I see by the snailpapers that Dan Smith's recent New York Times article on solastagia caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and illicited over 100 comments on the Times site....

Andrew Revkin, who runs the Dot Earth blog, and now teaches at Pace University, linked to the article on his FaceBook page -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html -- and noted:


"I'm dubious about anything deeper here than simple unease at large-scale change and/or fear of losing the familiar. More important, to my mind, is Robert Brulle/Jeremy Jackson/et al notion of each generation's environmental norms fading. The Arctic for my two sons is now unremarkably a place in flux. The Arctic for me was a frozen untouchable wild place."


Science writer Michael Lemonick commented: "I'm with Andy -- quite dubious about the existence of a distinct syndrome other than fear of change -- maybe combined with the fact that pastoral and other landscapes feel soothing. Why must it be dressed up as a diagnosis?"

To which Danny Bloom reposted: "Michael, good question and fair comment, re "why must it be dressed up as a diagnosis?". I think the writer of the article, Dan Smith, set out to do a kind of New Age take on climate psychology and focused on Bateson and Rozsak and these new New Age shrinks in Portland and Eugene as a story not about climate change but about a new sub-field of psychology, and he used the Albrecht coinage of "solastalgia" -- which may or may not stick as a new term -- as his intro and outro, but this was really a story about treating patients using a new angle of treatment, and not really about climate or sustainability. So the diagnosis is just a tool for these shrinks in the Northwest and elsewhere to use with their patients. My two cents: good article, interesting term (solastalgia!), but basically a story for shrinks to read. I'm not a shrink. I'm an enlarger! (smile)