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INTRODUCTION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 23
apparent far later. The consequences of the disappearance of bees and birds, of
toxic substances slowly seeping into the water, and the decrease of biodiversity
belong here. EH has, I believe, a particularly significant role in the latter." Viktor
Glied’s paper concerns environmental conflicts.
Solastalgia (solacium — Latin ‘comfort’, ‘solace’, -algia — Greek ‘pain, suffering, sorrow)
The neologism created by Australian professor Glenn Albrecht denotes the complex
and often traumatic feeling one experiences when encountering a profound and
irreversible change in a beloved, familiar locality: nostalgia, sense of loss, anxiety, and
confusion caused by the loss of a setting or landscape that has determined the individual’s
identity. This includes, for instance, people who see their homes where they lived for
generations being bulldozed so as to create a mine or suburban residents whose
accustomed neighborhood is erased to make way for a new shopping mall or the
extension of a motorway, or razed by the outbreak of a wildfire due to global warming.
The concept is closely connected to the notion of sacrifice zones, areas that are
degraded by industrial activity (the extraction of energy resources, processing, the
depositing of waste). Such are the surroundings of Chernobyl, Bhopal in India or
the red sludge reservoir in Hungary. Both the residents relocated by force and
those who remain may feel solastalgia. Such areas are eloquent examples of
environmental injustice and eco-racism as well. (To this, see Hubbell — Ryan 2022:
52-53).
Methods and subdisciplines of EH
The emergence of EH had its roots mainly in literary science, human geography,
history and anthropology, and its methods were inspired by these academic
disciplines. Accordingly, its main methods are participant observation, discourse
analysis, focus group methods, narrative analysis, story-telling, and visual
ethnographic means, often supplemented by artistic projects. The findings of
research work are also disseminated in a diverse way, depending on whether the
target audience is the academic world, civil society or decision-makers. In an EH
degree, it is not surprising that the graduation assignment is a work of art or a
literary essay. Nor is it surprising that the task is assigned at an ethnography lesson
by a professor who is both a biologist and an ecologist, or that a lecturer of
anthropology explains certain aspects with literary examples in a course on the
interrelation between nature and society.
As diverse as the roots of EH are, so great is the variety of subdisciplines
connected to it (as seen earlier): eco criticism, environmental philosophy,
environmental history, critical animal studies, queer ecology, ecofeminism,
environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, political ecology,
posthumanism, multi- and interspecies studies, plant ethics, and so on. Several of
them will be addressed in this book.
2 The term silent violence alludes to the title of Michael Watts’s book Silent Violence: Food, Famine,
and Personality in Northern Nigeria (1983).