Colonial Solastalgia
A look at how climate change and colonialism operate together to displace a young black woman’s sense of self or as she exasperates, “How do I even begin to read the palimpsest of my home landscape, when there is a global climate crisis?”
On par with how I learn most things, I was on Instagram and saw a post a couple of months ago from the NatGeo account discussing what climate philosopher Glenn Albrecht has described as ‘Solastalgia’. Here is a quote from the caption:
‘…an idyllic Australian valley. They felt it when coal mines churned some of the valley’s green fields into gray pits. The mines created dust, noise, and light pollution. People left. Communities fractured. Some residents lost the sense of solace they once felt there. It took a lot of effort to describe. “It was like homesickness, except no one had left home,” Albrecht says. It was, instead, like some essence of home had left them.’
Solastalgia is an acute awareness that your environment and landscape has been overturned and distressed. So in turn it distresses you; either as someone native to that environment or as someone who participates and engages in that landscape.
This word and idea really stuck with me, mostly because I love assonance, but especially alongside the photographs Peter Muller uploaded to accompany the story. The sincere look of powerlessness on the faces of the locals who built their ‘social fabric’ on that land only heralds what most of us could look like in the next lifetime, following more waves of environmental degradation.
Our present Climate Crisis will most likely result in floods, wildfires, sea level rise, species extinction of flora and fauna, ice sheet melting at both poles, acidity changes in the ocean from increased carbon emissions,droughts in already water scarce areas, sporadic precipitation intensity, cyclones, unpredictable growing seasons and coastal degradation.
Radiative climate forcing from modern CO2, CH4 and NO2 gasses will combine with the natural temperature and atmospheric gas feedback of the inter-glacial maximum period we are in. And it will get too hot in here, take off all your clothes ect ect….
There are graphs of deuterium (δD)variations in Antarctica Ice Cores that you can google if you want to look at glacial-inter glacial variation of temperature over the past 650,000 years. It’s a little terrifying, but if you are curious and want to stay informed the IPCC posts very comprehensive reports all the time.
According to the best case scenario however, from many simulation climate models, the landscape we know will inevitably be lost.
I learnt a lot of this from studying geology where catastrophes of environment, whether it was volcanoes or submarine landslides were literally my day-to-day textbook reality. In stratigraphy subdivisions of life are bounded by extinction events. And by extinction events we’re talking a minimum like 70 percent of all species gone. Each Mass Extinction Event Has Involved Abnormal Rises In CO2 levels except the asteroid one(I love living in space). Check out a summary here.
Modern geological catastrophes have meant that as people we have always cautiously had ‘new frontiers in our relationship with the environment’ waiting around the corner. Albrecht explains that the emotional dimension of how we have approached various climates always shifts so Solastalgia is most likely “felt worldwide in various contexts, and has likely been felt for thousands of years in similar circumstances.”
So what happens if you are not allowed to mourn the loss of your landscape?As I said before, the landscape we know will inevitably be lost, but what happens if you were prevented from knowing and naming your landscape in the first place?
As Climate Change earns the title of ‘climate crisis’ in many scientific and now mainstream spheres, social ambivalence is seen as irresponsible. Not considering the consequences of global industrialization on the environment and ecology is irresponsible. However, social ambivalence towards the environmental changes made specifically by colonialism is something most people are comfortable with. As with climate and it is true with colonialism, you can afford to be socially ambivalent if you do not perceive the result as a problem. Especially if it does not threaten your immediate survival. You cannot care if you do not know. And most people don’t know.
Colonialism and global industrialization are within each other, supported by each other, endlessly interlinked. They are the chicken and the egg inside the chicken and the egg. The economic gains dynamic, off-shooting from agricultural, resource mining and petroleum industries, that benefit the global center and that are exchanged out of the periphery, has been going on for years. I remember reading about it in my GCSE History classes, the dynamic of this relationship is always changing face but it is now entirely neo-colonial.
Landscapes lost in the era of global Climate Change and Landscapes transformed by colonialism and neo-colonial capitalist ventures are encompassed by the feeling of Solastalgia. Albrecht says “You can only address something that’s giving you grief if you have a shared understanding of what the cause is.”
So in turn I have decided to write about my own Landscape lost. This one here is for the Zimbabweans here are the degrees of our solastalgia post-colonization.
What landscape was lost?
Firstly what is Landscape? Landscape is different to place. Place is the non-objective ground that weaves into the fabric of your identity. ‘Indeed the idea of ‘landscape’ is predicated upon a particular philosophic tradition in which the objective world is separated from the viewing subject.’
Landscape is the inaudible soil and objective. Place is the talking roots and subjective.
The Landscape, natural environment and ecology, in my opinion is no longer being objective. Even as it disappears it is speaking, and even as its fauna and flora migrate or are suffocated: I count that as speaking. Like meta-data.
So back to the question: what Landscape was lost?
The ecological changes made by the British in southern Africa, were made to facilitate British financial investment and to construct a satellite of British culture 8,800km away. There were many changes made to the Landscape; and please do inform of those I miss, but I would like to highlight the following:
Soil Erosion under commercial farming practices used by European settlers and resulting from mining operations of alluvial gold supplies, such as in the Mazoe District. This erosion was coupled often with deforestation and resulted in areas becoming increasingly barren and inhospitable. The long-term soil fertility of the Landscape depended on nutrient fixation by trees and the feedback of nutrients from decomposed wood material. This exacerbated food supply too poorer communities in the long run when threatened by drought. Land degradation also forced fauna to move from their natural habitats.
Reduced biodiversity also followed commercial farming when compared to the antiquity of other plant-based agriculture. Biodiversity was reduced to elevate the production of tobacco, cotton and maize, the latter being mostly imported in the seventeenth century. Pioneering in farming produce that was personal to locals was discouraged under colonial government; whereas previously growing sweet cane, millets, rice, beans, cannabis, sorghum, groundnuts and melons was decided by cheiftaincy and spiritual conservation practices in the landscape known as gombomakura.
Flooding and land alienation brought massive ecological change to the Landscape. Between 1955–1959 the acquisition of the Zambezi flood plains forced the relocation of the local Tonga people and their royal clans, for the Lake Kariba Dam project. 57,000 local people were relocated to arid settlements away from the plateaus of the Zambezi for the artificial lake. Those who resisted relocation were killed and the reservoir during its construction flooded 5,580 square km and Operation Noah relocated 6000 of the wildlife endemic to that habitat. Kariba today has an entirely new ecosystem.
This beautiful interactive map shows the further effect of Climate Change on Lake Kariba dam, thank you NASA observatory.
The final change to the Landscape I would like to highlight is the use of Biological and Chemical warfare, which polluted water sources during the 1975–1980 guerrilla war. The bio-chemical agents colonial government used against people and in forested areas included parathion, thallium and a causative agents of cholera and anthrax.
Landscape Language
As well as those environmental changes a wider dissonance of Landscape language emerged from colonization. How do you call a thing that has always been what it is, what it is?And if you were then less socially mobile to own the land how did you learn what to call it?
The aftermath of colonization on the social hierarchy in Zimbabwe created a wide diaspora community in the UK.
I, like many others, am so far out of my Landscape that I struggle to write and talk about what it is. What it is that I miss. The objective taste and fragrance and nuance of that Landscape can only be breached in English. I have to remind myself that it’s not Victoria Falls its Mosioa-Tunya. Those are not brambles those are minzwa. Those are not beetles those are nyuchi. That’s not a lion that’s a shumba, one of the Shona family totem animals.
How do I speak of the landscape as I’m experiencing it? Livingstone saw and named. I see and have to read and retrace past what I was told to call the landscape in English, and probably because of Climate Change I will I have to imagine the landscape past the loss. Regardless the palimpsest of my Landscape is worthy of my attention, it always will be.
So here we are at the crossroads of History and the Future. The colonizer wrote the Landscape as it was to be, and climate change will write the Landscape as it will be.
Climate change and colonialism inform Landscape. What happens to the Landscape informs Place. And don’t forget place is the ‘ground of being’ for the individual.
But with one eye looking to the past of how things were and one eye imaging the horror of what more could be lost, a new textual language can emerge in the flux and that is why I am grateful for the world Solastalgia.
I look forward to postmodern texts that will incorporate Solastalgia in their cultural critical reality, because the subjectivity that people will approach various landscape risks as a result of climate change will not be equal in their urgency.
Eco-Considerations Beyond Theory
The National Geographic article is pretty good and by saying ‘ Let’s get rid of it. Let’s get rid of the circumstances, the forces, that create solastalgia.”
How sway? Nature is not naturally benevolent, but we can be!
We can and should reduce our direct waste and indirect carbon output when we can to mitigate the enhancing effects of climate change, and to prepare good environmental material for the worst. Living on less to make room for more time with the landscapes we love. Here’s a place where you can donate to climate risk areas, here’s a link to learn about more climate at risk areas and observable effects. Here are some aesthetic ways to reduce here and also here.
Two things: I should have probably evaluated the continued ineffectual mismanagement of ministry funds in present day Zimbabwe that can continue to exacerbate the products of climate change in the country, sure. But there are thirteen ways to look at a blackbird, pay me to write the others.
In my bio I wrote the question
How do I read the palimpsest of my home landscape to know myself, when there is a global climate crisis? Here’s the answer:
Take road trips in with your favorite great uncle. Become a geologist because rocks were never colonized …even if their discovery has been( ‘The map is the crucial signifier of the control over place and thus power over the inscription of being’…eek). Finally, read and cherish good literature such as the Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
Which is exactly what I did.
If you have any further suggestions please let me know.
