Essay by Eric Worrall
A green language expert has channelled a 17th century medical student to capture the profound emotional impact looking at an open cut coal mine can cause.
The Era of Climate Change Has Created a New Emotion
What word might describe losing your home while staying in one place?
…
As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to pondering language about and human relationships to the natural world. As a person, he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region, a sublime area of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. The valley here offers a stopover along a flyway that runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand how coal mining was threatening the well-being of the valley’s feathered and human residents. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter, akin to the mountaintop-removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes, had increased almost twentyfold. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge toxic metals into water supplies.
…
Over a period of decades, Albrecht has devoted himself to searching for language that might describe a type of sadness, shock, and loss that now seems more and more common—grief of displacement, unease with our surroundings, a sense that damage and disaster might lie just down the road. He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up. There, thanks partly to the early impacts of climate change, regional rainfall had dropped by about 15 to 20 percent since the 1970s, and the jarrah trees he had loved since he was a child—eucalypts with lustrous wood—were dying en masse.
…
In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, assembled a set of case studies to document the pain of home disruption. Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that turned the region into “a smoldering land, amputated of half its population,” writes the historian Thomas Dodman, and left this part of Europe in a state of economic stagnation and political instability.
…
To Hofer, nostalgia was also a medical condition whose symptoms included fever, nausea, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and respiratory problems, along with “palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.” Untreated, it could be fatal, and there were documented deaths among Swiss soldiers attributed to this malady.
…
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/07/climate-change-damage-displacement-solastalgia/670614/
Perhaps Albrect is trying to say greens are too upset to think straight. If this is the case, I sure hope they make the effort to try.
In his 1688 dissertation, which is credited with creating the word “nostalgia”, Doctor Johannes Hofer recommended blood letting, laxatives and narcotics as a cure, but I recommend greens consult with their doctor before trying any of these remedies. Learning some science might also help.
How is looking at an open pit coal mine different from looking at an open pit copper mine?
Or even a solar/ wind farm?
Yeah from Google maps satellite pics, a solar farm looks the same as an open cut coal mine.
The real difference when you get closer though is that one of these footprints can power an entire grid of electricity 24 x 7 x 52, while the other one goes dark 16 x 7 x 52.
Which one then is
“a waste of space”?
Not to mention the vast land area covered in ” renewables ” without a tree or any wildlife in sight.
Every photo of a solar, wind farm I see , there’s not a tree in sight. Funny that.
Because all the trees that grew there were cut to produce renewable electricity…
It is estimated that over 13 million trees in Scotland were cut down to make way for the many windfarms in the country.
Or a lithium mine in China or a cobalt mine in the Congo? I lived in Sydney in the 90’s (Castle Cove) and often visited the Hunter Valley. I stayed at a friends farm near Broke where he kept horses. I rode my bike many miles on the roads throughout and never really noticed the coal mines; but I did notice the great scenery and the wine growing. It was always a great refreshing get away.
Cos it’s coal and coal is evil, init
A copper deposit at surface, left alone, is a pollution source that bleeds copper into the groundwater. However, if you perform what I call a metallectomy to remove the offending copper, that’s the first stage in the clean-up and companies who provide this service will do the job for nothing!!😉
It produces evil coal dummy! Get with the program. You don’t want to be called a denier do you?.
Hush little fetus, don’t be a “burden” h/t Obama. The entity who identifies with the feminine gender, a simulated female sex, will abort you, too.
Can you leave the abortion twaddle out of a conversation about open cast mining please?
Dr Smith summed it up quite well back in the ’60s
The Climate Science Method™ is wot done them in!
Gotta love that graphic of “Scientific Method v Climate Science Method™ ”
Well played !!
The method has been revised, just three steps now:
1/Start with a conclusion.
2/Work backwards, invent supporting evidence.
3/Publish
I firstly read point 1) as –
“Start with a COLLUSION”
Works just the same though?
Start with a prediction (conclusion)
— dangerous manmade global warming ahead.
There is no supporting evidence of the
rapid, dangerous global warming (CAGW)
that is predicted year after year.
Publish, and block publication of opposing views.
4/ Get more funding (from the corrupt/gullible NGOs).
While the graphic is interesting,
it completely misses the main point
of the Climate Howlers:
50+ years of predicting
a coming climate crisis
that never shows up.
That’s their whole game —
predictions of climate doom.
Year after year.
Made by government bureaucrat “scientists”
paid to make scary climate predictions.
Supported by the mass media
who never point out the 50+ years
of wrong predictions.
There are no data for the future climate.
Just unproven theories and speculation.
The climate computer games are programmed to
repeat the scary predictions made by the people
who program them.
This is not about data or models.
It is about scary predictions of the future climate
that have been wrong for over 50 years.
The actual global warming since 1975
was mild and harmless.
But for every year since 1975, the predictions
had been for rapid, dangerous warming.
Climate reality is warmer winter nights in Siberia
and greening of our planet.
But the scary climate predictions never end
— they are a leftist climate fantasy.
H.L. Mencken- “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of
them imaginary.”
Scare taxes keep them in power with the luxury they want!
That’s the best quote — this one might be the second best:
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
Groucho Marx
That Scientific Method graphic is a hall of fame chart/post and one that deserves to be shared!
While believers in the fake climate crisis probably think it’s very imaginative, the truth is that it describes exactly, the process that defines today’s Climate Science Method.
And does it in a powerful way with pretty colors………..and ugly science.
Thanks Old Man Winter!
All the oligarch agenda news that’s fit to print
Yup!
Liberals are idealistic crybabies who don’t accept that there are
no perfect long-term solutions, only trade offs.
To a liberal, if it sounds good (to them), it is good.
If you disagree, you just don’t care about humanity.
Interesting take- it may be a physiological addiction to idealism in
their amygdala that must be preserved at all costs.
https://goldseek.com/article/why-liberals-dump-their-oldest-friends
I don’t really know the answer, but my first thoughts on this were greens get their dopamine release when telling their peers that they’re going to fight the baddies, not actually when fighting the baddies.
Thanks, nice read.
It makes me think of the Michigan psychotic MD students who walked out of the speech by a pro-life instructor having spent 16+ years of schooling being taught leftism and reinforcing their closed-mindedness among themselves and must protect their fragile psyche, thus their flight.
The article is most interesting, but omits an important fact about the physiological differences between “Liberal” Left and Right, namely that “Liberal” men have much lower levels of testosterone than men on the Right. The caricature of the typical progressive man as a weedy coward and weakling may well have a certain reality.
I get and agree with what you mean, but I make it a point not to apply the term ‘liberal’ to progressives or socialists of any flavor, as these people, along with their enablers are the antithesis of ‘liberty’ or ‘liberalism’.
Yep.
“…these people, along with their enablers are the antithesis of ‘liberty’ or ‘liberalism’.”
Your argument makes perfect sense in a sensible world, but you forget one thing:
Everything a liberal says on TV, is carefully crafted, written and rewritten, until it means exactly the opposite of what it sounds like to those without dictionaries.
Now you know why the War on Terror has the FBI entrapping retards to make bombs of FBI-supplied corn starch, why the US Army uses freight planes to transport the powdery proceeds of the War on Drugs, and the War on Poverty led to open-air defecation and typhus in Los Angeles…
Now, if you hear “Climate Change” keep in mind Baal Gates trying to block the sun with chemtrails, The Schwab constructing bubbles between Earth and the sun, Gore trying to drown the ice bears etc etc. These bastards are desperately trying to change Earth’s climate!
P.S. I think they are trying to terra-deform our planet to host some other species, but those’re just paranoid ruminations by a mancow.
…and go dust off the dictionary, translating their bulldust without one is impossible…
If you disagree with a liberal Thinker, you obviously need to evolve some first. We will never get to build our perfect society s’long’s youse people refuse to evolve to the point where you deserve our leadership.
I thank lord Baal Gates we have responsible leaders willing to take matters in hand and guide our evolution as human species. All hail The Schwab and his blessed disciple Harriri…
P.S. You Untermensch deniers must realise; we know who and where you are, you are using our operating systems on our hardware over our network, and we’re gonna change your climate for you soon; it’sa gonna get ho-o-o-ot! We shall evolve you at the point of a hollow needle, motherlovers!
Remember –
YOU CAN’T FIX STUPID!
Hi Eric
What is going on, as it wasn’t enough that the most famous son of Monte Negro, Novak Djokovic beat your man at the Wimbledon tennis final, but now your Bondi Beach Boys got trashed (waterpolo quarterfinal of the World League Final) 9:6 by kids from the Monte Negro mountains.
“Johannes Hofer recommended blood letting, laxatives and narcotics as a cure”
Actually, that could work if the dosages were high enough.
Just wondering if his16 case studies included being ripped from your home and force to work in a lithium mine.
“profound emotional impact looking at an open cut coal mine can cause”
Say what? I grew up in such a coal region. An uncle operated a dragline and family and neighbors worked in the industry. We kids played in the coal cuts and sometimes could take a swim in pooled water. Sometimes we even planted pine trees on the piles of spoil. That now can be classed as nostalgia.Beginning mid-last-century, the companies fill and recontour the land, put the topsoil back, and revegetate.
Thank you for that “revegetate” comment, John. As a long-time mining exploration geologist I have pushed for the need to have a mining project be as much of a good neighbor as possible. Now, I include the request of the locals “how do you want the reclamation to look”, because you can build a park and fishing pond as easy as back to previous state.
When the Army Corps of Engineers went to build retention basins for flood control west of Las Vegas, they had to move a lot of earth to make the basin and dam. A local shooting club was adjacent to the project and allowed the excess dirt to be placed on their land. The plan ended up putting backstops and dividers for the shooting ranges as needed for different firearm types and was no skin off the backs of the contractors.
Funny side note. The civil engineer doing the design was Indian and couldn’t get what a berm was, but once it was described, he said, “Oh, levee!”.
So as they built the berms they compacted them with the earth moving equipment like a levee. Not necessary, but the berms, after 30 years, have very little erosion apparent.
Not much rain in Vegas.
It ‘s well known that some humanoids have a significant need for self identification to confirm their essence or feeling of importance in the universe, i.e., to be recognized … That comes with education and exposure to media. “Hey I am here, I am human, I can form opinions This does not manifest in persons that are screwed into their place in the universe and have ba;amced psyches and do not need anyone else to gain acknowledgment of others to recognize their importance… in which case they don’t give a s*** what others might think. You can also see this in people who find it necessary to walk down the aisle of Costco, Macy’s or Krogers with a cell phone cradled between their shoulder and ear the entire time they walk through all 45 aisles in the store. The cellphone is their link to humanity.
Yes Mazlo’s “Hierarchy Of Needs” still accurately portrays the human condition.
Except that these days “Self Actualization” has been accorded an essential basic human right instead of the pinnacle of individual development and achievement.
So this pathetic nitwit compares a surface coal mine with the aftermath of the Thirty Years War?
Yeah. Count the dead. The raped. The mutilated. Many to see in the Hunter Valley?
Or trot off to see how the child slaves are getting on mining cobalt in Congo. Today.
Of course mining CAN lead to ground water pollution. Used to do. However, Hunter Valley has been extensively deep- mined for coal in the past. My guess is that the surface mine which this drip is sobbing about will very likely be not only digging out essential supplies of coal,
but will be resolving all the environmental issues arising with the old abandoned deep mines.
That is precisely what was done during the last 20 years of coal mining in the UK and Uk Coal used to keep a big display cabinet for all the prizes, medals and diplomas they had won for the quality of their restoration work.
I have every confidence the Aussie miners will do at least equally well.
“That is precisely what was done during the last 20 years of coal mining in the UK and Uk Coal used to keep a big display cabinet for all the prizes, medals and diplomas they had won for the quality of their restoration work.”
I have to say, NOT because of the love of it, but because of the 140 killed in the 1966 Aberfan disaster!
Initially the mining industry denied any fault, except when the hue and cry became too loud!
I have no such confidence of any industry to clean up (the proof of it from a local Wienerberger factory which has piles of sh…t everywhere and has left the local sea-bay area as a hideous enviro catastrophe).
Without some sort of disaster happening (France Azote factory explosion), or Bopal or dumping radioactive tailings into rural roads as base quarry gravel….well, at least some form of activism from people killed or maimed is warranted.
Just saying huh!
Historically, miners have wanted to restore and rehabilitate, but it takes a lot of money. As mining improved by practice and learning, profitability increased and money started to allow post-mining restoration as well as new expenditures on employee housing, employee medical services etc. it took many decades in countries like UK, Australia and USA to achieve the profitability that allowed comprehensive restoration. The Australian beach sand mining of the 1950-70 era was a demonstration.
Lately, we are fed stories that regulators like EPA were hero’s who dragged miners screaming resistance to spend the money. Not in my wide experience. Regulators lacked knowledge of what was possible in engineering and economics and most often were pests who made impractical demands. We had to take a State EPA to court to lift the demands and we won. That was the only time it came to push and shove. The rest of the time we did top class restoration of a dozen of our mines, to the satisfaction of all concerned.
That is not to say that restoration is the best way to allocate scarce funds. Excessive effort to make places look pretty, things like visitor viewing centres and so on, or spending to combat protest group alarmism is never wise.
Geoff S
Absolutely right, Geoff.
A certain level of well thought out regulation is a good thing. Too much, or thought out by GangGreen nitwits, an extremely bad thing.
But when I joined the Coal Mining industry in 1976 as a freshly Chartered Civil Engineer, (not long after the latest attempt to wipe Israel off the map had failed, but led to quadrupled oil prices), it was for two reasons. One, I considered that even thick politicians would realise that cheap efficient, indigenous energy would be a wise idea (how naive can you be?) and, second, to prevent the still lively worries of another Aberfan disaster. At least my second goal worked out.
And lets not forget that (for once), the Tribunal of Inquiry chaired by Sir Herbert Edmund Davies did an excellent job. The Report the Tribunal produced is still very worth reading. Not his fault that, as usual, those most to blame were unpunished.
But good quality restoration work, although expensive, if properly designed and executed, is a reasonable cost of doing business. Don’t do it right and you’ll pour money down the drain and never get another Planning Permission. I facilitated the great people who actually did the design and carried out the work and deserved their gongs and diplomas. But I was the Group Civil Engineer, not the restoration guys and gals.
But it doesn’t matter how good a job you do, if virtue signalling politicians sign up to GangGreen “Experts”, you still end up on the scrap heap with energy costs (and the entire economy) going off the cliff.
We think alike, Martin. Experience still has value. Geoff S
“akin to the mountaintop-removal
miningwindmilling that has devastatedAppalachian(fill in the blank) landscape”“Change you can believe in!”
There had been a lot of strip mining for coal in Ohio.
Here’s a link to just one example of the scars left on the land.
https://www.aep.com/recreation/areas/conesville
OH! I used to ride dirt bikes in SE Ohio, we rode thru lots of old, reclaimed strip mines, many now wooded but up close you could tell it had all been stripped. And my buddy had 24,000:1 topo maps on his cabin wall and the maps showed vast areas had been stripped from 1900 onwards, but now very little mining down there if any. I prefer riding in Michigan, but much of the land has been logged.
used to be great areas for deer hunting in Ohio
And they are again.
Obsessing over doomsday is bad for your attitude. Who woulda thunk it?
All the world’s a HS debate competition don’t ya know
One man’s take on how Jarrah trees made it into the IPCC’s 6th assessment.
The role of academics in influencing the perceived threat from climate change: Frank Batini I Australian Rural & Regional News (arr.news)
I fear too many lefties and progressives already self-treat with narcotics. Drug use is one of the things they are progressive about.
Seems like all the lefties I know are on anti-depressants.
That’s another progressive initiative well underway with unintended consequences well off in the distance.
High-Strength Cannabis Linked to Addiction and Mental Health Problems – Neuroscience News
If it had been published on the internet with open comments, I might accept this as legitimate science, but in a peer reviewed journal, not so much.
Just look at the recent depression and Alzheimer’s studies used for YEARS as the basis for massive drug company profits (depression) and future studies(Alzheimer’s) that have been shown to be just wrong of have manipulated data. Pal reviewed crap.
But on the bright side, lots of money made by lots of “scientists” who couldn’t even figure that the original study was crap. Sarc/
That’s why they are known as “Red diaper doper babies.”
Fear of a what an open pit mine can do to a landscape is fair, but ignores that modern standards can reclaim the land to health and beauty. Preferably the reclamation happens before the EPA gets involved and floods local rivers with toxins.
What we should fear even more is nearly 8 billion people trying to survive off the land and sustain their families without modern systems of energy, agriculture and shelter. There will nothing but devastation and species diversity won’t even be an afterthought when the next meager source of calories and protein is all anyone can consider.
Forget about fat polar bears invading Siberian and Canadian refuse dumps. Now we have to get really, very really worried about ‘global overheating’ when wild dear are brutally attacking London gardens. It’s scary time around here.
Ah, dinner.
Wild deer are an actual pest in Scotland, and need culling. The upside is that the culled deer are made into venisonburgers. I can attest that such burgers are much better than ordinary beefburgers.
“venisonburgers”
I called them “Bambiburgers”.
They were excellent.
Me from 2 minutes ago in the adjacent thread:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/26/get-ready-for-the-100-year-long-climate-emergency/#comment-3564007
There seems to be only one logical outcome to this great divide of opinion on climate change. It isn’t going to be pretty.
It hasn’t been pretty since the first crony capitalist project was subsidized by the taxpayers of the world.
Sadly that is the trajectory this is on as the greentards are so extreme.
as opposed to “stupidity of the posterior” which is a primary input in most IPCC calculations
I agree! The Atlantic causes stupidity of the mind.
The EU and England are going to find out the hard way this winter about the lack of coal mining.
When I see an open pit mine, I see a future lake.
So why is it OK to have tarmac highways that alienate orders of magnitude more area from home building, so much more area than coal mines, so small that most people have never seen one?
Poor old romantic author is unhinged from reality and deduction. Good candidate for a solitary life so normal people are not contaminated by his ignorance. Geoff S
A guys got to control his obsessions. To paraphrase Dirty Harry.
he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region
He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up.
Walked it all pushing a wooden barrow with his meagre belongings did he or……?
Hofer’s “nostalgia” seems far more closely related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder than it does a fond remembrance of the past.
I’m sure gonna miss having White Christmases.
“ blood letting, laxatives and narcotics ”
I would suggest a softer treatment: as food, bread and water as much as the apetite; and starting everyday with a single tablespoon of castor oil as breakfast.
Oh look at that ugly coal mine, things were so much less traumatic, back when we slaughtered whales so we can make candles of their fat.
Oh look at that ugly concrete dome, they say it is one huge atomical bomb, if it explodes, the Earth will move from its circuit. Things were so much better when we burned fossilised dung.
Oh look at them whale carcasses, life was so much purer when we sat around dung fires, scared of the dark outside.
Oh look at that lovely coal mine, it make so much less mess than all those trees we had to chop down, the leaves got in everywhere, you know!
Oh, look at that fancy expert who never had to pick up a shovel or hammer in his life, who has never built anything useful or helpful, telling us how to engineer a system he could not possibly comprehend beyond the level of soundbites.
Oh, and don’t forget the war, any war, just as long as you can imagine heaps of dead and dying, remember them in all bloody, gory detail, and then associate that trauma with the crap I just spewed in your ear, and be afraid…so very afraiaiaiaid…
“It’s not easy being green”, Kermit the Frog.
Kermit, of course, has the brain of an amphibian.
And – he’s green!
Auto – just sayin’.
Eco-alarmist nonsense.
One thing is clear, Madeline Ostrander and Albrecht did not bother to actually visit Appalachian landscapes.
According to Merriam Webster:
Albrecht’s and Madeline Ostrander version of symptoms describe PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), not nostalgia according to Hofer and Merriam Webster.
Merriam Webster also note:
Trust alarmists to try and make their misplaced nostalgia for things they do not know or understand sound like a dangerous illness.
Unlike the survivors of the Thirty Year War, neither Albrecht’s and Madeline Ostrander has actually experienced severe traumatic distress. As typical hypochondriacs
Hofer would have been party to this definition of hypochondria, “depression or melancholy without real cause, (1660s)” is a close description of Hofer’s nostalgia meaning. One is without obvious cause, the other identifies “homesickness” as the cause.
Now, if allegedly nostalgic alarmists are so distressed that they’d pine away for their imaginary fantasy spaces…