Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World

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For me, it validates such an approach to understanding my own responses to place, and my own lived environment, with a particular focus in my own case on not only my experiences, but those of my parents, my grandparents and their ancestors, who have lived in this same corner of Hampshire for centuries.

He has created an extensive glossary of terms that relate to emotional responses to nature and environment.Biophilia: an older term, first deployed by Eric Fromm in 1964, to mean a love of life, and a reverence for everything in humanity that enhances life and growth in nature, establishing it as an ethical good. Our lecturer referred to it a lot and used many of the words introduced in the book to emphasise how interrelated are the concepts of nature connectedness and mental wellbeing. By unpacking all of that at first hand in an almost autoethnographic fashion, it helps with his wider ‘psychoterratic’ mission. It means a love of peculiar places, so it is about a strong sense of place, but infused with cultural and historical identity. There is no escaping however an association with the unique biosphere and environment of a local area which are usually responsible for creating the rhythms which have contributed to creating those identities.

it is a bad thing and we only have to accept it because we can't change it, not because we agree with it? Yateley Common – definitely part of my sumbiography – and much of it is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. How do we possibly process the overwhelming information about climate change, and how it will impact on the places we know?Albrecht does what he sets out to do in creating a whole range of new words to describe the emotional responses to what people experience in the Anthropocene. When I did move back home, I was desolate to discover the ‘big tree’ that we used to race to at the end of the street had been felled. If you are going to go down the path of endorsing regional and local allegiance in a nature as well as culture context as part of your Utopia, but also keep bringing up how climate change will lead to mass migration, then you better have a really well-conceived philosophical defence system against the easy leap from "This is OUR land and people" to "This is OUR land and NOT YOURS, so go away".

And indeed, the book does a good job of defining a whole suite of terms to describe various Earth emotions. The book helpfully provides a glossary of all the ‘ psychoterratic’ terms at the back of the book, for ease of cross-reference. In terms of helping us better use language to understand how we feel about, and explore and explain our relationship with our planet and the places we live in and shape, and to equip us to make better connections, Glenn A. Just as a botonist before newly discovered plants, Albrecht needs more suitable, more specific lexicon to the familiar generic ones.Language extinction goes hand in hand with endemic landscape and biota extinction", therefore Glenn sees the need for new words that describe new emotions. He retired from Murdoch University in 2014 as a Professor of Sustainability, and he is now an Honorary Associate in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. It's bold and interesting to talk about allegiance to a local place and culture and anti-globalism in an environmental context and how, in that sense, nationalist movements like "Generation Identity" may have "a point" as the author phrases it.