When Dr. Cunsolo first started researching the impact of climate change on mental health, she said there was a misconception that indigenous people — often on the front lines of rising oceans, extreme heat and melting ice — would be the only ones affected.
But studies in Australia showed how farmers struggled with extreme weather, and that in Ghana, withered crops, dried-up wells and the “loss of beauty” made people sad.
“We weren’t around when the asteroid wiped out dinosaurs, but now we have humans in the 21st century who are trying to deal with a change to the world which is unprecedented,” said Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and former professor at Murdoch University in Australia. He said that language needed to evolve to articulate such profound loss.
After witnessing the devastation at Australia’s strip mines, Dr. Albrecht coined the word solastalgia: “a form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home.” (It comes from the Latin solacium, meaning “comfort” and the ancient Greek root algia meaning “pain.”)
Dr. Albrecht said the anxiety people felt about climate change was perfectly rational. What’s disordered, he said, “is the world that is causing you to feel that way.”
The experience of those on the front lines, Dr. Cunsolo said, was merely an indication of what was coming. “All humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are impacted by the natural environment,” she said.
Mr. Pottle, for his part, is learning, painfully, to adapt.
Blocked by the open water of the bay, he aimed his snowmobile along a path of low willow seedlings and mosses. Miles on, he would reach the tundra, where, in the distance, his red cabin sat against a white backdrop of sky and land.
- More
Here
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.
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I. J. Good
For if one shows this, a man will retire from his error of himself; but as long as you do not succeed in showing this, you need not wonder if he persists in his error, for he acts because he has an impression that he is right.
- Epictetus,
Discourses, II.26
A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that set in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on ‘solastalgia,’ with it’s evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, 'the homesickness you have when you are still at home.
- Naomi Klein,
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the “Plasticene”. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
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Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever
Gandhi was more directly influenced on freedom, as on non-violence, by Tolstoy. We saw earlier, in A Letter to a Hindoo, the influence of Tolstoy’s view on non-violence, that Indians would be free from British rule, if they internalised the law of love and stopped cooperating on violent projects. Tolstoy saw freedom in recognition, when he said that Indians are enslaved by violence only because they do not recognise the eternal law of love inherent in humanity. Similarly, in Gandhi’s other favourite work by Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), Tolstoy writes that you will be free as soon as you recognise that the role you play in a violent society is not needed for the public good. The reference to love, we saw above, was brought into the Stoic Epictetus’ account of the Cynic’s response to injustice.
Tolstoy was more immediately influenced by the Stoics. He had in his library a book about the Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and other Greek moralists, and had marked a translation of Marcus Aurelius with numerous underlinings. One of Tolstoy’s remarks in The Kingdom of God is Within You is reminiscent of Epictetus on freedom as an inviolability of the rightly directed will, when he says: ‘It is impossible for a man to be placed against his will in a situation repugnant to his conscience.’ Gandhi’s own remark in 1926 seems to echo this when he says: ‘No power on Earth can make a person do a thing against his will.’ In both views, the will cannot be forced, although Epictetus had said this only of the rightly directed will. Gandhi’s comment is presumably not meant to deny that one can act reluctantly, as in his example above, in which non-violence is seen as even worse than violent action.
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I have already given an example to show why I think Gandhi’s philosophy needs to be studied if his politics are to be understood. It is not opportunism that he sometimes allows violence yet often forbids it too. His belief is subtle (and, to my mind, correct) that, although violence is always wrong, it does not give us exceptionless laws of how to act. As already mentioned, he did not think of himself as a philosopher. But neither, for that matter, did he care for politics, which he once called a ‘botheration’, even though he was a great tactician. He put politics below spiritual values, and would give up political objectives if they clashed with spiritual ones.
Nonetheless, his conclusions about non-violence were to have an enormous impact on India, and not only there. It was partly because he had won worldwide admiration that Britain, weakened by the Second World War, had no choice but to leave India. By the count of Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, which is dedicated to advancing the study of non-violent action, there have been 23 non-violent resistance movements influenced by Gandhi in the 20th century and beyond, up to 2005; Martin Luther King, Jr’s was only one. Some have used Sharp’s analysis of Gandhi’s techniques as a handbook. Sharp regards about half of these resistance movements as having succeeded. I think one further effect of Gandhi’s non-violent approach was that there was so little bitterness among first-generation Indians towards the British once they had left, although later generations could well be much more upset when they read the history of British occupation.
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Gandhi the philosopher
An innovation will get traction only if it helps people get something that they're already doing in their lives done better.
- Clayton M. Christensen
