited a firestorm of interest across the globe. These chemicals are across the globe. Read on. A sad fate for many of us humans, mentally and God knows what else. Thousands of miles away, Australians are feelings mental pain too!
Global Mourning
How the next victim of climate change will be our minds.
Australia is suffering through its worst dry spill in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dustbowl, crops are dying off of fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht – a philosopher by training – is how his fellow Australians are reacting.
They are getting sad.
In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, sores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don’t grow anymore. Gardens won’t take. Birds are gone. “They no longer feel like they know the place they’ve lived for decades,” he says.
Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They’re suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven’t moved anywhere. It’s just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.
Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocate name: solastalgia. It’s a mash up of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it’s pining for a lost environment. “Solastaglia,” as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, “is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”
It’s also a fascinating new way to think about the impact of global warming. Everyone’s worrying about resources management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species – polar bears, whales, and wading birds – that’ll go extinct.
But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we reply on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey we’re nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns.
This is a neat mythos, but in truth it’s a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one’s sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can’t handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? “We like to think that we’re cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big,” Albrecht says. “We haven’t evolved that much.”
What’s more, Albrecht has noticed that the more quickly environmental change occurs, the more intense the solastalgia. The mental health effects can be powerful. In the Australian outback, industrial activity – notably open-pit coal mining – has turned verdant areas into moonscapes seemingly overnight, and the suicide rate in the region has skyrocketed. Or witness New Orleans, where a Harvard survey found that survivors of Hurricane Katrina reported suffering”serious, mental illness” at roughly double the rate of the city’s residents three years earlier. Fully 6 percent have thought about suicide. Trauma and personal loss obviously play a role in this, but the decimation of the city’s physical environment surely does well.
Ironically, we may simply be rediscovering a syndrome that we thought was dead and buried. Back in he 1940s, the military considered homesickness to be a serious and potentially fatal illness, because drafted soldiers who got shipped overseas would often become savagely depressed. These days, Americans are rarely dislocated against their will, and the army is all-volunteer. Few of us have the experience of being unmoored in the world.
But that may be changing rapidly. In a world that’s quickly heating up and drying up, you can’t go home again – even if you never leave.
~End~
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