Homesick At Home
Unprocessed Ecological Loss Leaks Into the Way We Fight, Freeze, and Fragment
TL;DR
I have been to three funerals in the last decade. Each time, the community knew exactly what to do. Someone cooked. Someone spoke. Someone cried in the right way at the right moment, and everyone understood. The grief had a shape. What I have not seen, in all my years working in conservation and ecology, is anything like that for a disappearing wetland, a bleached reef, or a river running dry for the first time in recorded history. We have the data. We have the reports. We have, occasionally, the outrage. What we do not have is the ritual. I am starting to think that absence of grief mechanisms for ecological loss is costing us more than we know.
“Solastalgia is the homesickness you have when you are still at home. It is the pain experienced when the place you live and love is transformed beyond recognition.”
— Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: A New Concept in Health and Identity” (2005)
Fairly early in my time living in Botswana in the 1990s, I visited the Mababe Depression, a remote yet significant ecological and geological feature between the Okavango Delta and Chobe National Park. Mababe catches enough water for seasonal wetlands and surrounding grasslands that support large wildlife populations, including some of Botswana’s largest buffalo herds and significant numbers of elephants, lions, and other iconic species. The area is also a critical habitat for numerous bird species, making it a valuable site for conservation and ecotourism.
Alright, so it’s a wonderful African wilderness area that still looks much like it has for millennia. I was lucky to go there. I was visiting a wild dog research project, and we spent an evening following a pack, radio collar on the lead female, and counted over 20 mammal species, including an aardvark that darted between two termite mounds.
All that was pretty special Africa, but what happened the next morning as I took a gentle stroll a few meters away from my tent and onto the terrace of the Savuti channel was truly special.
No lions, elephants, or cheetahs, just a gentle serenade from the morning doves and a ground hornbill in the distance, the sun warming my face and a profound sense of peace. Stillness of mind, like nothing I had ever known before. I was home, true home, at one with whoever, whatever made me. In that place where I could not survive for a day was the peace that, the religious say, is bestowed by the Almighty. I was touched and, for a moment, serene.
No thoughts, no doubts, no pain, pure presence.
I blinked and it was gone.
I had connected, however briefly, with where I came from, where my ancestral DNA resided all those generations ago. It might be true, and if not, it is a comforting story.
Turns out, you can feel homesick without leaving home.
Coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in the early 2000s, solastalgia merges the Latin solacium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain), capturing the paradox of feeling homesick while still at home.
Solastalgia is what happens when the place that made you feel grounded starts changing or breaking while you’re still living in it, and the loss lands as powerlessness and dislocation rather than a wistful longing for elsewhere. It puts a name to an increasingly common psychological response in communities watching drought, deforestation, rising seas, or extractive industries remake their home in real time, with farmers in New South Wales enduring prolonged drought and open-cut mining featuring in Albrecht’s early work. The point isn’t semantic; it shifts environmental damage from an abstract ecological or economic problem into a lived emotional and existential one, and that matters because naming it creates space to recognise mental health impacts that might otherwise be filed away as depression or anxiety while the environmental root cause goes unspoken.
The term has gained traction globally and is now used in climate psychology, environmental justice, and eco-arts to articulate the lived experience of environmental loss. It resonates particularly with Indigenous communities, coastal dwellers, and rural populations confronting environmental transformation.
And it begins with the idea that everyone, however disconnected they may be, are suffering from loss.
Ecological degradation triggers genuine grief responses that often go unrecognised
Loss of a loved one, a friend, or even a well-known public figure is tangible. The person was real, physically present in our lives, and coming to terms with their absence is difficult. Family pets that die were physical, too, loved and lost. Even the word, we can’t find them anymore.
Environmental grief is a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability in the face of planetary-scale disruption. The loss here is often abstract or slow-moving, often with no obvious visible signs in everyday life. This mismatch can lead to the internalisation or dismissal of such feelings, even by those experiencing them, thus compounding the emotional burden.
On some mornings, it lands quietly. You open the news and there it is again, another reef bleaching event, another fire season starting early, another species you have never seen in the wild being filed away as gone. Nothing in your own house has changed, but the background world feels thinner, depleted somehow, and you feel it.
That response has a name. Solastalgia is grief triggered by environmental damage and a collapsing sense of home. It is not melodrama and it is not a political mood. It sits in the same family as bereavement because it follows the same logic, attachment, rupture, and the slow recalibration of what you thought would endure.
Conventional grief for a person is legible and people know what to say. There are rituals, leave policies, casseroles, condolences, an accepted storyline for how sorrow is meant to move through those who knew who passed and even a community. Ecological grief often arrives without any of that scaffolding. It can be difficult to name, harder to share, and easy for institutions to treat as either private anxiety or public ideology.
So people carry it alone because the culture has not built a recognised place to put it.
Psychologists have linked ecological grief to individual wellbeing and to motivations for pro-environmental behaviour. Theoretical frameworks situate it inside broader models of grief and loss, rather than treating it as a novel anomaly. Systematic research is still evolving, but multiple lines of evidence are pointing to the same conclusion. Ecological grief is real, and it is showing up more often as environmental change accelerates.
And yet, for the most part, modern society ignores environmental grief. Perhaps to avoid guilt, we don’t have formal ways to process it.
Modern societies lack cultural frameworks for processing environmental grief
When a human dies, a socially sanctioned practice begins. The death is recorded, the body taken away, and carefully prepared for appropriate rituals. A funeral takes place, and the body is laid to rest. There are memorial services, maybe a plaque or a headstone are crafted, and a mourning period is observed. It’s a process of acknowledgement that takes time and engagement and appears in various forms in all cultures.
In contrast, grief over environmental loss is typically silent and unsupported, partly because such losses are collective, diffuse, and ongoing, rather than discrete events. The absence of cultural acknowledgement makes it harder for people to validate their emotional responses and may result in internalised shame, numbness, or psychological distress.
Several factors contribute to this cultural void.
To begin with, it is new. When agriculture began some 12,000 years ago, the best estimate was that around 10 million people were spread thinly across the planet. These foragers had a light touch, perhaps exterminating a few species of megafauna, but they did little to the broad brush of the landscape. Fire and selective planting altered the vegetation, but they had little reason to grieve for their home. Indeed, they were most likely agreeing with its rhythms.
There are 2,050 Barcelona’s worth of people today, vs 10 million at the start of agriculture. More than enough to alter every corner beyond recognition. We have plenty of visible and reported environmental change to grieve.
Then, there is the psychology.
Values in modern capitalist societies tend to downplay or deny emotional connections to the natural world. The anthropocentric framing of nature is as a resource to be used rather than a relational entity to be mourned. We used to forage in it now we can plough, mine and pave it for our needs and wants. Emotional responses to ecological harm are typically dismissed as irrational, sentimental, or unproductive.
When a society has no rituals for ecological loss or has lost them, the cost shows up in emotional stagnation and a disconnection from nature. A kind of numb drift. Without ritual, ecological grief becomes a private, invisible burden. There is no public space to mourn a dying river or a lost habitat, so people learn to read their own sadness as irrational or excessive. They stop talking about it. That silence produces stagnation, and stagnation produces numbing. The psyche protects itself by dialling down feeling across the board, and the cost is not just the muting of grief. It is the erosion of awe, connection, and the capacity for sustained attention to the living world.
Authors and practitioners like Joanna Macy, Martín Prechtel, and Francis Weller make the claim, albeit from different angles, that grief over the environment is both personal and a communal responsibility. The rise of climate vigils, Earth-based rituals, and ecopsychology is trying to fill this gap and create a space where collective mourning can happen without apology. Still, these frameworks remain peripheral. They have not yet been widely integrated into public life, education, or mental health systems.
Rituals interrupt that drift by doing three specific things. They validate the loss, signalling that what the mourner feels is real and proportionate. They externalise it, moving grief from the interior of the mind into a physical act shared with others. And they restore the feedback loop between people and place, reminding participants that they are part of the ecosystem rather than spectators of it. In many Indigenous cultures, rituals for the land kept that awareness sharp and continuous. When the rituals disappear, the land is quietly reclassified from a relative to a resource. Once that shift is complete, its destruction registers as a line item rather than a loss.
Indigenous worldviews often understand humans as embedded within, rather than separate from, the natural world. This perspective shapes how ecological loss is experienced and expressed. When species disappear, landscapes change, or sacred sites are desecrated, these losses are not seen as external environmental events but as familial or spiritual traumas. Grief, in this context, is often collective, ceremonial, and continuous, reflecting deep relational ties to land, water, and more-than-human kin. Ceremonies of mourning, offerings, songs, storytelling, and seasonal rites are examples of how many Indigenous communities acknowledge ecological change and maintain emotional continuity with the land.
For example, many First Nations peoples in Australia mourn the destruction of Country not only as environmental damage but as a rupture in ancestral relationships. The concept of Caring for Country includes spiritual, legal, and emotional obligations to maintain the health of land and water. When Country is harmed through mining, logging, or fire mismanagement, for example, the grief that follows is real and culturally supported. Similarly, in the Arctic, Inuit communities experiencing melting permafrost and declining ice have described deep sorrow and identity loss, which researchers like Ashlee Cunsolo have documented as ecological grief. Among these communities, such grief is not pathologised but interwoven with resilience, storytelling, and intergenerational knowledge.
Modern societies, especially those shaped by settler-colonial, industrial, and secular paradigms, often cut the emotional and spiritual cord to the land. That rupture does three things at once. It isolates people from the ecosystems they live inside. It removes the cultural tools that would help them metabolise the trauma of environmental collapse. And it also reduces their guilt from actions that drastically affect the way nature works.
The most functional aspect of the rupture, for an industrial society, is the ethical distance it creates. When people are emotionally and spiritually connected to a forest, destroying it feels like self-harm. Sever that connection, and the same act becomes an economic necessity or a statistical externality. The numbing is not incidental because industrial systems depend on it to keep operating without the friction of collective shame.
The bitter irony is that the tools used to master nature, secularism, industrialism, rational resource accounting, are precisely what stripped away the emotional equipment needed to reckon with the consequences of that mastery. The capacity to exploit and the capacity to grieve were dismantled together. And in the absence of ritual, community acknowledgement, or linguistic framing for environmental loss, a privatised, often pathologised grief experience happens. Perhaps this explains why we want to save the whale, the koala or local iconic species. It makes us feel better; briefly.
Suppressed ecological grief manifests as anxiety, depression, and political polarisation
A growing body of research in psychology and environmental humanities suggests that unacknowledged ecological grief manifests as anxiety, depression, and chronic feelings of helplessness. Francis Weller describes this as unmetabolised sorrow, a weight that accumulates in individuals and communities when loss goes unprocessed.
Grief is not resolved, which brings serious consequences. Climate-aware therapists report that patients frequently present with vague, persistent anxiety and depression tied to an unspoken awareness of environmental loss and planetary instability. Those conditions are compounded by the absence of public language or ritual to validate such feelings, leaving sufferers uncertain about the origin of their own distress. There is no cultural container for what they are carrying.
An emotion not seen or acknowledged by the surrounding culture is rerouted into outlets that are easier to name, justify, or perform. Some people slide into denialism, apathy, or hyper-consumerism as forms of emotional displacement. Others carry the same unresolved grief into polarised identity politics, eco-anxiety-fuelled outrage, or rigid ideological posturing. The grief finds itself a shape, only it is rarely a useful one. Knowing this, climate polarisation can be read, at least in part, as collective emotional dysregulation. A clash between those who suppress grief through denial and those who express it through alarm and advocacy, often without mutual recognition.
Unresolved grief is also fertile ground for populist stories that feed on existential fear. When people feel loss but have no shared way to name it, the energy looks for a channel. Some authoritarian or nationalist movements have learned to offer one. They co-opt ecological language, for example, “protecting our land” and convert grief into exclusionary or regressive agendas.
Meanwhile, the ecological left has its own failure mode. When grief is not communally held or metabolised into constructive engagement, it can curdle into burnout or despair.
Without cultural and psychological mechanisms to name, share, and process ecological grief, societies may experience increased fragmentation, mistrust, and emotional volatility that erodes the social cohesion needed to face ecological crises together. Rituals are not cultural relics or optional comfort. They are social infrastructure, and without them, the cohesion needed to navigate the Anthropocene dissolves into the numb drift and fragmentation that makes collective action nearly impossible.
So what do other cultures do about this? Recall that only around a billion or so of the 8 billion people on the planet hail from liberal democracies that know little more than exploitation of natural resources.
Presumably, there are other ways to process collective loss.
Different cultural traditions offer diverse models for processing collective loss
Human societies know about shared experiences of grief and loss from war, natural disaster, famine, or death. Their coping mechanisms often include ritualised mourning, collective storytelling, music, dance, prayer, seasonal ceremonies, and public memorials. Such practices serve not only to acknowledge pain and loss but also to reaffirm cultural identity, reknit social cohesion, and symbolically connect the past to the future. For instance, Japan’s Bon Festival honours ancestral spirits and affirms familial continuity; in many African cultures, grief is processed through extended mourning periods, drumming, singing, and public expression; and in Jewish tradition, shiva provides structured time for collective grieving, reflection, and emotional support.
My own cultural salve is Johnny Clegg’s 1993 song The Crossing (O Siyeza), a tribute to his bandmate Dudu Ndlovu, murdered during the unrest preceding the end of Apartheid. I heard Clegg play it live soon after its release. The song weaves personal grief with Zulu spiritualism, using the metaphor of crossing over to trace the soul’s journey from the living to the ancestors. It became something larger than a eulogy. For a country navigating out of racial segregation toward a democratic future, it captured the exhaustion and the hope in a single breath. The journey over the dark mountains is arduous. There is rest on the other side.
In many Indigenous cultures, land is part of the community. So rituals of loss extend outward to trees, rivers, species, and ancestral landscapes. In Māori tradition, whenua (land) is bound up with identity and ancestry. Damage to land is felt as a rupture in lineage and belonging, which is why communal rituals can arise to restore spiritual and social balance.
Set against that, many modern societies tend to privatise grief and put it on a clock. These cultural traditions do almost the opposite. They build ongoing, cyclical structures for revisiting loss and returning to healing, not once, but across generations. Coping mechanisms are also adaptive. They have survived disruption before and learned to hold loss without collapsing into it.
Grieving together turns out to be more than consolation. At scale, it becomes resistance, cultural renewal, and psychological repair. That is precisely its value when the loss is too large for any one person to carry alone.
Tangihanga, the traditional Māori process of mourning, unfolds over several days on a marae and draws together waiata, karakia, communal meals, and ancestral speech into a single act of re-stitching. It is not only a farewell to the deceased. It reaffirms tribal identity and the living relationship between people and whenua because in Māori cosmology land and nature are kin, not backdrop. That framing changes what environmental damage means. Degradation is harm to whakapapa, grieved communally, and when sacred sites or rivers are damaged, rituals of mourning and healing are invoked to restore balance. As a model for acknowledging ecological loss with ritual depth and communal weight, it has few equivalents.
Rooted in Indigenous Aztec traditions and blended with Catholic ritual, Día de los Muertos honours deceased ancestors through altars, ofrendas, laden with food, photographs, candles, and marigolds, alongside cemetery vigils held in a spirit of celebration rather than sorrow. The tradition affirms a cyclical view of life and death, keeping the relationship with the dead active and participatory. Grief becomes something you do together, out loud, and in public. As communities across Mexico face deforestation, water scarcity, and climate disruption, some environmental groups have begun folding that symbolism into ecological memorials with altars for extinct species and processions to mourn vanishing landscapes.
The Dogon people of Mali hold Dama ceremonies to mark the passage of the dead and release their spirits into the ancestral realm. Multi-day events built around masked dances, drumming, storytelling, and communal gathering, that in Dogon cosmology ties human life tightly to the rhythms of nature, agriculture, and celestial observation. The Dama works to restore that spiritual-ecological order when death has disturbed it. Individual loss and cosmic rebalancing are the same ceremony.
It might be obvious by now that the collective grief of ecological loss is not new or trendy or something imagined by a lefty academic on a New England campus. This is the stuff of human evolution, a knowing that loss is more than the passing of a loved one or the family pet and is felt by everyone.
It is time to acknowledge and honour it.
Acknowledging grief is essential for sustained environmental action rather than an obstacle to it
When grief is recognised and worked through, it stops being dead weight. Joanna Macy makes this point in the work that reconnects. Grieving the loss of ecosystems or species hurts, but the pain is evidence of connection. It tells the truth about what we belong to. And it can support a kind of activism that is grounded and sustainable, powered by love and loyalty to what is threatened rather than by fear or outrage alone.
Suppressing grief tends to do the opposite. It does not remove the feeling. It forces it to find another exit, and that often looks like numbing, denial, or burnout, particularly for people doing climate or conservation work up close. Many activists describe this pattern as futility, despair, and chronic fatigue. Not simply because the work is hard, but because either their grief is invalidated or because their effort starts to feel emotionally unmoored from what it is actually about. Without space to mourn what has been lost or damaged, people either step away entirely or get swallowed by hopelessness.
Psychologically, grief functions as a necessary pause. A way of honouring what matters. A bridge from loss to adaptive response. It is not indulgent or distracting. It is how individuals and communities integrate the reality of change, so they can keep acting with intention.
Socially and politically, normalising grief is a resilience move.
When people grieve together through ritual, storytelling, or public acknowledgment, they build solidarity, mutual support, and a shared sense of purpose. You can see that in the rise of climate vigils, extinction memorials, and eco-rituals. They take private sorrow and turn it into public witness. They make urgency more real because it is rooted in emotional truth.
In that sense, acknowledging grief is not a side project. It is the beginning, the maintenance, and the moral renewal of activism. The key is not to pathologise grief, but to recognise it as a necessary emotional foundation for sustained, compassionate, and creative environmental action.
Only this is not how we do it, at least not in Western democracies. Environmental crises are routinely framed as technical problems requiring scientific and technological fixes. Renewable energy, carbon pricing, and conservation strategies are essential, but that framing sidelines the emotional responses that determine whether people act, support policy, or disengage entirely.
Anxiety, grief, guilt, and apathy are not noise. They are signals that something morally and existentially significant is at stake. Public discourse rewards data and objectivity while leaving the inner human experience unaddressed, and that mismatch strands people between warnings that are scientifically accurate and emotionally inaccessible.
When emotions are named and held in community, through storytelling, ritual, artistic expression, or honest dialogue, they stop obstructing and start fuelling care and collective action. Movements that make room for emotional expression tend to generate deeper public resonance than campaigns that stay purely technical. Extinction Rebellion’s use of grief rituals and the climate justice framing of youth movements both demonstrate the point. Emotional literacy is not a soft addition to strategic work. It shapes how leadership holds under pressure, how communication lands, and how mobilisation survives the long haul.
When we make cultural room for ecological grief, we increase, not decrease, our capacity for environmental action. That runs against the old reflex that emotion pulls us away from rational solutions, when, in practice, it is the reverse. Grief is properly acknowledged deepens commitment, reduces burnout, and builds the psychological resilience required for long-term engagement with complex environmental challenges.
You can see examples of this everywhere. Indigenous communities with established ways of expressing environmental relationship often show notable resilience as conditions shift. Activists who include grief rituals in their work often sidestep the cynicism that catches many colleagues. Conservation organisations that openly name the emotional reality of biodiversity loss often sustain staff engagement and creativity longer than those that rely only on technical problem-solving.
I cannot promise a serene moment on the banks of an African river, the musty warmth of elephant dung in the air and a mourning dove pulling its long note across the channel telling you, without words, that you belong to something older than your own name. I had that once. I did not know what to do with it then, and the culture I returned to had no ceremony for what I had felt or for what was already being lost.
We have built extraordinary tools for measuring the damage. We have built almost nothing for carrying it.
Notes & Sources (for the curious)
Naming the feeling of solastalgia & ecological grief
Solastalgia (definition + origin) — Albrecht (2005)
Ecological grief as legitimate response to climate-related loss — Cunsolo & Ellis (2018)
Eco-distress/eco-anxiety as a mental-health pathway of climate change — American Psychological Association + ecoAmerica, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate (2017; updated 2021)
The backdrop: biodiversity decline & environmental loss
Global biodiversity decline (headline synthesis + drivers) — IPBES Global Assessment Summary for Policymakers (2019)
Biodiversity as systemic risk (economy/finance framing, recent synthesis) — IPBES-linked reporting on systemic risk assessment (2026)
Culture as “container”: collective mourning frameworks
Tangihanga as a communal Māori mourning practice (duration, purpose, open grieving) — Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand (2013)
Día de los Muertos (public remembrance ritual, timing, meaning) — UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage entry (2008)
Indigenous place-relations & “Country”
“Caring for Country” (definition + obligations; why Country is relational) — Australia State of the Environment 2021
Caring for Country (overview + social/health benefits framing used in policy contexts) — AIATSIS resource on Caring for Country benefits (2017)
Practice-level “so what” for holding grief without collapsing into it
Guidance for communities/clinicians on climate-linked distress and coping — APA + ecoAmerica (2021 update)
Primary Sources
Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: A new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, (3), 41–55.
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8(4), 275–281.
Lawrance, E. L., Thompson, R., Newberry Le Vay, J., Page, L., & Jennings, N. (2022). The impact of climate change on mental health and emotional wellbeing: A narrative review of current evidence, and its implications. International Review of Psychiatry, 34(5), 443–498.
Pihkala, P. (2022). The process of eco-anxiety and ecological grief: A narrative review and a new proposal. Sustainability, 14(24), 16628.
Varutti, M. (2023). Claiming ecological grief: Why are we not mourning (more and more publicly) for ecological destruction? Ambio, 53(5), 552–564.
Thank you for naming the grief I feel that my children and grandchildren will never see the natural wonders I saw during my lifetime. I grew up in Puerto Rico in the 1960s. Much of what I saw and experienced no longer exists.