As The Natural World Crumbles, We Seek Solace In Animatronic Moose

EDIT

The lobby does nature much better than nature anyway. For one thing, there’s no cold. In the lobby, it is always the second week of summer camp. The inside of the “Grand Living Room” is like a vastly inflated log cabin. There is a fireplace, again gas-lit, with animatronic wolves that occasionally howl from the imitation stones. Rushing through the front doors, the kids are immediately enraptured by the animatronic scene beside the check-in. A robotic moose and bear and tree engage in an endless futile conversation, spurred whenever a kid presses a hand against an imprint. The bear in the tutu declares, “This is the most magical place in the whole North Woods.” And the children listen to her promise: “Isn’t this a wonderful place?”

Mo the Moose makes jokes. “What can you wear anytime, anywhere?” “A smile.” This is what nature after nature looks like. The kids watch anthropomorphized robots while their parents hand over their credit cards. Under the lobby check-in line, a little robot squirrel pokes out his head and screams. Hysterical silliness follows. The kids push the button again. The squirrel pokes out his head and screams again, and there’s more silliness. The kids push the button again. The kids love the robot squirrel. For the kids, it’s paradise. It is a solastalgic paradise.

The idea of solastalgia came out of a stripped landscape, that of the Australian droughts of the early oughts. They provided direct evidence of the mental health consequences of climate change. The effects were most acute among indigenous groups, scientists who confront climate change directly, and farmers whose land has been destroyed. In 2006, Nick Higginbotham, a scholar of public health also at Newcastle University, developed with his colleagues a quantitative measurement of “the bio-psycho-social cost of ecosystem disturbance” called the Environmental Distress Scale, or EDS. They defined solastalgia as a response typical of “contexts where one’s physical environment (home) is transformed by forces that undermine identity, well-being, and control,” and measured it by asking respondents to agree or disagree with statements like “I miss having the sense of peace and quiet I once enjoyed in this place,” “[I am] sad that familiar animals and plants are disappearing,” or “[The] thought of my family being forced to leave this place upsets me.”

Higginbotham found that the experience of solastalgia measured this way correlated strongly with other reactions to environmental distress, like fear and anger. Solastalgia, the researchers concluded, appeared to “give clear expression, both philosophically and empirically, to the environmental dimension of human distress.” In the eleven years since Higginbotham’s paper, researchers have uncovered the mental health effects of environmental change in communities around the globe. The effect of warming in Nunatsiavut, in Labrador, has produced solastalgia. In Central Appalachia, the destruction of the mountains and the valley streams by mountaintop removal mining have produced solastalgia.

EDIT

http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/how-we-cope-with-the-end-of-nature