Essay by Eric Worrall
A green language expert instructed a 17th-century medical student to capture the profound emotional impact looking at an open pit coal mine can have.
The era of climate change has created a new emotion
What word can describe the loss of your home while in one place?
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As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to considering language and man’s relationship to the natural world. As a person he also cares deeply about this place which has been his home since 1982 – Australia’s Hunter Region, a wonderful area of dairy farms, wineries wine and gardener. The valley here was a stop along the crow’s way from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand that coal mining was life-threatening. of the feathered inhabitants and the people of the valley. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-pit mines at Hunter, similar to the destructive mountaintop mining that devastated the Appalachian landscape, increased nearly twentyfold. This process leaves permanent and coarse scars, with no topsoil. Such mines can also release toxic metals into water supplies.
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Over the decades, Albrecht has devoted himself to finding language that can describe a kind of sadness, shock and loss that seems to be more common today — the sadness of displacement, dissatisfied with our surroundings, feeling that damage and disaster may occur. located right under the road. He will feel the same grief and anxiety in 2009 when he moves to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he has grown up. There, thanks in part to the early effects of climate change, rainfall in the area has dropped by about 15 to 20 percent since the 1970s, and the jarrah trees he’s loved since he was a kid. — glossy wooden eucalyptus — is dying en masse.
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In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, put together a collection of case studies to document the pain of family breakdown. Historian Thomas Dodman writes: Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War — a conflict that transformed the region into “a smoldering land, with half its population amputated” and left This part of Europe fell into economic stagnation and political instability.
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For Hofer, nostalgia is also a medical condition whose symptoms include fever, nausea, sleep disturbances, fatigue, and breathing problems, along with “The heart beats fast, often sighs, the mind is also stupid.“Untreated, it can be fatal, and there have been documented deaths of Swiss soldiers attributed to the disease.
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Perhaps Albrect was trying to say that the green women were too annoying to think straight. If that’s the case, I certainly hope they make the effort to try.
In his 1688 thesis, which is said to have coined the word “nostalgia”, Dr Johannes Hofer proposed giving blood, laxatives and narcotics as a cure, but I recommend consulting your doctor before trying any of these remedies. Learning some science can also be helpful.
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