Solastalgia
Activism, Good Intentions and the Decision Whether or Not to Have Children...
Pun Pun, our little unintentional community here in Thailand, regularly attracts young activists from around the world. I love the energy they bring. The enthusiasm and desire to help make the world a better place is refreshing medicine for middle aged activists like me who, if not careful, can easily become jaded and disenchanted. They help us keep views fresh. An increasingly common trend I have been observing with many of them in recent years is a commitment to not have children, believing that this choice is a noble and effective way to save Mother Earth. “Less humans to suck up the planets precious resources!”, they say. Though I appreciate the progressive thinking and good intent, somehow, this hurts the most human vestiges within my heart to hear this.
Indeed, modern humans have broken their original agreements with Nature and now take far more than is honorable, or even safe. “Civilized” man gives virtually nothing back to the planet after taking, without even being given permission from Her to take anything in the first place, thus stealing everything from precious minerals to water, soil, trees, etc, going so far as to frack for the last drops of holy petrol. It is disastrous. Despicable. Terrifying. One can certainly see why young people, who rightfully fear for the very future of life itself due to the crimes of their parents’ generation and those before them, often feel that humans, being seemingly incapable of living well in a place are no longer viable candidates for life on Planet Earth. Therefore, in an act of solidarity with all other lifeforms The Movement increasingly vows to cease to procreate. I get it. I do.
However, being a seed saver and recovering academic who over the years, sense abandoning the narrow realms of modern thought, social media’s hypnotic vortex’s, intellectual rationalism and scientific peer review has been blessed thus to spend most of his time in the hallowed grounds of wilderness and in gardens, listening instead to the Larger Than Human dialogue that goes on between That Which Was and That Which Will Be, attuning myself as such to the unspoken rhythmic exchanges between Light and Beings Unborn still resting beneath the soils, wrapped temporarily as they are in microbial blankets awaiting the embrace of Time, well, I have been graced with a few important reoccurring observations. It turns out, Life does not continue by ceasing to make life. Extinction itself seems to be a form of birthing, within which Life continues when the Seed is courageously offered to a black hole.
Companies like Monsanto/Bayer, Exxon-Mobile, Shell, Halliburton, CP, etc are vile. They are like Marvelesque villains hellbent on sucking every last ounce of life from our beloved homelands under the guise of “progress”. And on top of their overt wickedness, the seemingly apathetic majority who continue to directly or indirectly support them by either lazily continuing to purchase what they sell or by not speaking out openly against these puppet masters’ various crimes are certainly uninspiring, however forced their choices may be. It’s nearly enough to convince one that humans are hopeless, utterly incapable of living with courage, honor and dignity. Again, I get it. I do.
The *Solastalgia so many today feel is understandable. I feel it too. I am old enough to remember a time when it at least appeared as though most humans cared about the well being of the planet. I remember clean air. I remember snorkeling in clear salt water, observing myriad oceanic creatures playing in a marvelous underwater world of vibrant reef systems. I remember life before plastic dominated the world, both land and sea. I remember life before cell phones and social media when people talked directly to each other at coffee houses. I remember bugs splattering on windshields, before chemicals saturated the midwestern sky and wiped them all out for good, when one couldn’t avoid causing a small insectoid genocide upon rapidly speeding through cornfields. I recall too the time when it was easier to find organic food than “food” covered in chemicals. Now we are so steeped in this brave new world that for most, to quote the words of Fredric Jameson, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” It’s beyond depressing, enough to make one completely lose the will to harness the creative capacity necessary to even envision a world properly fit for raising a family in, much less putting in the hard work to actually build it. How honorable indeed then are those able to usher up the courage to generate faith that a new life is still worth tending to, even amidst the madness of modernity. And I’ll admit it, it took me until I was 40 to finally become a father. It is a scary time indeed to bring new life into this world.
One thing I see in common with all the activists we have hosted over the years at our farm is an impressively passionate love for life. Yet ironically, it is often this very love that results in a choice to not bear children, believing that bringing another body into the world will cause more harm than good. It is one thing if one simply doesn’t have a desire to have children. Fair enough. It’s everyones sacred right to choose for themselves, But be sure, the overlords of the worlds military industrial complex’s, Big Ag, Big Pharma, the leaders of the NRA, etc. who play such a large role in orchestrating the destructive world views now so dominant in this mysterious liminal space we now find ourselves drifting through will certainly bear children. And they will continue to steep their children, and the schools they continue to develop the world over, in all their curious ways and these children will grow up and one day have kids of their own too.
Whether one chooses to have children or not, or whether we want children yet aren’t able to, we still need to collectively reorient our understanding of how life works, shifting our focus away from the individual back into the collective and dedicate our long game efforts to creating the appropriate conditions for allowing life to grow. If we cease to save organic seeds, Monsanto will not suddenly cease to make GMO seeds and chemicals. Such an act would simply make all efforts to keep alive ancient foods and their related lifeways all the more challenging. The same is true for opting to not bear children in a strange effort to preserve life. It simply doesn’t work that way. Better than giving up therefore, or fighting against what we hate is to actively and persistently participate in co-creating and regenerating that which we love. It’s exhausting. It’s inconvenient and it’s what makes us human.
It is not by ceasing to put seeds in the ground that we will prevent a world of monoculture of mind and plant. It is by courageously keeping good seeds, lovingly nourishing the ones who have been harmed, lovingly planting them again and again, and dedicating our lives to keeping them alive. And as my mentor, Martin Prechtel says, “It is not enough to save heritage seeds. The culture of those people to whom each seed belongs must be kept alive along with the seeds and their cultivation. Not in freezers or museums but in their own soil and our daily lives.”
Choose life. Whether bearing children or not. We all are responsible for each other.
*Solastalgia - Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is best described as the lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. A distinction can be made between solastalgia linked to distress about what is in the process of negatively perceived change and eco-anxiety linked to what may happen in the future (associated with "pre-traumatic stress", in reference to post-traumatic stress).
The word was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2003 book Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. He describes it as "the homesickness you have when you are still at home" and your home environment is changing in ways you find distressing. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause solastalgia as well. Differing from nostalgic distress on being absent from home, solastalgia refers to the distress specifically caused by environmental change while still in a home environment. In 2015, an article in the medical journal The Lancet included solastalgia as a contributing concept to the impact of climate change on human health and well-being. More recent approaches have connected solastalgia to the experience of historic heritage threatened by the climate crisis, such as the ancient cities of Venice, Amsterdam, and Hoi An.
(from Wikipedia)