By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
One of my home places is the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey to be exact. I have loved it with a terrible, extraordinary love. My baptism was in its salty water – any holiness I had came from brine and seaweed. In my smallness its depths felt dangerous and magical.
One summer, playing with my children by the edge, I noticed there were no sandcrabs. As a child I could scoop sand, let the waves make a smooth pool, and watch them swimming within seconds. I wanted so much to believe that the ocean and shoreline was invincible.
When the Place You Love Begins to Change
In 2007, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a new word, solastalgia, meaning the profound distress or homesickness caused by negative environmental transformation while still inhabiting one’s home. Homesick at home.
Something registers before you have words for it. A morning that smells different. A walk that returns you home unsettled. An absence of a sound you don’t realize is missing.
Grief for Place Has No Political Party
It doesn’t matter who you are, what your place is – the farmer, the hunter, the coastal family, the rural community whose river changed. Recent polling by The Nature Conservancy reveals that a vast majority of Americans have a deep, bipartisan connection to the land, with 94% supporting natural climate solutions and 93% favoring the protection of natural beauty.
Relatives, Not Resources
“The notion of a good life that most Indigenous peoples share is deeply relational: the relation to the land with all its interconnected human and nonhuman inhabitants constitutes their collective self-understanding as community,” writes Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), who is Irish, Tsalagi and a made relative of the Oglala Lakota Medicine Horse Tiospaye. To grieve a place, then, is not sentimentality. It is the loss of a relative.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and writer, often describes mosses as her oldest teachers and relatives. She argues that referring to a living being (bird, tree, rock) as “it” steals its personhood and turns it into a resource.
When a place we love slows becomes unrecognizable, we grieve because we are losing a relative, not just a resource or some scenery. This reframe is available to anyone, regardless of politics. It doesn’t require agreeing on climate science. It requires only the capacity to love a place.
What If We Mourned Instead?
The original Earth Day on April 22, 1970, was not just a celebration but a somber, nationwide demonstration born of crisis. Activists used “mock funerals,” “dump-ins” of litter, and “die-ins” to mourn massive pollution and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill.
“Somewhere along the way, what started in 1970 as one of America’s most successful protests ever has turned into a massive marketing opportunity for companies to sell more stuff and flaunt their half-hearted initiatives. I’m not a cynical person, but it’s hard to ignore: Earth Day has become all gooey with virtue signaling, greenwashing, free tote bags and stickers,” writes Kristin Hostetter.
What would it look like to gather — in person, online, in the Transformative Sustainability community — and simply name the places we are grieving? Not to fix anything. Not to assign blame. Just to bear witness together.
The day I discovered the sandcrabs were gone. The day I noticed insects no longer splattered the windshield. Or the year a local shop retired its long-standing summer tank of seahorses.
Years later the sandcrabs returned, not as plentiful, but there. Relief, tinged with worry. Or was it worry, tinged with relief?