Re-Gain

I have been curious why at times I feel anxious, unsettled, despairing, and depressed. In the course of my life I have observed much disconnection, distraction and denial of what we are doing to our planet. Glenn Albrecht has a name for psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home...’ In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rai...

If your house started to catch fire, what would you do? Well our Earth is catching fire, and many humans are sleeping through the beginning flames. The world’s future is interdependent on our ability to foresee and forestall this global blaze. Never in human history have we been faced with such a menacing wildfire. Are we, the human species, going to become burn victims? Are we on the verge of bringing on the sixth great Earth extinction event? Reflecting on the fact that ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct, you may hear your smoke detector start to scream. Can you feel it getting hotter? Yes there is truth what Smokey the Bear used to say, “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Fires caused by humans are usually the result of carelessness and ignorance. A critical mass of people who are asleep act as small sparks igniting flames throughout our collective home. In order to survive, we must change our mind-set of “independence” into a new “D...