There is a great article over at Wired with the great title 'How the Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds'.  In it we learn about Glenn Albrecht, an australian philosopher who has been studying how Australians are dealing with the changes in their environment.  For those of you who haven't heard, Australia has hit upon some pretty rough times: severe drought, water rationing, dead crops, dead coral reefs, disappearing wildlife... all resulting from rapid changes in their environment due to climate change.

What Glenn Albrecht has discovered from his studies is that Australians are beginning to suffer from a "deep, wrenching sense of loss" as they watch their once familiar home turn into something unfamiliar.  He even came up with a name for this new "syndrome":

"... solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia," as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"

This is fascinating because it shows that despite all of our technology and urban development we still have this close psychological (dare I say spiritual?) connection to the Earth.  The plants and animals around us aren't going to have billions of years to adapt, and neither will we. 

I wonder what our reaction will be to climate change, as a society?  Will we cocoon ourselves deeper within our artificial environs or will we try to reconnect to our planet and adapt to change?

This stuff is awfully doomy-gloomy, isn't it?  However, I'm still going to play the optimist.  We can't just pop Prozac and turn-up the air conditioning in our SUVs and pretend everything will be okay.  (Well, okay, maybe some of us can.)  Human beings have migrated to and inhabited every square mile of this planet.  The people most successful at doing this learned how to adapt to their surroundings.  No matter what we are hard-wired to survive.  Now more than ever we need to connect to the world around us so we aren't blindsided when change comes.

» Wired Magazine