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Some time ago I remarked on this term, which seemed to capture so well my feelings about changes in the landscape due to global climate change. Maybe it is
catching on. As this article states, solastalgia is a neologism that Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher at the University of Newcastle’s School of Environmental and Life Sciences, created in 2003.

Now there is a new term, “psychoterratic illness” that labels the psychological response to climate change, of which solastagia is one form.

“Psychoterratic illness involves the psyche or mind and terra or earth. So a psychoterratic illness would be an earth-related mental illness, where both nostalgia and solastalgia are examples of people being made “mentally ill” by the severing of “healthy” links between themselves and their home or territory.

And ill physical health due to a degraded environment is:

“Somaterratic illness, on the other hand, involves soma or the body and relates to damage done to the human body, its physiology and/or genetics, as a result of the loss of ecosystem health by, for example, toxic pollution in any given area of land.” I suppose the effect on humans of the dioxin found in mozzarella in parts of Italy recently would qualify.

Here is the part of the article that relates to what I wrote previously:

“SK: Do you see a relationship between the conquest of Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, the state of environmental degradation and the experience of loss that we are seeing today? If so, what is that relationship from your perspective and research?

GA: The answer is, yes, there is a relationship between the two colonial cultures: the two continents were colonized only by the systematic dispossession of complex and formerly sustainable Indigenous societies.”

Read the rest to learn more.

Photo from today’s New York Times of Haiti by Marc Lacey.

First cut: I went to the Obama rally here in PDX today. Got up at O’Dark to get in line early enough to get a good seat. Ate cheese sandwiches in the car on the drive down. It turned out we didn’t really know where the Memorial Coliseum was, but we spotted a man walking with a sense of purpose in the general direction and he was headed there so we followed. We were about the 1000th persons to arrive and got in line. (In a sweet irony, I realized that in 1965 I had followed my older sister to our first Beatles concert in this arena.) Our seats were a couple of rows from the stage. The crowd was psyched. From the very young to senior citizens; Asians, blacks, caucasians; the well and shabbily dressed, a good cross section of PDX was present. (I just detest the TV commentators’ query on whether or not Obama has the white vote; clearly he has a lot of it, at least as much as does Hillary or McCain.) Two hours later the photogs with their stylish hair cuts and huge cameras showed up, TV and other media got on their observation desks and eventually the DipDive video of Obama’s speech set to song was broadcast. That was the cue. The photogs ran over to the corridor near an exit, crouched and pointed their cameras, so everyone in the crowd in the general area titled in that direction, hanging over the barricade in the direction of the doorway, cameras ready, too. As the DipDive video ended, the doorway coughed up some of the Obama entourage and then the man was there shaking hands, Bill Richardson in his shadow but gamely joining in.

Obama did his usual stump speech without betraying any of the fatigue he must be experiencing. I was reminded again how serious and almost tragic an expression he sometimes carries. It goes beyond a Lincoln-esque melancholy, but something like what I’ve noticed in the face of a Michelangelo Madonna and child, that ineffable sense of grave portent.

I know Portland isn’t on a par culturally with Berlin, Shanghai, New York etc. But when international cultural figures come here, we really turn out for them. A more appreciative crowd there cannot be.

And generally, artists and thinkers of a high caliber are more accessible when they are in Portland, partly because the venues and vibe are low key and less crowded, and the audience less star struck.

So it was that over this weekend I was able to hear jazz great Ornette Coleman and even get a few hours’ chat with him, and hear James Turrell speak for a couple of hours at PNCA.

Turrell is an artist of light, and as he put it himself an artistic descendant of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Monet and others who have created progressive art theories around light. However, Turrell is certainly one of the most scientific, with a degree in perceptual psychology and with a knowledge of the retinal and ocular that surely would stump most of the rest of us.

And it struck me listening to his talk how much science informs really great art today. Ornette Coleman’s music is about ideas of sound, ergo, his “Sound Grammer” theses. It’s not an original thought to point out that there is beauty in science, but these artists do it with a divine touch.

After a long trying day full of situations that were fubar and snafu’d, we were rewarded with an evening with a living treasure, jazz Hall of Famer Ornette Coleman.

The Schnitz was packed to the point of overheating, and that was before Ornette’s band started playing bits from “Sound Grammar.” Ornette writes an extreme form of intellectual music, one that is, in his own words, about ideas.

I’m not ashamed to admit that Ornette’s invention, free jazz, is not what I normally gravitate to, as it is quite challenging. But it is also plain astounding in its ultra expression of the essence of jazz.

And Portland was most appreciative. Post-concert, we sat with Ornette, invited to visit with him by our friend who was part of the musician’s entourage. Ornette (and what a nice name) seems to be one of those greats who became an outsized genius out of an inner urge to explore originality, humbly, at the feet of the masters. In Ornette’s case, these were Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk among others. He speaks softly and with a touching sincerity.

On Portland: “People here are so nice. So nice. I just can’t get over it. So nice.”
On his performance: “At first I was a little nervous, but after feeling that the audience was so nice, so quiet, I knew I could try any idea I could think of, and so I did.”
On his music: “Improv isn’t a style; it’s an idea.”

He is the Picasso or the Pollock of music.

Here’s the gut-wrenching line from the Joe Nocera business column in today’s NYT:

“Are you ready to face a world in which your two biggest assets, your retirement account and your home, don’t automatically go up?”

As he points, there was a time a generation ago when Americans didn’t need the stock market or home appreciation to live well. “Now we do.”

The economy runs on spending, and borrowing against those assets, to spend more than we make (I use the “we” figuratively, btw) and keep those assets humming along.

We may be on the threshold of a massive, countrywide cold turkey withdrawal from the addiction of shopping.