Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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Glenn: Yes, it is important that symbiosis is not really a philosophical idea: it comes from science. It’s Lynn Margulis writ large. As we have just said, there is a lot of scientific work now that shows that life forms not only compete with one another, they also collaborate and work together. The more we understand symbiosis, the more we understand that that’s the future for life on Earth, whether we’re part of it or not. So I’m beginning to put together a book that explores ways in which we might re-integrate with the rest of the life-world and use our intelligence to convert everything that’s currently parasitic or cancerous – I mean in the metaphorical sense – to something which reconnects us to not only the shape of life, but the processes of life Negative feelings are unhealthy and can lead to illness. Poor emotional states that cause disease is not pseudo-science that can be dismissed. As engagement with the positive psychoterratic takes place, nurture and protection of those places becomes the main aim of the politics of soliphilia. The momentum created by Gen Z is now unstoppable. I am convinced that many from all other generations, including the Boomers, will unite to form Generation Symbiocene. They will do so because it is now absolutely clear that the future will be unthinkable if it continues in the current direction.

Self-aware, tranquil, adaptive, empathetic, modest, devoted, reflective, authentic, integrating, co-operative Many of these renewable energy systems are already in existence with an energy delivery cost structure lower than that of finite, high-risk polluting alternatives such as coal. As Gen S dismantles gigantism, at the same time they need to be furiously building a new economy. Ideas that have global application (such as renewable energy) will be shared, while innovation at the local level requires tailoring technologies to the particularities of place and culture. Gen S will become technological “terroirists” and sumbiofacts will replace artifacts. Apart from the emotion typology which is at least fun and fruitful regardless of how stringent it may be (similar to how personality typologies tend to be bullshit but at the same time very fun and fruitful), the outlook of the book is just confusing and, I think, confused. Not all relations in nature are mutualistic. Death and decay, here, seem associated with evil, seem excluded from the Utopian future of universal symbiosis - what a toxically positive vision! Ends with "all is well on earth". All will never be well. That is not a desirable outcome.And the idea has grown from there. There is a journal called PAN ( Philosophy, Activism, Nature) that was prepared to accept what was initially a short essay designed to stimulate discussion and help turn it into a more thoughtful and considered article. [3] The period from 2005 to now has seen – unfortunately, really – solastalgia being widely accepted as a term by all sorts of people. It is actually only the first of what I call ‘psychoterratic’ (psyche-earth) concepts [/]. I am devoted to the task of fully explicating all of the positive and negative earth emotions that we have, because even though we may have had them in the past, we seem to have lost these sensibilities in the last two or three hundred years since the Industrial Revolution. Jane: As I understand it, the essential message of your book Earth Emotions is that there’s a connection between the state of the earth and our own mental and emotional states. We’re deeply embedded in our relationship to nature and have both positive and negative emotions associated with it. But in western languages, at least, we don’t really have words for them. So you have set out to create them. The best known, I think, is the term ‘solastalgia’. Can you start by saying something about this? The pleasure derived from a close emotional bond with our local and regional home was described by Yi-Fu Tuan as topophilia or love of place. The closer to the land a person lived, the stronger the topophilia. Recent years have made it abundantly clear how much our actual, physical homes and lives are at risk, all over the world. In 2019 alone, 24.9 million people around the globe were effectively evicted from their homes by natural disasters and climate-change impacts. Communities that survive disasters, both large and small, face damage that is hard to even tally. Various economists have tried to estimate the harm of climate change to our societies in monetary terms. Others have made calculations of potential economic losses based on factors such as wage-earning potential and gross domestic product. The world could lose up to 18 percent of GDP by 2050 if nothing is done about climate change. But such calculations strike me as profound underestimates of a phenomenon that could easily tear apart the basic fabric of our societies, economically and physically.

By mastering the four elements in your emotions and actions, the fifth element emerges in your conscious mind and automatically takes control of any situation. As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to pondering language about and human relationships to the natural world. As a person, he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region, a sublime area of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. The valley here offers a stopover along a flyway that runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand how coal mining was threatening the well-being of the valley’s feathered and human residents. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter, akin to the mountaintop-removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes, had increased almost twentyfold. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge toxic metals into water supplies.There will be no time for the myopia of reality TV, gambling and gaming; this is genuinely productive work and it will be relentless and all-consuming. With urgency, new visions of all of the foundations of human life now can be imagined, then built. Here are a few of them to give you free entry into Gen S and the Symbiocene. Jane: Lynn Margulis is very much associated with the concept of Gaia, which is a way of seeing the world as an interconnected whole. But ghedeist is not the same as this, you say? From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions.

In his experiments, Dr Emoto concluded that when you direct positive energy towards water it forms geometrical patterns that are natural. Negative energy, on the other hand, disfigures the water.

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Glenn: The traditional people of Australia have undergone a double-whammy of psychic blows. Colonisation has also been a form of deep and immensely distressing nostalgia because of the loss of both their culture and place. Their culture is 60,000 plus years old, so it is not something that can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and an injunction to get into the 21st century and enjoy Netflix. And of course, they are still living in Australia and Tasmania, where climate change, global scale development and multinational mining is destroying what’s left of the homeland that is their spiritual, physical and material base. Glenn: Of course we should be doing everything we can to stop the decline. We should have stopped coal mining 20 years ago and now we cannot afford another degree of warming. On Wallaby Farm, we try to live on our fruit and vegetables as best we can. But in recent summers we have had temperatures of 47 degrees here, and I have seen plants burn – literally burn – without there being a fire. I live with koalas, wallabies, snakes, lizards, parrots, and it has been recorded that birds just fall out of the sky dead because the temperature was too high. If COP26 fails, we are going to have an even warmer world, and our property – my life at Wallaby Farm – will come to an end because it will get too hot or we’ll burn. To work with water, learn to understand how water works as it takes on many different mutations. It can flow gently down a stream, or tumble in a rage along a river. You can increase the power of each of the elements through visualisation exercises. I have described some useful exercises you can do to work with each element, but you can also imagine your body filling with whatever energy you want to provoke. Lay face down on the ground and unburden yourself of all your woes and worries, then be silent and listen to what Mother has to say. The noises you hear deliver a message.

Jane: This question of interconnectedness suddenly seems to be at the forefront of our awareness in every way. There is a lot of scientific work now coming out now about it, for example. Glenn: Yes. I see the Symbiocene as a culturally transmissible idea that could be attractive to people, and give them hope and radical anticipation of the future. And also give them something to do. There’s no end to the amount of work needed. We are talking about a change in our political structures and different forms of democracy that involve, for instance, the integration of considerations of other life forms. We are talking about a change in our educational structures, because the effort to create something like the Symbiocene is trans-disciplinary; it’s not going to happen in the universities as currently construed. And architecture – I am no expert, but I occasionally give guest lectures to the architecture students at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, and they are just blown away by the creative possibilities of thinking differently about these things. Eutierria is a good Earth feeling and one that lovers of nature, landscapes and biodiversity often experience. Eutierria is not euphoria, as it comes from raw interaction with the living Earth. It is not enhanced by artificial or extraordinary means.

How To Identify Your Weaknesses and Transform Them Into Strengths The four elements feature heavily in every ancient culture around the world. Our ancestors had a profound understanding of how the symbolic elements of air, earth, water and fire affect emotions and characteristics and enriched their mythologies with deep meaning. Jane: We seem to live between the two extremes of depression and complacency at the moment. Some people feel that the ecological situation is so dire that it is too late to do anything about it, so we need to adapt to a very different world. Others – which unfortunately still seem to be the majority – feel either that it is not urgent, or it can be fixed by a few technological innovations. Both of these are leading to a kind of inertia. Australia is still mining coal in Hunter Valley, for instance, and we are continuing to cut down forests and deplete our soil at an ever increasing rate.