A number of terms have been coined in recent years in an effort to make sense of the climate crisis. Language, after all, is a living thing that constantly mutates to keep up with reality, and as our environment changes in unprecedented ways, we struggle to find words to describe what’s happening, even as we struggle to understand it.
Take the widely used “Anthropocene,” first employed back in the 1980s. It brings together the Ancient Greek ánthropos (human) and kainós (recent) to define the current era, when humanity began to substantially alter the surface of the planet we live on. The Anthropocene Era dates back to at least the 19th century Industrial Revolution, though a number of scientists believe it’s part of the current Holocene, which began almost 12,000 years ago. Experts also disagree on whether the Anthropocene began earlier than that, or if its starting date was much more recent — as recently as the 1950s, in fact, when the global risks of nuclear wars and terrorism took center stage. Our species’ impact on the planet is hard to define: The consequences have grown exponentially in the last 200 years, and they’ve done so in increasingly complex ways.
“Anthropocene” is not an official unit of geologic time, and not everyone who accepts the concept thinks the word is an apt description. Scholars like Donna Haraway argue that “Anthropocene,” by its nature, assumes that all humans should be blamed equally for ecological destruction. Haraway prefers calling this era the “Capitalocene.” She did not come up with the word, though she is credited for its spread across the humanities.
“No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone,” Haraway wrote in her commentary “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” in Environmental Humanities. “But, is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the ‘game’ of life on earth for everybody and everything?” Haraway, a feminist studies professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees with other critics that instead of blaming humanity, we should look at yet another human construct: the capitalist mode of production and its endless push for growth.
Stephen J. Pyne, an Arizona State University professor specializing in environmental history, came up with the term “Pyrocene,” which reflects our experience of increased wildfires, or of burning fuels for energy. “I see the world through a pyric prism,” Pyne wrote in a 2022 essay in the journal Psyche, titled “Our children will need to find the beauty in our burnt planet.” In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a consequence — and fires everywhere as a catalyst.”
“No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone.”
Whichever concept we use to help us move through our current world — Pyrocene, Anthropocene or Capitalocene — can it give us some new agency, or are we obliged to accept this era as a new normal, a geological epoch whose fate is written in the stars?
The word “solastalgia” was coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe his and our collective anguish at living amid environmental destruction. The term isn’t as widely used as the Anthropocene, but the sentiment seems to be everywhere these days. It combines the Latin sōlācium, meaning comfort, and the Greek algia, or pain, to describe the kind of sadness, malaise or existential dread that many of us may feel in connection to rapid environmental destruction. Climate despair is obviously different from outright denial, but it implies a feeling that it’s already too late to stop the worst impacts of climate change.
Solastalgia reminds me of another word, the Portuguese saudade, a type of nostalgia for a place or a person we love and miss. I love the idea of saudade, how sometimes one can experience it for something that hasn’t even existed, but will, or perhaps can — how it defines a longing that reminds us of home, or of any beloved place that we yearn to return to, especially if we know it still exists. But what if our home is disappearing around us? In addition to having words that define our feelings, or our epoch, we need frameworks for dealing with this moment and the future as we try to navigate toward better ways of being.
It turns out the term already exists: The Symbiocene. Inspired by the Greek symbiosis, or “living with,” the Symbiocene was also dreamed up by Albrecht.
“The idea of the Symbiocene stimulates all humans to create a future where positive Earth emotions will prevail over the negative,” Albrecht wrote.
Albrecht believes that “positive Earth emotions” ought to define the next era of human and Earth history, making it a time of mutual benefit between humans and planetary systems. As an imagined epoch, the Symbiocene doesn’t blame all humans for climate change, nor does it indulge our sense of fatalism and helplessness. The Symbiocene hints at an imagined future. But it also captures something that has always existed: Humanity, not at the center of existence, but as part of a system that’s interconnected, dependent, responsible — to other species, to ecosystems, to life.
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
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This article appeared in the August 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “After despair comes repair.”
